Los Angeles County Cultural Research
Tile Image Credit: Monica Almeida for Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture
As a Research Analyst and Mellon-ACLS Public Fellow at the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (LACDAC), Laramee Kidd’s duties included research and evaluation support across the department’s programs, with a particular focus on supporting the grants and professional development for arts and culture non-profits in addition to conducting the Civic Art as Infrastructure program evaluation. Some highlights of Laramee Kidd’s activities in this role include:
Provided professional development workshops on evaluation and data collection for arts nonprofit organizations and on interview methods and data visualization for Arts Commission staff.
Revised grantee and contractor reporting processes across divisions to better support internal evaluation of programs.
Supervised an intern conducting field scan of nonprofit professional development providers in LA County.
Served on a committee led by Department of Regional Planning to develop list of indicators of equity for use in planning, public health, transportation, affordable housing, and community development.
Laramee Kidd also participated in cultural policy research projects conducted by the Research and Evaluation team. These research projects supported LACDAC’s overall mission to advance arts, culture, and creativity throughout Los Angeles County.
Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative Literature Review (2016) This literature review provides background information on how others have addressed how to improve diversity, cultural equity, and inclusion in the arts and culture sector, with a particular focus on boards of directors, the arts and culture workforce, audiences and programming, and culturally specific arts organizations. This literature review was developed in support of the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative, an 18-month public process that led to the development of 13 recommendations to the LA County Board of Supervisors to ensure that everyone in LA County has equitable access to arts and culture, and to improve inclusion in the wider arts ecology for all residents in every community.
What People Talk about When they Talk about the Arts: (2019) Efforts to understand who participates in the arts often focus on quantitative data, using demographics like race and ethnicity, gender, age, income, and zip codes. These data give us important facts, but they don't tell us why people participate in the arts, or how they incorporate it into their lives. To fully address diversity, equity, and inclusion in the arts, and ensure everyone has meaningful access to the arts, we need both kinds of data. This study uses qualitative methods to understand arts audiences in LA County, providing a complement to demographic studies. Based on in-depth interviews with 28 people from many walks of life across the county, this study shows how arts and culture play a critical role in our communities with benefits that reverberate far beyond the moment of the experience.
The annual Arts Datathon has brought together arts administrators, artists, educators, data scientists, students, community advocates, researchers, civic technologists, and others in Los Angeles County to explore how we can use data to improve access to the arts. Laramee Kidd was also part of the Arts Datathon since the first gathering in 2017 and continued to provide support in subsequent years, through Metris Arts Consulting and then as an independent consultant.
2017: Access Laramee Kidd gave a presentation on pivot tables and data visualization in Excel and took notes for the team presentations during the judging process, which supported the final report.
2018: Collections Laramee Kidd designed a live archiving activity and led a team of live archivists working to archive the event as it happened, publishing the results in an open-source online archive.
2019: Democratize As an employee of Metris Arts Consulting, Laramee Kidd returned to lead a team of live archivists, to interview participants, take photos, and gather information throughout the day for this year's online archive. Laramee Kidd combined these interviews with feedback survey data to write an assessment reflecting on three years of Arts Datathons from 2017 to 2019 and what was learned along the way.
2023: Atlas Laramee Kidd provided documentation by leading a team of notetakers for this event.