Shaping Societal Impact Through the Arts

Published Date April 03, 2025
News Type Public Address

Glenn College graduate Susannah Montgomery, left, and undergraduate statistics student Carol Luo, select inputs and watch as generative AI changes the tone and bias of a news article. (Credit: Joan Slattery Wall) 

By Joan Slattery Wall

Glenn College graduate Susannah Montgomery has a formula for meeting challenges of our society: technology plus art.

“Data creates facts to justify why we care,” said Susannah Montgomery, “but art is what makes us listen.” 

Montgomery, a 2017 graduate of the arts policy and administration master’s degree program, offered jointly by the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and the Department of Art Administration, Education and Policy, started 2025 with a new opportunity to position culture and creativity as essential drivers of Europe’s economic, environmental and social progress.

A resident of the Netherlands, Montgomery is a business development manager for the European Institute for Innovation and Technology (EIT) Culture & Creativity, a European Union-supported partnership.

She is tasked with building awareness and enthusiasm around the EIT Culture & Creativity network among creative industries stakeholders in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The network offers a variety of resources for creative professionals and organizations, including grant funding, accelerator programs for start-ups and capacity building programs.

“By joining EIT Culture & Creativity, I can now try to nudge positive change and impact at much larger scale than I ever could have before. I’m excited about the opportunity to address some of today’s most pressing challenges, such as climate change, digital transformation and public health crises, through the lens of culture and creativity,” Montgomery said.

“I’ve always loved the magic that happens when you bring people together from different disciplines, different cultural backgrounds to tackle society’s wicked problems,” said Montgomery. Her career has included managing international projects while employed in the academic sector as work package manager at the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, the national museum and institute of the Netherlands, and as international account manager and senior lecturer at Inholland University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, as well as deputy director of its Sustainable Media Lab. In addition, she co-edited the “Research Handbook on Human Rights and Digital Technology,” published by Edward Elgar this year.
 

Susannah Montgomery, right, explains AI marketing tools to (from left) biostatistics Assistant Professor Andy Ni and PhD students Jeongjin Lee, Andrew Gothard and Xinyun Chen at the “fabricated” exhibit.

In 2024, at the Sustainable Media Lab, Montgomery co-led “fabricated: Unravel Fact from Fiction in Your Digital World,” an award-winning, traveling research exhibition focused on promoting digital literacy through games and interactive experiences. 

The “fabricated” exhibition, which highlighted the impact of AI and digital misinformation on democracy in a fun, engaging way, in November made a weeklong stop at The Ohio State University in partnership with its Translational Data Analytics Institute and the STEAM Factory.

“We wanted these topics that seem so complex to be presented in a way that no matter someone’s digital literacy or age, there’s something they could relate to,” Montgomery said. “People have been craving to have conversations about this. The playfulness of the exhibit makes them feel open to have conversations, to feel like they have a space to be open about it.”

In addition to helping people better understand how media and technology affects their daily lives, “fabricated” organizers helped cities including The Hague and Amsterdam and libraries such as the Library of The Hague get insight into AI policies and outreach to their constituents.

From an education standpoint, we looked at how to create interventions with citizens and how the output from those interventions can be used by policymakers.

Susannah Montgomery
Glenn College graduate

“I hope this also can help these institutions feel accessible to people that don’t always feel represented,” Montgomery said. “These issues should matter to everyone. Libraries serve everyone. City governments represent everyone, not just people with the loudest voices.”

Montgomery will continue to serve an advisory role for “fabricated” while the team translates data collected from the exhibition.

“Based on the current news and policy changes from large social media platforms like Meta, ‘fabricated’ is also increasingly proving to be an interesting record for a moment in time right now as these platforms start to radically deregulate,” Montgomery said. “As a result, this is reshaping for us a bit the value our data has for academic and public stakeholders and creating conversations among the ‘fabricated’ consortium partners about how we can potentially pivot this work or collaborate further in the future to tackle some of the increasingly inevitable new challenges coming to the global media landscape.”

At the “fabricated” exhibit, (from left) biostatistics Professor Greg Rempala; Tanya Berger-Wolf, director of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute, which hosted the event; Susannah Montgomery; and biostatistics PhD student Andrew Gothart discuss challenges with facial recognition technology. (Credit: Joan Slattery Wall)

Montgomery said her work at the Sustainable Media Lab made her Glenn College arts policy education resonate.

When she came to Ohio State looking for arts management programs, she didn’t know much about policy.

“It was so exciting to learn how we are shaping the arts on a local and federal level. I chose the Glenn College in part because of its reputation, knowing people who’ve gone through the program and how it was the kind of program you could get a job out of,” she said. “In the Glenn College, we used cases so often. I loved how much we could shape it to apply to our own interests.”

Montgomery’s new role at the European Institute for Innovation and Technology Culture & Creativity gives her opportunities to continue her passion for creating meaningful experiences through the arts.

“I look forward to seeing how our support for creative industries and the largest EU initiative of its kind will not only empower cultural entrepreneurs,” she said, “but also demonstrate that culture is a powerful driver of prosperity and societal change.”

Learn more about the “fabricated” exhibition.

Read the latest edition of Public Address, the Glenn College magazine.