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.
