Philip Horn - Arts Leader and Advocate.
- Mark Walmsley FRSA AGSM
- Feb 23
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 25
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Meet Philip Horn.
In this interview, Mark invited Philip Horn to create his own fantasy cultural year from the answers to some easy questions where there are no wrong answers. Enjoy his journey below.
Philip Horn is a US arts leader and lifelong advocate for widening access to culture — a former actor turned public servant who spent 25 years as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA), the Commonwealth’s state arts agency.
Based in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania (across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg), Philip’s career has spanned the full ecology of the arts: from studying theatre and performance (with graduate study at Michigan State University), to working directly with artists and touring companies at the California Arts Council, to shaping statewide strategy, funding, infrastructure, and partnerships at PCA.
During his tenure in Pennsylvania, Philip became known for modernising systems and strengthening statewide arts infrastructure — including pioneering approaches to grants administration, helping to expand the reach of public arts funding across the Commonwealth, and supporting innovative partnerships such as Pennsylvania Performing Arts on Tour (PennPAT).
Alongside that public-facing leadership is a clear through-line: Philip’s belief that the arts grow when we understand how audiences actually decide to show up.
In conversation with Arts & Culture Network Founder Mark Walmsley, Philip argues that “you can’t market the arts” as if they’re a single product category — because the arts are too different. Instead, he champions marketing that communicates the lived experience: showing people enjoying themselves, signalling welcome and belonging, and removing the unintentional messages that say “this isn’t for you.” This thinking informed an initiative in Pennsylvania with Americans for the Arts to help organisations strengthen audience engagement through more effective communications.
Now retired from state government, Philip continues to contribute his insight, humour, and deep sector knowledge to conversations about the future of cultural participation — including a particular fascination with “super-peers” (the people who influence whether groups attend), and with the arts equivalent of “Little League”: how we get more young people making work so they become lifelong supporters of other people’s work.
Philip is also a Full Member of The Arts & Culture Network, supporting a global, independent, member-funded community for creatives — and sharing decades of perspective on what it takes to build arts participation that lasts.
Philip's Fantasy Cultural Year ... with a magic wand and time machine to hand.
Mark introduced the idea of a “ fantasy cultural year” - a way to get to know each new full member that's far more spontaneous than a traditional interview — allowing imagination, travel, culture and John’s creative vision to collide.
Philip’s Fantasy Cultural Year highlights
Favourite building: Fallingwater (Frank Lloyd Wright) in western Pennsylvania.
Research-trip starting city: St. Louis, Missouri.
First-class drink order: Vodka martini (method optional).
Book on the plane: Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman) — “like a detective novel” about how people decide.
One music lane for 12 months: Early jazz or John Adams, especially Shaker Loops.
Dance choice: Twyla Tharp’s Sinatra Suite (created for Baryshnikov) — plus admiration for choreographer Susan Marshall; dancers as “athletes of the heart.”
Dinner cuisine: Mexican (with roots in growing up in Los Angeles and living in Sacramento).
Next destination: Rural Japan (via Kyoto).
Sport to watch: Baseball — “so bizarre you can understand anything in the arts.”
A week of culture in London:
Concert to relive: San Francisco Symphony touring Northern California (including Sacramento), with Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben.
Shakespeare: Hamlet — with Philip’s provocative take that Hamlet may be paranoid schizophrenic and his father was never murdered.
Musical premiere: Cabaret (with Joel Grey).
Opera: The Magic Flute.
Film: Seven Samurai.
Hero lunch guest: Historian David McCullough (with a twist: McCullough would invite Abraham Lincoln).
The conversation is rich with practical audience insight, cultural curiosity, and comic detours (Groucho Marx, Bob Newhart), all underscoring Philip’s central focus: helping arts organisations communicate in ways that genuinely invite people in.
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Mark Walmsley FRSA FCIM AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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Mark Walmsley FRSA AGSM
Chief Culture Vulture
Arts & Culture Network
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