Frances Pollock was drawn to the arts from a young age.
She found that the arts - especially music - allowed her to make sense of the contradictions, and even messiness, of life.
"Growing up, I found that the world wants to put you in boxes," said Pollock, '19 M.M., '25 D.M.A. "The box I was born into didn't work for me, and if I had stayed in my boxes, I would be an entirely different person. The way I escaped from my boxes was through art. Art breaks all of that open."
Pollock doesn't just mean that symbolically. She also means it strategically and economically. She started to break open more boxes herself when she was given the opportunity to join the Yale School of Music as a master's student in 2017. A composer by training, she was interested in both creating music and exploring ways in which an artist could make the often-precarious career in art more sustainable.
Eventually, Pollock and eight other collaborators in 2020 launched the Midnight Oil Collective (MOC) to tackle those very issues. Founded, owned, and managed entirely by artists, the venture capital fund helps artists and arts-based institutions develop financially sustainable models that help them maintain greater control over their work and profits.
That's what led Pollock to start working with Yale Ventures, a university initiative that supports Yale's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, connecting faculty, students, staff, and community innovators through innovation programming, intellectual property and licensing resources, business development, partnerships, mentorship, and events.
"When I started to understand the ways in which the university could be a catalyst for cultural changes, I desperately wanted to be a part of that conversation," she said.
Pollock is now bringing that conversation to an even wider audience as the inaugural director of the university's new Cultural Innovation Lab. After three years of building alongside Yale Ventures, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD), and MOC, the Cultural Innovation Lab will be an applied research and development lab that develops practical solutions to ethical and structural challenges in cultural production.
"Arts innovation at Yale and across Connecticut is a vibrant, essential part of our innovation ecosystem," said Josh Geballe, '97, '02 M.B.A., managing director of Yale Ventures and senior associate provost for entrepreneurship and innovation at Yale University. "We're proud to serve as the home for the Cultural Innovation Lab and look forward to seeing the impact it will have across Connecticut."
The lab will leverage the university's legacy as a beacon of the arts and humanities to make the cultural sector more sustainable, creative, and accountable - at a time when artists, scholars, and institutions are confronting economic precarity and societal change.
"As much as the humanities need business, business needs the humanities, too," said Pollock, who is also a venture advisor at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale (Tsai CITY). "Otherwise, we're not actually enacting a world that is kind and gentle and humane in a way that is building the type of world we all want to be a part of."
Like art itself, the Cultural Innovation Lab is a work-in-progress. But it will have three core pillars: incubation, the "brain trust," and capital architecture. Thanks to $1.7 million in funding from the state's DECD, the lab will launch a multi-year accelerator program for arts and culture projects that are ambitious, intellectual property-driven, and scalable. Think Y Combinator - a prestigious accelerator for tech startups - but for the arts.
"Connecticut's creative sector is a vital part of our economy, and the Cultural Innovation Lab represents an exciting new way to nurture its growth," said Liz Shapiro, director of arts, preservation, and museums with the Connecticut DECD. "By giving our artists, scholars, and creative entrepreneurs the same kind of support available to other industries, we are investing in both cultural vitality and economic opportunity for our state."
The accelerator's first cohort is designed around Connecticut-based theaters like the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford and the Theater Works in New Milford - and for good reason. The state has a long history of incubating acclaimed musicals including "Annie," "Man of La Mancha," and "In the Heights."
The accelerator will help even more culture makers launch brands and companies that reach similar global audiences, leaders say.
"The arts can be a primary driver of economic development in the same way that tech or biomedical engineering are for the state [of Connecticut]," Pollock said.
In addition to incubation, the lab launched three think tanks this year as spaces for artists, scholars, and civic leaders to confront tough questions about ethics, power, and public trust in cultural work. This includes the launch of two think tanks this past fall - one on public-facing scholarship and one on civics, activism, and the arts and humanities - and one this spring on opera as playground for disruption.
"What I really wanted to do was make sure that we always had a place where we could bring together leaders and experts in different fields and different spaces to really guide the trajectory of what the lab was doing," Pollock said.
Finally, the lab will reimagine the role of capital within the arts and humanities, rethinking how money enters, supports, and sustains cultural work while deliberately softening the line between artist and executive. Rather than relying exclusively on philanthropy or short-term project funding, the lab is exploring pathways that align capital with artistic agency, long-term value creation, and ethical stewardship, including collaborations with leaders like James Rhee, an entrepreneur, author, and the lab's inaugural artist-in-residence whose work challenges the assumption that creative and executive identities must be separate.
Like her work with the MOC, Pollock thinks it's essential to put capital and control in the hands of artists themselves through the new lab.
"If you look beneath the hood of cultural production in almost any field, what you're going to see is a lot of outdated and ossified production models," she said. "An artist doesn't want their work to feel cheapened, but, at the same time, they don't want their work to sit on a hard drive either."
