Savannah Barrett is the Program Director for Art of the Rural, the Project lead for the Rural Generation initiative, and co-founder of the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange. She serves as Lead Advisor for the Bush Foundation Community Creativity Cohort II, on the board of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice and the Robert Gard Foundation, as well as many national and local advisory boards, including The Art of Community: Rural S.C., the EmcArts' Community Innovation Lab, and the Ford Foundation's Southern Cultural Scan. She has widely published essays and interviews and presented her work at conferences internationally. She holds a Masters of Arts Management from the University of Oregon, and is an alumnus of the Ali Scholars Program at the University of Louisville and the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts. Savannah was raised in Grayson Springs, Kentucky, where she co-founded a local arts agency in high school and now stewards seven acres of her homeplace. She is a twelfth-generation Kentuckian and lives in Louisville's Southend with her partner and their daughter.