Cornelia D. Emerson, PhD
Consulting: Arts/Cultural Heritage/Higher Education
Cornelia Emerson has spent her career in arts, cultural heritage and higher education institutions in Southern California, with seventeen years as Development Officer at the UCLA Film & Television Archive. There she developed scores of successful grant proposals to federal agencies such as NEA, NEH, IMLS, the National Park Service (Save America’s Treasures) and the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the California Arts Council and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. She researched and wrote numerous proposals to private donors and foundations including the Academy (of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences) Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. In 2009, Gregory Lukow, Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress, called her “one of the leading development officers within the U.S. film archive community for the past two decades.”
Since 2010, Cornelia has acted as a part-time development director for the Musical Theatre Guild, and was concurrently Founding Chair of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Department at the New York Film Academy (Universal City campus) from 2011-12. She consults on strategic planning and fund development for arts, cultural heritage and higher education organizations. She organized and moderated the panel, Moving Images in the Museum Context, at the California Association of Museums Conference in 2011, and presented on funding development topics at professional conferences of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Society of California Archivists.
Earlier in her career, Cornelia was the Associate Dean at Otis College of Art and Design, a Development Writer at California Institute of Technology and Director of Publications at Art Center College of Design. She holds B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English literature from Yale University, and studied organizational development at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management.
