On April 1, 2026, I met with executive director Steve A. Hoffman over Zoom to discuss his leadership and strategic management of Danville, Kentucky’s performing arts center, the Norton Center for the Arts, located on the campus of Centre College. As a former student at Centre College, I experienced firsthand the impact of the Norton Center for the Arts. Not only is the organization a leading employer of students on campus, but they also provide free performances and events to enrolled Centre College students. The Norton Center’s engagement with students provides invaluable professional opportunities in the arts as well as leadership experience that students may carry with them into a range of careers. In this interview, Steve Hoffman and I had the opportunity to delve into how the Norton Center for the Arts plans for their future as a collegiate institution entwined with the academic work of Centre College. The excerpts from this interview have been edited for length and clarity for this blog post.

Caili Harris: Thank you so much for meeting me today. Please introduce yourself and talk about your time at the Norton Center in Danville, Kentucky.

Steve A. Hoffman: My name is Steve Hoffman. I am the Executive Director for the Norton Center for the Arts in Danville, Kentucky at Centre College. This is my 16th year in this position. It's a mixture of managing the building, overseeing staff, programming the performing arts, programming visual arts, and integrating what we do with the campus as well as the community. Before that, I was the CEO of the National Steinbeck Center in Monterey, California. Before that, I opened and ran a facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As CEO, I oversaw the performing arts center, the science museum, an art museum, and an Omnimax theater complex, and I did all the performing arts programming.

Caili Harris: Regarding Norton Center’s programming, how have you seen your strategies develop over the past five years? And what are some projects and initiatives that you're most proud of?

Steve A. Hoffman: Our strategies have been ever changing since the pandemic started because we weren't doing live performances. The campus was closed. We were all working remotely. Students were taking classes remotely. And we tried to figure out how the Norton Center could be involved and continue to program. 

We developed a program called the Culture + (Plus) Series. It was an online Zoom-based program free to everybody. Each one of these were convocations (academic events and discussions approved by the college for academic credit–a requirement for Centre College graduation). Students would get credit for attending to them. Because there were so few convocations during that time, they were well-attended. 

We were trying to find ways to connect with the Danville community as well as the greater Bluegrass community in interesting ways that weren't necessarily just about the arts. It was about culture. If it wasn't an artist, then we would have a thought leader of some kind. 

One of the coolest ones was Culture Plus eSports. We had an award-winning game designer on the panel. We had a couple of students who were in eSports at the time at the Center, and one of them, because they couldn't graduate on stage during the pandemic, created an 8-bit version of the Norton Center. Students entered through the program SimCity. They came in through there, and they walked across the stage to pick up their diploma virtually. All of these ways to tap into our resources in the community were really important. 

Now we're seeing what's happening across the country not only in higher education but nonprofits and businesses everywhere. They are experiencing new challenges. We're reevaluating what our priorities are and how to stay within our mission, not only of the Norton Center, but also of the college. We're working very closely with the college and seeing how we can help achieve their goals through what we're doing. 

Caili Harris: That transitions perfectly into my next question, how are you planning for the future of the Norton Center for the Arts and its support of the Danville and Bluegrass region?

Steve A. Hoffman: It ties into what we're doing right now. We're working with the college president and other leadership from the college to develop a programming board that will consist of some faculty, people in the community who attend Norton Center activities, and staff who subscribe. It'll be a number of stakeholders who are already invested in what we do to help guide our work. We're going to probably start reducing the number of shows we do for a little while and see what happens. Rather than just me selecting the shows, we will be working with a group of our stakeholders. 

At the same time, we're working with another group of people who are more philanthropic. We're working with them to start an advisory group to look at fundraising for our endowment, and we hope to double it over the next several years. There's a lot going on and it's a lot behind the scenes. Our work all comes back to how we can continue with the mission and best serve the collegiate community–not just year by year, but with an endowment.

Caili Harris: As you plan for the future of the Norton Center, are you using a strategic management process or a formal strategic plan?

Steve A. Hoffman: We've just had an operations evaluation done for the Norton Center. We just finished that at the beginning of the year, and that sets the stage for many recommendations for us to implement. Those two groups, the two advisory groups, are part of those recommendations as well as trimming the season. 

Now, the mission part of it is recognizing that we do serve college students and have a vision for making sure that they're exposed through a liberal arts education, through a lot of different arts genres even if they're not popular financially and to be able to break even generally. We’re asking ourselves how can we navigate still being able to bring in some of the more diverse cultural programming as well as popular programming that can help financially? 

I’m always trying to lead with the question, who is the future Norton Center team? How are future leaders going to think about us 25, 30 years from now? Did we help them? Did we set them up for success? With these next five years, we're working towards building our endowment. My hope is that whoever takes my place and then their place and their place moving forward that they have a much easier time programming and taking risks. 

Caili Harris: Thank you so much, Steve, for your time today. I am truly so excited to follow the Norton Center’s bright path forward. 

Written by Caili Harris, a graduate student in the MFA in Theatre - Arts Leadership program at Virginia Tech.