Dr. Avery Willis Hoffman – a writer, director, producer and curator of public programs – is currently Program Director at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. Previously, Avery was a Senior Project Developer at Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a museum planning and design firm, where she conducted research and developed content for a number of special projects; between 2010-2015, her primary project was the development of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, D.C. Avery has worked with acclaimed director Peter? Sellars for over a decade, including on his international productions of? Shakespeare’s Othello, Mozart’s opera Zaide, and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. She also assisted Sellars in developing the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna. She is currently tour producer and the curator of public programs for FLEXN, Sellars’s collaboration with Reggie Gray and the Brooklyn flex community, which premiered at the Armory in March 2015. She has worked with James Schamus, formerly of Focus Features, with Jehane Noujaim on her TED-prize film festival for TV, entitled Pangea Day, and for President Clinton’s Clinton Global Initiative. Avery earned a PhD and an MA in Classical languages and literature from Balliol College, University of Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar and earned her? BA in Classics and English at Stanford University.