At Issue: The Fate of America’s Cultural Institutions Featuring The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott & Award-Winning Producer Kitty Eisele

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Hill Center launched its new public affairs discussion series, At Issue, in April. The series will examine the many critical issues we are faced with today. Kennicott and Eisele will address the growing challenges confronting and impacting America’s cultural institutions, including museums, performing arts centers, libraries, arts funding, and public broadcasting.

In a recent Post article titled “Yes, Donald Trump could destroy the Kennedy Center. Or worse,” Kennicott wrote, “Until a week ago, it was unthinkable that the president of the United States would take direct control of the nonpartisan Kennedy Center for the Arts, fire board members not deemed personally loyal to him, replace them with members of his inner circle and install a widely disliked political operative with little experience in the arts as interim director. But now the thought has been thought, so two more previously unthinkable things must also be considered: Can Donald Trump destroy the Kennedy Center? Or will he use it in the usual way that authoritarians have used the arts in the past, as a vehicle for Trumpian propaganda?”

Philip Kennicott is the Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic of The Washington Post. He has been on staff at The Post since 1999, first as classical music critic, then as culture critic. In 2011, he combined art and architecture into a beat focused on visual culture and public space.

Kitty Eisele is an award-winning writer, editor and producer. She helps America tell its
stories on air and in public spaces. As editor of NPR’s Morning Edition and Weekend All Things Considered for nearly two decades, she has set the news agenda for millions of listeners and contributed to
numerous cultural and arts profiles, interviews, podcasts and live events. As a film producer with Ken Burns, she received an Emmy Award for her work on The Civil War series and led research for his documentary history of Congress for PBS. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard, her work has earned Dupont, James Beard and Peabody Awards. She teaches journalism at Georgetown and her essays on Washington life
have appeared on NPR and in The Washington Post. Her most recent project is Twenty-Four Seven: A Podcast About Caregiving, inspired by her experience caring for her father, Al Eisele, a longtime Washington journalist, in the final years of his life.