Carole Charnow

For over 30 years, Carole Charnow has led cultural non-profits in the US and the UK, overseeing over 100 professional theatrical and opera productions, as well as community-based music and arts education programs and events.

Charnow was appointed the President and CEO of Boston Children’s Museum in 2010 and has leveraged her relationships to transform the Museum’s cultural and science programming. Recent Museum partnerships have included: the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Berklee School of Music, New England Conservatory, the Handel and Haydn Society, the Boston Children’s Chorus, the Boston Ballet and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Under Charnow’s leadership the Museum won the 2013 IMLS National Medal, the nation’s highest honor conferred on museums and libraries for extraordinary service to the community, presented by First Lady, Michelle Obama at the White House. The Museum has also recently secured funding from NASA and the federal government’s Race to the Top program, and is the only children’s museum in the country to be awarded these distinguished grants. Under her tenure the Museum has introduced New England’s first groundbreaking access program for families receiving benefits, which is now being replicated across the Commonwealth. For the Museum’s Centennial she commissioned a song for the 100th, I Am A River of Hope, by Jim Papoulis, which was performed by the 500 member Boston Children’s Chorus in October 2013.

As the founder and General Director of Opera Boston, Charnow produced 50 operas and musical theatre original productions at the Cutler Majestic Theatre, receiving the Boston Globe’s Best of Boston eight years, as well as superlative reviews in the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the London Times. Her 2010 premiere of Madame White Snake, jointly produced with the Beijing Music Festival, was the first major opera commission by a Boston company in over forty years, and the first-ever opera collaboration between an American company and China. Madame White Snake toured to Beijing in the fall of 2010, and the opera won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2011.

Charnow was one of a select group chosen from arts leaders across the state to attend the Executive Education Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School for Government and is a participant in the prestigious Noyce Leadership Institute Fellowship program. She is a member of the Mayor’s Cultural Planning Steering Committee and was recently named a Barr Fellow in the class of 2015. She also received the Emerson College Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015. Charnow serves on the Boards of The Dimock Health Center and the Wheelock Family Theatre, and served on the Nominating Committee for the Accreditation Commission of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) and on the 2013 National Program Committee for AAM. She was one of the early Moosewood Restaurant chefs in Ithaca, New York and contributed to the best-selling Moosewood Cookbook. She has a Bachelor’s Degree from Emerson College and a Masters of Arts from the University of London.