has been a board member since April 2011 and a a humanities advisor to Docs In Progress since 2010. A folklorist and ethnographer specializing in the culture and politics of work, Tom most recently served as the managing director of the Delmarva Folklife Project, a multi-year initiative of Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
He was introduced to the study of folklore at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), earned a doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington in 1995 and has nearly completed a certificate course in fundraising, budgeting and business management at the University of Pennsylvania. Following graduate school, he worked on several projects involving ethnographic fieldwork, research, and public arts programming, most often focusing on occupational culture and labor history, including work with merchant sailors and longshoremen on the east and west coasts, firefighters in Troy, New York, and machinists and millwrights at the Harley Davidson Motor Company. He has also worked with traditional musicians and in the 1990s directed a project to collect and annotate a traditional repertoire of accordion tunes from a well-known Irish-American musician living in Minneapolis.
Tom has served as trustee, officer, board member, committee member, and advisor to several national and local non-profit organizations, including the Fund for Folk Culture (formerly of Santa Fe, NM), Parents for Non-Toxic Alternatives (Washington DC), American Friends Service Committee-DC Program on Human Rights and Economic Justice (Washington DC), and Friends of Greek Culture (Greek Embassy to the United States). As a family trustee of the Walker Foundation for over 20 years, he has developed an expertise in grantmaking in the field of environmental economics.
