Joan Shigekawa is an American film and television producer, cultural grantmaker, and arts administrator. After a distinguished career as a senior executive at the Rockefeller Foundation, she joined the Obama Administration in 2009 as senior deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and served as the agency's acting chairman from 2012-2014.
Early life and education
As a young child, she and her family were among the roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans interned by the federal government during World War II. Together with her parents George and Yoshiko and her brother George Jr., she spent roughly 18 months at Tule Lake camp, just south of the Oregon border, turning 6 while in captivity.
Shikegawa recalled in an interview, “I remember that we were very cold and that my mother used to go out and try to find scraps of wood, something to keep us warm. While we were in the camp my brother got whooping cough.”
In 1958, she received a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College.
Career
Motivated by an interest in historical documentaries, Shigekawa moved to New York City to pursue her career. Her first job was as an assistant to CBS producer Julian Claman, who was working on cultural programming for the network.
There were few female role models in the industry at the time. As Shigekawa told the Journal of Independent Film and Video Artists in 1976, “[W]hen I started working, it never occurred to me that I could be a producer, because I would look around CBS and I didn’t see any women producers. There were women who were forty year old production assistants, and that was the kind of job I wanted to have. It didn’t occur to me that all the young men who were already production assistants were planning their careers as producers and directors….”
She gained skills and experience in a series of early jobs, including working on NBC's Today Show, at New York's public television network WNET, in theatrical production, and as a field director of admissions at Barnard College. In 1963, she helped two friends produce a low-budget documentary series about the circus, earning her first associate producer's credit.
In 1973, while working as an independent producer, she received a call from Ronnie Eldridge, who spearheaded special projects for the newly created feminist monthly publication Ms., about an hour-long special the magazine was planning for national television.
Shigekawa signed on as producer of what became Woman Alive!,a feminist documentary series made by and for women that showcased the changing role of women in society. The series, which aired on New York's public television channel WNET/13, featured individual women's stories from across the country. Presented in “magazine” format, each half-hour episode included documentaries by female filmmakers, performances by female artists and entertainers, and expert commentary from leading women such as Gloria Steinem and Lily Tomlin.
In a review on June 16, 1974, New York Times television critic Ellen Cohn described Woman Alive!as “powerful, provocative, moving, and funny.”
On October 22, 1975, New York Times critic John O’Connor wrote that Woman Alive!“achieves a most impressive level of effectiveness, scattering valuable insights and modest epiphanies with attractive care and intelligence.”
Women Alive! broadcast 10 episodes in 1975 and five more in 1977, but was unable to secure sufficient corporate funding to continue beyond its initial Corporation for Public Broadcasting Grant.
Philanthropic leadership
Shigekawa was the first director of the arts program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York City.
In 1985, she became the inaugural director of the international Production Laboratory at the Program for Art on Film, a partnership between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Trust.
From 1995-2009, she served as associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, where she led the foundation's domestic and international programs in the arts, including the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund, Creativity in a Digital Age, and cultural exchanges between U.S. artists and their counterparts in Southeast Asia.
The NYC Cultural Innovation Fund was an effort to “enhance New York City’s role as a global center of creativity, culture, and diversity, and strengthen its economic and cultural vitality.” During her tenure, Shigekawa oversaw the awarding of 49 CIF grants totaling $7.8 million.