Phil reynolds

Phil Reynolds co-founded Trillium Arts in 2018 and serves as the organization’s president. Prior to relocating to Asheville, NC in June 2019, he was executive director of Chicago Dancers United from 2016 to 2019 and executive director of the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, Chicago’s leading presenter of contemporary dance for 17 years. Phil has more than 35 years of experience as a performing arts presenter, fundraiser and community organizer.

 At the Dance Center, Phil presented more than 140 world-class national, international and regional contemporary dance companies in extended campus-based residencies. Those residencies were a model for the integration of public performances, learning opportunities for students and community engagement initiatives. Under his leadership, the Dance Center commissioned or co-commissioned 11 new dance works.

 Prior to moving to Chicago in 1998, Phil was director of Catamount Film and Arts Company, an exemplary multidisciplinary rural arts presenter and local arts agency in St. Johnsbury, Vermont (population, 7,500). For seven years, he had the pleasure of curating and presenting a host of world-class performing artists from various disciplines, while concurrently building the organization’s essential community arts profile with a gallery for regional visual artists, public art classes and performance workshops for children and adults, a regional cultural tourism initiative, a statewide partnership with Head Start sites and a nightly film series of foreign and independent American films.

Phil began his career at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, where he served as membership director and director of planning and government grants for the world-renowned presenting organization for three years. Also in New York, he was executive director of the Nikolais and Murray Louis Foundation for Dance and a development consultant for the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra.

Phil is deeply active in the professional arts field nationally and internationally. He has served on funding panels for the North Carolina Arts Council, New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Japan Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum. Illinois Arts Council, Vermont Arts Council, Connecticut Arts Commission and Chamber Music America.

 Phil’s lifelong interest in Asian performing arts has impacted upon his curation and research.  He has traveled professionally in China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Nepal, Taiwan and Thailand. He served on the Advisory Committee for the Japan Foundation’s Performing Arts JAPAN program (2000–05) and has been an advisor to the Contemporary Dance Association of Japan (2001). He was a member of the research teams for The Mekong Project (2000) and the Yunnan China Ethnic Minority Arts program (2003). In 1997, he participated in the New England Foundation for the Arts’ U.S.-Asia Presenter Mentor Program.

 Phil was awarded the Chevalier de L’Order des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication in 2006 for his work with Francophonic African choreographers. In 2004, the Chicago Tribune recognized him as a “Chicagoan of the Year in the Arts, Dance.” Newcity magazine named him a “Top Ten Player” in the arts and culture in Chicago in 2011.

 Phil graduated with a BA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA in arts management from Columbia University in New York City.