Concluding an international search for a leader to replace 25 year outgoing president William M. Lowman, the Idyllwild Arts Foundation Board of Governors selected Brian Cohen to be the foundation’s new president.

Artistically, Cohen is a printmaker who embodies a rare combination of practical educational and artistic experiences. He is the founder and owner of Bridge Press, a publisher of limited edition prints and he is the founding artistic director of the non-profit cooperative Two Rivers Printmaking Studio.

He comes to Idyllwild Arts Academy from The Putney School where he currently serves as the dean of faculty.

His other Putney roles over the years included arts department chair and founding director of the Putney School Summer Program.

Cohen shares in his arts education statement:

“Arts education is primarily about guiding, ordering and encouraging the impulse to create. This drive is a powerful imperative, particularly in adolescence, when the joy, self-awareness and instinct of making art, and student’s emotional lives, are especially vivid. The arts offer the discipline, extension of skills and ideas and ultimately self- confidence of visible, shared achievement. The educational model of learning by doing is nowhere better exemplified than in arts education.”

Cohen earned his MFA in Painting from the University of Washington and his BA from Haverford College.

Photo credit: IAA