Lee Bynum

Chair

Lee Bynum is the Chief Education Officer of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, providing strategic leadership, creative vision, and administrative direction for the organization’s educative initiatives, and serving as an advocate for the value and importance of arts education. Prior to Lincoln Center, Bynum inaugurated the role of Vice President for Impact at Minnesota Opera, guiding the company’s educational, engagement, and equity work. During Bynum’s tenure, the company made diversification a priority, and the percentage of the staff who identified as people of color rose by fifteen percent, including at the director, vice president, and board levels; built its access apparatus to begin addressing internal policy and artistic programming gaps relative to physical ability and neurodivergence, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, and gender identity; produced multiple mainstage works by Black, Asian, Latinx, and women composers and librettists; and unveiled a community commissioning program that advanced conversations around who-creates-opera-and-for-whom. Before Minnesota Opera, Bynum was on the program staff of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, making diversity, equity, and inclusion grants to colleges, universities, community music schools, and museums. In addition, Bynum co-founded the Harmony Theatre Company, which championed the work of underrepresented creators and performers. Since 2021, Bynum has cohosted The Score podcast, which was recommended by The New York Times for its humorous interviews with luminaries from Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, RuPaul’s Drag Race, DC Comics, and academe, on a range of contemporary topics in the inclusion, diversity, equity, and access sphere. Bynum holds undergraduate and graduate from Columbia University.