Donald Fann

Fann currently works as the Theater Arts Teacher at Stewarts Creek High School. He comes to this postion after serving for 19 years as Executive Director of The Arts Center of Cannon County. He saw that organization grow from a local community theater with an annual attendance of 3,000 into an award-winning regional Arts Center serving a worldwide audience of over 150,000 through its facility, web sites, publications, and recording projects.

At The Arts Center he programmed seasons for one of the premier community theaters in the Southeast including over 150 annual performances averaging 80% capacity and serving 40,000 people annually. The Arts Center of Cannon County has set the standard for high quality community theater from a rural perspective. Fann works hard to discover challenging new works that fit within the cultural context of the community. This has resulted in various premiers over the years including the Tennessee premiers of Art, 1st Baptist of Ivy Gap, and Mitch Albom’s Duck Hunter Shoots Angeland world amateur premiers of Always Patsy Cline, Man of Constant Sorrow and Keep on the Sunny Side. His extensive theatrical background includes over 175 credits for directing, design, and performance.

Since 2010, he has been Principal Guest Director for Crossville’s Cumberland County Playhouse, a professional theater serving over an audience of over 130,000, making it Tennessee’s largest theater audience. His work here has garnered him multiple nominations for BroadwayWorld.com’s Tennessee Theater Awards including winning Best Play and Best Director in the 2010 professional division for Duck Hunter Shoots Angel.

A long time Arts Education Advocate, Fann designed and implemented a school matinee program that currently serves over 10,000 students per year. He established a program, based on the Kennedy Center model, to provide graphically interesting, curriculum based learning materials to each child attending a performance, and initiated a partnership withMiddle Tennessee State University to provide satellite school broadcasts of classes geared to help students better understand the arts events. He also founded residency program and a summer youth theater conservatory at The Arts Center.

In 2002 he founded Spring Fed Records, an independent non-profit record label that has used field recordings and reissues of traditional recordings to build a catalog of over 40 titles which have been reviewed by major national and international music publications. In 2008 John Work III: Recording Black Culture, won the Grammy Award for Best Album Notes and garnered feature articles in The New York Times, Associated Press and The International Herald Tribune.

Through his involvement with the Cannon Association of Craft Artists, Fann has worked to support both the traditional and contemporary craft communities, conceived the white oak timber co-op to provide materials to local basketmakers, coordinated the creation of The Crafts Directory featuring over 150 local artists, and created Southern Visions Gallery, a retail crafts outlet for these artists, located at The Arts Center. Under his management, The White Oak Crafts Fair grew from 30 craft artists and an attendance of 800 to over 80 artists and an attendance of 8,000.

He received the 2013 Governor’s Award for the Arts in Arts Leadership for contributions to the state’s arts community. At the ceremony, Governor Bill Haslom said of Donald “with all he has accomplished he has retained the heart of a teacher.” He currently serves as Vice Chair of Humanities Tennessee Board of Directors and is the former Chair of The Tennesseans for the Arts Board. He has served on panels for The Southern Arts Federation and Tennessee Arts Commission, and was a founding member of Tennessee’s peer advisory network.

A native of Woodbury, Tennessee Fann graduated from The University of Memphis with a BFA in Theatre and has received training as a Teaching Artist from The Lincoln Center Institute and the Wolftrap Institute, Foxfire Teacher Training Program, as well as The Tennessee Arts Commission’s Peer Advisory Network. He currently lives on his family farm outside of Woodbury with his wife, Cortilla and his three daughters, Chloe, Hattie and Corinne.