Lee Bynum

In February 2023, Bynum assumed the role of Chief Education Officer at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, providing strategic leadership, creative vision, and administrative direction for the organization's educative initiatives, and serving as an advocate for the value and importance of arts education. Prior to Lincoln Center, Bynum inaugurated the role of Vice President for Impact at Minnesota Opera, guiding the company's educational, engagement, and equity work. During Bynum's tenure, the company made diversification a priority, and the percentage of the staff who identified as people of color rose by fifteen percent, including at the director, vice president, and board levels; built its access apparatus to begin addressing internal policy and artistic programming gaps relative to physical ability and neuro-divergence, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, and gender identity; produced multiple main-stage works by Black, Asian, Latinx, and women composers and librettists; and unveiled a community commissioning program that advanced conversations around who-creates-opera-and-for-whom. Additionally, Bynum launched the Creative Development Program, which gave Minnesota Opera a fully articulated set of educational programs-from babies to seniors-rooted in the values of inclusion, diversity, equity, and access and social emotional learning pedagogy. The programs directly address pipeline issues among underrepresented singers, composers, and technical artists, as well as prioritize "de-gendering" vocal pedagogy and broadening the canon to normalize the programming of underrepresented composers.

Before Minnesota Opera, Bynum was on the program staff of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a decade, working in the Higher Learning, Diversity, and Scholarly Communications and Information Technology funding areas. At the Foundation, Bynum made diversity, equity, and inclusion grants to colleges, universities, community music schools, and museums; supported the creation of K-12 music education programs and arts majors at HBCUs; and funded two PBS documentaries, Tell Them We Are Rising and Driving While Black. As Associate Director of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Bynum steered a program that shepherded several hundred budding scholars of color through the PhD process at dozens of colleges and universities in the United States and South Africa. Before joining the Foundation, Bynum was the Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, managing the Latinx, Asian American, Native American and comparative ethnic studies programs. Bynum also was invited to be a visiting scholar at the Caritas Institute of Higher Education at Hong Kong's St. Francis University.

Bynum was part of the 2019 cohort of the Council on Foundation's Career Pathways Executive Leadership Development Program, as well as a professional mentor for Opera America's Opera Leaders of Color program for two years. Additional field service includes peer reviewing for the Educating Harlem program; writing for the Harlem Heritage Project; researching as the staff historian for We Are 2042; coordinating the Critical Approaches to Race and Ethnicity Working Group; making regular contributions on film and television to The Amsterdam News; and serving on the editorial board of Journal of South Asian Studies. As a dramaturg, Bynum has collaborated on the development of new works with American Opera Projects, the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, and Columbia University. And as a librettist, Bynum recently was commissioned two create two new operatic works that will be produced in the United States and United Kingdom.

Bynum has been active with a number of nonprofits dedicated to progressive causes, including TakeRoot Justice, which provides legal, policy, and participatory research support to strengthen the work of grassroots and community-based groups that dismantle racial, economic and social oppression in New York City; the Black Feminist Project, which provides direct services related to food insecurity and reproductive justice to Black Women, girls, and people of marginalized genders in the South Bronx; the Queens-based activist orchestra, The Dream Unfinished; Luna Composition Lab and American Composers Forum, both of which support equitable practices and access to resources in the creation of new music; and Diaspora Community Services, a social support service agency that advocates for immigrant communities in Brooklyn. In addition, Bynum co-founded the Harmony Theatre Company, which championed the work of underrepresented creators and performers, and held roles as its artistic director, managing producer, and executive director between 2001 and 2010.

An historian of race and performance, Bynum has published articles on the contributions of people of color to opera, theatre, concert dance, classical and popular music, television, film, and comic books. Bynum has been invited to speak on these topics by the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Consulate, New Music USA, the Sphinx Organization, the League of American Orchestras, San Francisco Ballet, History of Education Society, Museum of Arts and Design, Detroit Opera, and Harlem Chamber Players, as well as Harvard University, Brown University, New York University, University of Cape Town, and the University of California. Since 2021, Bynum has co-hosted The Score podcast, which was recommended by The New York Times for its humorous interviews with luminaries from Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera, RuPaul's Drag Race, DC Comics, and academe, on a range of contemporary topics in the inclusion, diversity, equity, and access sphere. Bynum holds bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, and has taught at its Institute for Research in African American Studies and Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. Bynum is married to singer-composer Damian Norfleet, and they split their time between Manhattan and Hong Kong.