Emerson College announced last week that Kelly Bates has been appointed as the founding executive director of the Elma Lewis Center for Civic Engagement, Learning, and Research, starting in September 2013.
Since 2007, Bates has been the executive director of Access Strategies Fund, a nonprofit charitable foundation that seeks to empower underserved communities to access democracy in Massachusetts.
At Emerson, Bates will work with faculty, students and staff to help shape the college’s civic engagement initiatives. The center is named for Elma Lewis, an Emerson alumna and a nationally recognized arts educator. A recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” Lewis was a mentor to generations of Boston’s young dance, opera and theater students at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, which she founded in 1950 in a Roxbury apartment. Lewis passed away in 2004.
Bates graduated magna cum laude from the University at Albany, State University of New York in 1991 and from Boston University Law School in 1994. She has served as an adjunct professor at Northeastern Law School and Tufts University.
Bates lives in Roslindale.
