Shannon McCue is an arts administrator, educator, and professional violist. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative (CARI) at The University of Alabama. CARI is an interdisciplinary, arts-focused research engine driven by the interests of faculty from across the University. By facilitating collaborations across disciplines, CARI maximizes the impact of faculty arts research, while enriching the University, local, and regional communities. Prior to that, she served as Education Director at the Arts & Humanities Council of Tuscaloosa, where she managed all of the organization’s education initiatives in a variety of artistic disciplines, including the national Poetry Out Loud program, the Visual Art Achievement Award Program, the Spectra Partners in the Arts guide – which pairs schools seeking arts programs with organizations and teaching artists providing them, and a partnership with the City of Northport to oversee arts education programming in six elementary schools. Through the Arts Council, she also led the West Alabama Arts Education Collaborative, which is part of a state legislature-funded collective impact initiative called the Amp Up Arts. The goal of Amp Up Arts is to provide high quality arts education programs to all public school students in Alabama. Shannon worked with schools, teaching artists, community arts organizations, and legislators to start innovative arts programs in West Alabama, and provide professional development for teachers and teaching artists.
In early 2020, the West Alabama Arts Education Collaborative joined forces with the Greater Birmingham Arts Education Collaborative to write a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Collective Impact Arts Education Grant. In January 2021, they were awarded $100,000 from the NEA to start The pARTners Project, a two-year community-driven and community-centered initiative to make a plan to increase arts education access in Jefferson, Tuscaloosa, and Hale Counties. This project brings together local leaders – not just in the arts – to empower these communities to determine the best way forward for arts education. In the spring of 2023, the pARTners Project Design Team finished a strategic plan that will serve as the guide for both Collaboratives as they work with students to envision the world they want to live in through the arts. In early 2024, both Collaboratives received word that The pARTners Project was awarded a second $100,000 NEA Collective Impact Arts Education Grant to continue the initiative for another two years.
From 2016-2018, Shannon worked in multiple capacities, including as Executive Director, for the Alabama Blues Project, a music nonprofit seeking to preserve the heritage of Blues music as a folk art through creative educational programs that especially target children in underserved communities. She worked with school districts and administrators throughout the state to design and fund unique programs that range from skill-based instrument instruction to courses on Blues history.
Prior to her work in Alabama, Shannon – a Chicago native – lived in Wisconsin, California, and New York. While in California, Shannon served for five years as Director of Chamber Music and General Manager of Santa Barbara Strings, a comprehensive youth string orchestra. She was one of the first teaching artists hired to launch the Incredible Children’s Art Network (iCAN) music program, an El Sistema-inspired initiative in Santa Barbara providing free after-school music classes and academic enrichment to 120 elementary school children from an underserved community. During her time with iCAN, Shannon taught violin and viola group lessons, conducted the orchestras, and led musicianship classes. Shannon was inspired by her experience as a teaching artist in the nonprofit sector to pursue a career in arts administration with the specific goal of designing educational programs that serve and represent diverse communities.
From 2014 to 2016, Shannon served as Manager of Youth Programs at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (OSL) in New York City. In this role, she led the organization’s Youth Orchestra of St. Luke’s (YOSL), an El Sistema-inspired program that offers free music classes to 100 children at five Manhattan sites. Under her leadership, YOSL increased student enrollment by 40% within a year, developed a middle school program, and formed a partnership with the New York Youth Symphony. Shannon also coordinated large-scale events, including one community concert that brought together 250 children from six El Sistema programs in rehearsal and performance.
After moving to Alabama in 2016, Shannon began working with orchestras around the United States as an education and community engagement consultant. In 2018, she was the lead writer of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Symphonies for Schools Concerts study guide for Andrew Norman’s new opera, A Trip to the Moon. She worked with the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra (TSO) to establish a new initiative for online educational content that began with the 2017-2018 season. She wrote the teacher study guides for several of the TSO’s Family Concerts, and created social media activity surrounding audience education through 2019. She also continued her relationship with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s by writing and contributing to their Free School Concert study guides.
Shannon did her doctoral work in viola performance at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studied with Helen Callus. She also holds a Master’s degree in viola from UCSB, a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Bachelor of Music degree in music performance from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Shannon lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with her husband, Jacob Adams, Associate Professor of Viola at the University of Alabama, and her children, Isaac, Jesse, and Maya. In her spare time, she serves as a substitute violist with various regional orchestras, including the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, the Tuscaloosa Symphony Orchestra, and the Meridian Symphony Orchestra. Her hobbies include collecting LPs, competitive running, and logic puzzles.
Shannon is excited to serve your organization. She is skilled and knowledgeable in grant-writing, grants administration, facilitation, arts education program design and management, and arts-centered collective impact initiatives. She completed the Facilitation for Social Change course through the Boston-based Interaction Institute for Social Change. Her article on school partnerships was the featured piece in the July 2017 issue of the El Sistema USA newsletter, The Ensemble. She has presented at numerous conferences on equity-driven arts education initiatives, including the Arts Education Partnership (AEP) Annual Convening and the American String Teachers Association (ASTA) conference. Additionally, Shannon has served as a grant reader and panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts in various arts and arts education disciplines.