President of Music Center Resigns Post

Citing “personal and professional reasons,” Joanne Kozberg, president of the Music Center of Los Angeles County, has resigned from the post and will step down as soon as a successor can be found.

Andrea Van de Kamp, chairman and chief executive of the Music Center, said Monday that she expects the search for Kozberg’s replacement to take from six to eight months.

Kozberg, who was named president of the downtown performing arts complex in 1999, said Monday that she will leave the post in order to concentrate more of her time and efforts on her role as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, where she has served three years of her 12-year appointment.

And, although she has handled both jobs concurrently for several years, Kozberg said the opening of the Music Center’s newest venue, Walt Disney Concert Hall, in 2003 will expand the duties of the Music Center president to include overseeing new programming both at Disney Hall, new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which will have more time available on its stages once the Philharmonic moves out.

“Public policy has always been a primary love of mine,” she said. “I’ve always seen the Music Center as an incredible community resource, and now it’s got to go 24/7.”

During her years at the Music Center, Kozberg steered the merging of Music Center Inc., the fund-raising arm for the center’s resident performing arts companies (the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Master Chorale and Center Theatre Group), with the Music Center Operating Co., which managed its theaters.

Both Van de Kamp and Kozberg said that now that this project has been completed, the center is seeking a new president who can take more of an impresario role in future programming at both Disney Hall and the Chandler Pavilion.

“I came here to merge the Music Center Operating Co. with the Music Center, Inc., and it’s been an effective merger,” Kozberg said. “I really think that now is the time we begin to recruit somebody who has theatrical operations background, and will be in place before, during and after the opening of Disney Hall.”

While the Music Center has been a co-presenter of a number of productions and musical engagements at its county-owned complex, Van de Kamp said that, following the merger of the two entities, the county Board of Supervisors authorized the Music Center to begin to present programming as a separate entity, rather than in partnership with a third-party presenter.

Both Kozberg and Van de Kamp said the Music Center has plans to expand dance programming, as well as to make the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and Disney Hall available for more community programming using local artists and performing groups. “There are many community groups that want to perform at the Music Center, but can’t because we’ve been so full,” Kozberg said. “We see ourselves as becoming a huge community resource for a different type of programming.”

Kozberg, 57, took over as Music Center president in February 1999, following three years of interim leadership at the center. She served from 1991 to 1993 as executive director and chairwoman of the California Arts Council and in former Gov. Pete Wilson’s cabinet from 1993 to 1998 as secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency. Before that she was senior policy advisor to Wilson when he was in the U.S. Senate. The Canadian native grew up in Beverly Hills and graduated from UC Berkeley.