Todd Lanier Lester
Todd Lanier Lester is an artist and cultural producer. He has worked in leadership, advocacy and strategic planning roles at Reporters sans frontiers, Queer Art Mentorship, Astraea Lesbian Justice Foundation, and most recently as the Executive Director of the Global Arts Corps, an organization that creates theatre to advance reconciliation in societies emerging from violent conflict. He founded freeDimensional, an organization that helps artists and activists-in-distress by providing safe haven in artist residencies. He serves as a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute where he’s building an incubator to support collaborations between artists and policymakers broadly, while also developing a new project in the center of São Paulo called Lanchonete.org. Inspired by a range of ideas, people and movements — e.g. Walking in the City, Social Sculpture, Arte/Cidade, Artist Placement Group, Bolaño, The Situationist International, Third Cinema, Subaltern Studies — the Lanchonete project celebrates São Paulo’s ubiquitous lunch counters and their role in the life of the Center. Lanchonete.org invites a group of international artists to reside in — and thus develop a relationship with — the Center of São Paulo, its citizens, institutions, issues and patterns. Begun as a research process, the project materializes into a community-owned restaurant over its five-year duration, and leaves behind a management structure — Associação Espaço Cultural Lanchonete — to contend with the inherent responsibilities of such an endeavor.
