The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

76 APRIL 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Staying connected to our broader community of diplomats led directly to the launch of the salon. Thanks to the encouragement, advice and support of the Swedish cultural counselor, herself a prac- ticing theater director, the salon launched its “Who Gets to Feel Safe?” season in July 2018 at Woolly MammothTheatre Company with a play reading and panel discussion featuring a Swedish playwright. During the rest of the 2018-2019 season, we partnered with Ford’s Theatre, Mosaic Theater Company, the Delegation of the European Union to the United States and the New York Univer- sity Washington, D.C., campus to host dialogues on inequality and criminal justice, as well as the role of story, music and culture in resilience. Making this transformation happen required mapping my Foreign Service skills and Washington policymaking experience onto the U.S. domestic the- ater and arts sector. Working at an arts policy think-tank, Createquity, allowed me to use the analytical, drafting and quantitative chops from the Foreign Ser- vice—on top of the more obvious public diplomacy skills—to publish and speak on arts policy issues. Finding common ground with practi- tioners in the arts world served as another point of entry. I connected with the Forum Theatre’s community engagement coordi- nator over a shared background in global development in 2016. Our shared experi- ence in foreign policy and American arts policy enabled me to design and launch the Talk Tank series to explore policy issues underpinning Forum’s productions. The Talk Tank program served as a beta version of Theater and Policy Salon. I partnered on policy discussions with the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Friends Service Committee and the Jamestown Foundation, along with local experts including a local police executive in charge of recruitment and doctrine. In fact, successfully transitioning to both the arts and policy practice and my Transitions International work paralleled the familiar Foreign Service experience of arriving at a new post and establishing oneself as an effective interlocutor and influential voice. In my new role, I set about establish- ing my profile and building my networks in the arts policy and theater world in Washington following retirement. In addition to working a lot of rooms, I published articles, spoke at symposia and nurtured my social media presence (follow me @artsconnectedDC) . Our 2019-2020 Theater and Policy Salon season is focused on two themes: resilience in struggling U.S. communi- ties, and migrants and refugees. The first NJMITCHELL,THEATERANDPOLICYSALON Panelists from the Delegation of the European Union to the United States, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund and Human Rights Watch in front of the set of “Twelve Angry Men” at Ford’s Theatre in early 2019. Set design by Stephanie Kerley Schwartz. RETIREMENT SUPPLEMENT