Astrid Baumgardner
I strive to inspire and empower my students to be leaders in the world of the arts in order to ensure that the arts remain vital, essential and alive in our culture. I help my students explore and embrace their unique gifts to deepen and grow their talents in the service of the arts. I encourage proactive experimentation, risk-taking and learning from mistakes. I provide my students with leadership, entrepreneurial, social and psychological skills and tools so that they embrace their roles as leaders in the world of the arts, generate innovative solutions to their challenges and create successful lives.
Astrid Baumgardner
Astrid Baumgardner, JD, PCC, brings her experience as a career and executive coach, lawyer, non-profit executive and consultant, and music board chair to help musicians, arts leaders, lawyers and creative professionals achieve creative success. The author of Creative Success Now: How Creatives Can Thrive in the 21st Century, she gave a TEDx talk on Cracking the Code on Creativity: The Secret to Full-Blast Living.
At the Yale School of Music, Baumgardner created the Office of Career Strategies in 2011 and directed the office until 2022. She teaches a graduate-level class in arts leadership and entrepreneurship and provides individual and group career coaching to students. In 2017, she was voted by students as the most inspiring professor at the School of Music and spoke at “Inspiring Yale”, the Yale Graduate and Professional Student Senate’s annual conference showcasing outstanding professors in Yale’s graduate schools.
Baumgardner also trains arts leaders at OPERA America, the League of American Orchestras, and Ensemble Connect at Carnegie Hall and guest lectures widely at other conservatories and music programs on topics including creative success and inspired leadership. She particularly enjoys bringing the research-based SPIRE framework of happiness and well-being to arts organizations and their leaders.
Baumgardner is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the Rutgers University Newark School of Law, where she was a member of the Law Review, as well as a certified professional coach and a graduate of the science-based Happiness Studies Academy. After practicing law in New York City for nearly twenty-five years, she then combined her professional skills with her love of the arts to serve as the Deputy Executive Director of the French Institute Alliance Française of New York and later was an independent consultant to nonprofit arts boards before starting her coaching business and assuming her positions at Yale. She currently serves on the boards of OPERA America, Sō Percussion and Beth Morrison Projects and previously was a board member of the American Composers Orchestra.
