MA Top 30 Professional: Ayanna Cole

Director of Social Impact Programs
Carnegie Hall

Ayanna Cole describes her path to Carnegie Hall as “winding.” Maybe so—but every step along the way informed her role as the venerable institution’s director of social impact programs. A Long Island native, Cole started her career producing Daytime Emmy–winning programs for A&E Television Networks, including the History Channel. But for all her years in television, she rarely saw anyone else who looked like her in the field.

“If I can accomplish this after a lot of hard work, why aren’t there more women? Why aren’t they more people of color?” Cole wondered.

After leaving the History Channel, Cole founded Life Light Street Productions (LLSP), a nonprofit introducing teenagers to the media production field. She launched it after successfully applying for a NeON Arts grant, a program previously co-hosted by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute and the New York City Department of  Probation. Two years later, in 2016, Carnegie Hall sought to hire a new NeON Arts manager; unbeknownst to her, Cole had been put forward for the job.

She has by now been at Carnegie Hall for nearly nine years, working on several different initiatives. The newest among them, the B-Side, is not unlike the work she did with LLSP a decade ago: The program introduces young people, ages 14 to 22, to various career options in the music industry. Cole adds that her most transformative experiences on the job tend to be the ones where she’s learning, too—like a panel she co-hosted earlier this year on drill, a rap subgenre that’s as popular as it is subversive.

“The kneejerk reaction was, ‘This music is challenging; there are some themes in the music that we don’t think are safe or healthy for young people.’ But this music is really important to a lot of the young people we’re serving. And if it’s a musical and artistic approach that’s important to them, we need to understand it,” Cole says.