Resume

MARYO GARD EWELL
Community/Arts Development
315 W. Ohio Ave., Gunnison, Colorado 81230
maryo@gard-sibley.org 970-641-4340 970-596-2871 (mobile)

Maryo Gard Ewell may have been destined at birth to work in the community arts and nonprofit worlds; she was the daughter of Robert E. Gard, community arts pioneer, whose books Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America and The Arts in the Small Community: A National Plan profoundly shaped the national community arts development movement in the United States.

Her passion is linking the arts to the furthering of broader community ends. For example, she designed the Creative Districts program for Colorado Creative Industries as a way to blend community and economic development with arts and creativity; she designed Neighborhood Cultures of Denver – in which artists were paired with community activism organizations in low-income areas of Denver – as a way to creatively address neighborhood issues. She designed the Arts Education Equity Network that teamed arts education advocates with community organizers. And she designed a regionalized folk arts program which addressed the conservation and evolution of heritage as well as cultural tourism.

Work History: Maryo retired in 2023 as Director of Community Impact for the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley, serving a rural county in the Rocky Mountains. Her job involved managing grants and trainings for nonprofits, and she was on the leadership team of the county Health Coalition, where she chaired the “Basic Needs” committee. Although retired from CFGV, she continues to serve on the Health Coalition and the Resiliency Project, and volunteer for other community-building causes such as creating a Civic Engagement Toolkit or a Basic Needs Guide for the county’s immigrants, veterans, seniors, and people in poverty.

Prior to CFGV, she was Associate Director at the Colorado Council on the Arts from 1982-2003, and her areas of emphasis included community arts development, folk arts program development/supervising the state’s five folklorists, designing/managing a technical assistance program, and oversight of all programs in Western Colorado. When CCA was reduced to a staff of 1.5, she was a contract worker, designing and managing the Creative Districts program for the agency, now renamed Colorado Creative Industries. Altogether, she served CCA/CCI for 32 years.

Prior to CCI, she was the Community Arts Coordinator at the Illinois Arts Council, 1976-82. Prior to that, she was the Program Assistant at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven (CT) and the Westport-Weston Arts Council (CT). Summer jobs in college and high school included community liaison work in the first rural arts grant ever awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and as clerical assistant at the Rhinelander (WI) School of the Arts.

Outside of CCI, she managed projects for such clients as the Arts Extension Service at the University of Massachusetts, conducted research for the Wisconsin Arts Board and for Americans for the Arts, evaluated programs for the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the Missouri Alliance for Arts Education, and more. She’s conducted innumerable workshops on a host of nonprofit management topics, and has done public speaking engagements especially around the history and meaning of community arts in America. And, she has served on grant review panels for state arts councils across the United States, for the Rockefeller Foundation and for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Board Service: She has served on several boards. She is Past President of the Robert E. Gard Foundation and her local Gunnison Arts Center; she has served as a board member of the Community Foundation of the Gunnison Valley, the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies (now Americans for the Arts) and the Colorado Alliance for Arts Education.

Publications: She has written widely. Her preface to Democracy As Creative Practice: Weaving a Culture of Civic Life (Borrup & Zitcer, editors) was published by Routledge in 2024. Her chapter “No Mute, Inglorious Milton,” about the role of the arts and the progressive “Wisconsin Idea” in Revitalizing the Wisconsin Idea (Goldberg, editor) was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2020. She collaborated with Americans for the Arts on To Change the Face and Heart of America (2016), collaborated with Dr. Michael Warlum on The Arts in the Small Community 2006, wrote monographs for Americans for the Arts, and wrote many published articles. She was an editor of Arts Extension Service’s Fundamentals of Arts Management (2016).

Teaching: She co-designed and co-taught the required community arts course in the online MA program in Arts Administration at Goucher College; she teaches grant writing for Western Colorado University, and co-teaches the online grant writing class for the Arts Extension Service/University of Massachusetts.

Honors include the 2017 Colorado Governor’s Award for Creative Leadership; the 2012 Arts Education Advocacy award from Think 360 Arts; the 2004 Arts Advocate of the Year award from her local Gunnison Arts Center; the 2003 “Arts Are The Heart” award for service to the arts in Colorado from the Colorado Arts Consortium; an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Goucher College in 2001; the 1995 Selina Roberts Ottum Award for community arts development from Americans for the Arts, and a research award from Rockefeller University.

Education:

BA Cum Laude with Honors, Bryn Mawr College, Social Psychology, 1970

MA, Yale University, Organizational Behavior, 1972

MA, University of Colorado-Denver, Urban & Regional Planning, 1992