Ivonne Chand O’Neal, Ph.D., is Founder and Principal of MUSE Research, a creativity, arts research, and cultural strategy consulting firm providing assessment, strategic research design, and evaluation services for creative youth development initiatives, school districts, educational institutions, government organizations, foundations, museums, performing arts centers, pop culture initiatives, the entertainment industry, and multinational business enterprises in the areas of creativity in arts, corporate, and healthcare domains; arts impact; audience impact; culture; civic engagement; creative placemaking; arts equity and access; restorative and social justice; and arts education. Dr. Chand O’Neal’s current work centers on measuring the impact of the arts on marginalized and underserved populations, and building diversity, equity, and inclusion access to arts education. She also serves as a cultural strategist building evaluation systems to assess the social impact of pop culture on the American public through her work past work with the Pop Culture Collaborative and the USC Norman Lear Center, and applies her training in cognitive psychology to address equity decision-making patterns under the current pandemic circumstances in access to healthcare with such entities as the National Institutes of Health, Massachusetts General Hospital System, and the arts with such institutions as the Minnesota Opera in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Prior to founding MUSE Research, Dr. Chand O’Neal’s recent positions included serving as, Chief Research Strategist for Crayola, Director of Outcomes and Evaluation for VSA: The International Organization on Arts and Disability, and as the founding Director of Research and Evaluation for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she created the Center’s first national research agenda comprised of over 25 national and international research studies examining the impacts of the arts on society on individual, community, and national scales.

Dr. Chand O’Neal has published, and presented research papers, book chapters, and webinars in a wide variety of related fields, including the impact of the arts on human flourishing, creative youth development, the effects of restorative arts on at-risk youth, development of exceptional talent, arts integration, school readiness, creative economy, positive psychology, creativity, using the arts to break the school-to-prison pipeline, innovation, research design, education, museology, visitor studies, student engagement, restorative justice, civic engagement, human flourishing, and quality of life.