About the keynote speaker Lily Yeh

Lily Yeh is an internationally celebrated artist and award-winning executive director of the Village of Arts and Humanities. Since 1986, with the help of neighborhood children and adults, Yeh has built the Village from an abandoned lot into an organization and a community. She has infused the Village with her own artistic sensitivity, collaborating with other artists and community residents to create a place that brings art into both the physical space and daily rhythms of life. Expanding beyond North Philadelphia, Yeh's work has taken her to communities in other parts of the country as well as abroad. Based on her work at the Village and abroad, Yeh has received many prestigious awards including a 1992 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, a 1993 Lila Wallace-Arts International Fellowship and a 1995 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in the Arts, Prudential Foundation's 1996 Leadership Award, the 1997 HomeTown Hero Award from the Children’s Miracle Network, an ArtsLink Fellowship in 1998, a Leeway Achievement Award in 1999, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for “Arts Leadership and Service” in 2000, and the prestigious Golden Medal Award for Urban Excellence from Rudy Bruner Foundation in 2001. She has received three Honorary Doctor Degrees, from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1999, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2000, and University of Massachusetts Boston in 2001. She will be bestowed another Honorary Doctor Degree by Villanova University in Villanova, PA, in May 2002.

Yeh’s work has been featured in the one-hour documentary film “An Angel in the Village,” which did PBS present in many cities across America in 1998-99. She was keynote speakers at numerous national conferences and has conducted workshops on community building through art across the nation. Yeh’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, the Knight Foundation, First Union Regional Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, William Penn Foundation, Lattner Foundation, Butller Family Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Connelly Foundation, Ford Foundation in Kenya, The Philadelphia Foundation, Samuel S. Fels Fund, the New Path Foundation, and many others.

Originally from China, Yeh studied traditional Chinese painting in Taiwan before coming to the United States in 1963. In 1968, she began teaching at the University of the Arts where she became professor of painting and art history. In 1997, she resigned from her tenured position to devote all her time to her work at the Village of Arts and Humanities. Her work has impacted people and places in the United States, China, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Italy, Soviet Georgia, and Ecuador.