Full Name
Frances Pollock
Job Title
Managing Partner
Company
MOC Innovations
Speaker Bio
Frances Pollock is a composer, producer, and cultural strategist working to dismantle the myth of the "starving artist" by building new economic engines for cultural production. Her operas and musicals have been presented by the San Francisco Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Seattle Opera, Opera Omaha, Aspen Music Festival, PROTOTYPE Festival, and others.
At Yale (while earning her Doctorate), Frances founded Midnight Oil Collective, a venture studio supporting artist-owned enterprises and mutual economics in the arts. In collaboration with MOC, she is in the process of launching the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, a national consortium that retools the tech transfer model for creative intellectual property and incentivizes universities to support artists and scholars in the humanities. With partners at Yale Ventures, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of the Arts, she is helping to position Yale and Connecticut as a national hub for cultural innovation and reframing the arts as a vital sector for public investment and sustainable growth.
Frances’s scholarship and practice focus on cooperative funding structures, transmedia storytelling, and the systems artists need not just to survive—but to lead. Her academic work interrogates identity, authorship, and institutional power, particularly how universities frame and circulate cultural narratives. These inquiries shape the courses she has designed on entrepreneurship, arts institutions, and cultural theory, which prepare students to navigate and transform the creative economy. A dedicated educator, she equips artists and cultural builders to own their work, sustain their practice, and shape the systems they move through.
With vision, rigor, and a deep belief in collective possibility, Frances Pollock composes not just music—but strategies for a more connected, cooperative cultural future—one aimed at finding a way to make value and values meet.--
At Yale (while earning her Doctorate), Frances founded Midnight Oil Collective, a venture studio supporting artist-owned enterprises and mutual economics in the arts. In collaboration with MOC, she is in the process of launching the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, a national consortium that retools the tech transfer model for creative intellectual property and incentivizes universities to support artists and scholars in the humanities. With partners at Yale Ventures, the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of the Arts, she is helping to position Yale and Connecticut as a national hub for cultural innovation and reframing the arts as a vital sector for public investment and sustainable growth.
Frances’s scholarship and practice focus on cooperative funding structures, transmedia storytelling, and the systems artists need not just to survive—but to lead. Her academic work interrogates identity, authorship, and institutional power, particularly how universities frame and circulate cultural narratives. These inquiries shape the courses she has designed on entrepreneurship, arts institutions, and cultural theory, which prepare students to navigate and transform the creative economy. A dedicated educator, she equips artists and cultural builders to own their work, sustain their practice, and shape the systems they move through.
With vision, rigor, and a deep belief in collective possibility, Frances Pollock composes not just music—but strategies for a more connected, cooperative cultural future—one aimed at finding a way to make value and values meet.--
Speaking At
