SHAY THORNTON KULHA

Shay Thornton Kulha is a nationally recognized consultant, educator, and practitioner at the intersection of arts, health, and wellbeing. With more than a decade of leadership experience across healthcare and nonprofit arts sectors, she brings a combination of strategic vision and operational expertise to her work advancing arts in health as a discipline.

As Managing Principal of STK Strategies, LLC, she advises clients on strategic planning, program innovation, evaluation, and organizational growth. Her consulting work spans the arts and health sectors, including serving as the researcher and author of the Texas Cultural Trust's State of Arts in Health Report, a statewide effort to synthesize trends, assets, and emerging needs in the field.

Prior to this, Shay spent over a decade at Houston Methodist's Center for Performing Arts Medicine, where she directed the Arts Integration program across eight hospital campuses, overseeing large-scale installations, performance series, and employee enrichment initiatives that generated nearly 100,000 annual encounters with patients, visitors, and staff. She designed mixed-methods evaluation framework linking patient and employee data to outcomes and led financial decision making to grow the center to one of the largest in the country.

Earlier in her career, Shay served as Programs Director at the Arts Council for Long Beach, where she led a National Endowment for the Arts initiative that produced the city's largest public art effort in over a decade, and as Director of External Affairs at California Repertory Company.

Her scholarship has been published in numerous peer-reviewed venues, including the Journal of Applied Arts and Health and Music and Medicine. She holds a dual MBA/MFA from California State University Long Beach and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Notre Dame.

Education

MBA/MFA- California State University Long Beach- 2013
BA, Film, Theatre, & Television - University of Notre Dame- 2010