Director and Professor of Performing Arts Leadership & Management David Edelman, M.F.A., will retire from Shenandoah Conservatory at the end of the 2025/26 academic year. Edelman began working at Shenandoah in 2009, and will retire after 17 years of dedicated service to its artistic and educational community.

“For the past 17 years, David Edelman has brought incredibly important expertise to the programmatic design and direction of the Performing Arts Leadership & Management (PALM) program at Shenandoah Conservatory,” said Shenandoah Conservatory Dean and Professor of Music Jennifer Smolos Steele, Ph.D. “As he embarks upon this well-deserved next chapter, we would like to express our gratitude for his leadership and wish David well throughout the years ahead. Congratulations!”

Edelman is the founder and editor emeritus of the American Journal of Arts Management. Prior to joining the conservatory faculty, he was executive director of Big Apple Performing Arts in New York City. Edelman has served as the executive director of the Contemporary American Theatre Company in Columbus, Ohio; managing director of Delaware Theatre Company; managing director of George Street Playhouse in New Jersey; and associate producer at the late Olympia Dukakis’ Whole Theatre in New Jersey. He has served as president of the New Jersey Theatre Alliance and sat on the boards of ArtPride (New Jersey’s arts advocacy organization), the Association of Arts Administration Educators and Social Theory, Politics and the Arts. He was a founding member of the Arts Consortium of Delaware and the Riverfront Wilmington Business Improvement District. He also served on the boards of Sister Cities of Wilmington, the Wilmington Arts Leaders Roundtable, Brandywine Valley Cultural Tourism Planning Committee, AIDS Delaware, the Wilmington Metropolitan Area Planning Commission and the Ohio Department of Education’s Arts Standards Advisory Committee. Edelman received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and earned his Master of Fine Arts from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts.