About Us

Jon Lohman

Jon Lohman is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Cultural Vibrancy. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina and holds an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania.

From 2001 until 2020, Jon was the director of Virginia’s state Folklife Program where he initiated and carried out numerous programs, including an award-winning Folklife Apprenticeship Program and the correspond book In Good Keeping, which chronicles the first five years of the Apprenticeship Program. He also produced numerous documentary materials, including films such as The Buckingham Lining Bar Gang and Put me Down Easy: the Charlie McClendon Story. His audio recordings’ portfolio is rich and includes albums such as The Sherman Holmes Project’s The Richmond Sessions, The Legendary Ingramettes’ Take A Look in the Book, and more than a dozen records in bluegrass, old-time, and gospel in the Crooked Road Music Series of Virginia’s Music Heritage Trail.

Jon has presented and served on curatorial committees for numerous local and national festivals, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Richmond Folk Festival, Merlefest, Floydfest, the Lowell Folk Festival, the American Folk Festival, and the National Folk Festival. Jon has presented his work and collaborated with the Smithsonian, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the State Department, and numerous cultural organizations and festivals throughout Virginia and the country.

Jon taught courses on folklife, oral history, and cultural sustainability at the University of Pennsylvania and Mary Washington and Goucher Colleges.

In 1991, he was a Corps Member of Teach for America, assigned as a fifth-grade teacher at Harriet Tubman Elementary School in New Orleans.

Josh Kohn

Josh Kohn is the Associate Director of the Center for Cultural Vibrancy (CCV). At CCV, Josh leads programs that bring culturally rooted arts to life. He oversees the Baltimore Old Time Music Festival, a major celebration of Appalachian and string-band traditions; he helped launch the virtual educational portal World Cultural in Context, connecting artists with students around the globe; and he works closely with Ustad Naseeruddin Saami and the Saami Brothers of Karachi, Pakistan, to expand the reach of the family’s nearly 800-year-old Sufi devotional traditions through unique apprenticeship programs and public performances. When the spirit moves him, he also produces concerts throughout the Baltimore region.

Before joining CCV, Josh was the Performance Director at Creative Alliance in Baltimore, producing nearly 1,000 events during his eight years with the organization. He launched the nationally recognized Sidewalk Serenades series just five days into the pandemic, bringing hundreds of performances to neighborhoods across the city and directing over $100,000 to local artists. While at Creative Alliance, he also co-founded the Baltimore Crankie Festival, co-curating it for many years and helping it grow into the largest event of its kind celebrating the scrolled panoramas lovingly known as “crankies.”

Earlier in his career, Josh served at Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation supporting jazz and traditional arts and spent more than a decade with the National Council for the Traditional Arts, programming festivals and managing tours for some of the country’s top tradition-bearers. He has also led cultural exchange tours in China with the public radio program American Routes, contributed to A Guide to The Crooked Road: Virginia’s Heritage Music Trail, and produced more than a dozen albums and radio programs.

Josh is a former DeVos Institute Fellow at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a current Bloomberg Tech Fellow in the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Accelerator Program for Arts and Culture. He lives in Baltimore, where he regularly holds family dance parties with his wife, Marianne, and their daughters, Golda and Lena.

Tori Talbot

CCV Business Manager Tori Talbot has been working in the arts and nonprofit world for more than twenty years specializing in logistical planning, event production, and financial management. Known for her organizational wizardry and calm under pressure, she shepherds CCV through daily administrative operations, financial and human resources processes, and provides support to projects and programs.

From 2010 to 2021 Tori served as Events Manager for Virginia Humanities, where she handled all aspects of logistical planning and execution for several major festivals including the Virginia Festival of the Book, coordinating the participation of more than 300 authors for a weeklong literary event involving more than 150 separate programs in two dozen venues; the annual Virginia Folklife Apprenticeship Showcase; and the Virginia Folklife Area at the Richmond Folk Festival, which routinely drew audiences exceeding 150,000 people.

Prior to her position of Events Manager, Tori served as the Program Associate for the Virginia Folklife Program assisting in the planning, coordination and production of a host of festival events, conferences, concerts, apprenticeships, recording projects, and exhibitions. In 2003 Tori handled all logistical aspects of Re-Imagining Ireland, a week-long festival and conference that hosted a large number of Irish and American artists, authors, poets, activists, and political leaders, including the President of Ireland. Tori holds a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia.