CEO
Dr. Kidogo A. Kennedy, Ed.D., is an educator, museum administrator, and scholar whose work bridges higher education, cultural institutions, and community-based learning. She currently serves as the Director of Academic Programs and Partnerships at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she leads initiatives that connect undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and emerging scholars to museum practice through fellowships, experiential learning programs, and institutional collaborations. Her work is grounded in a sustained commitmentto expanding access to cultural spaces and reimagining museums as active sites of public scholarship, intellectual exchange, and civic engagement.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Dr. Kennedy's intellectual formation was shaped by an early encounter with African diasporic cultural traditions, particularly Yoruba spiritual and philosophical frameworks. A formative influence in her life was her engagement with Youruba cultural life in Oyotunji Village in south Carolina, a community founded in the late 20th century to preserve and reconstitue Yoruba religious, linguistic, and cultural practices in the United States. Her time in Oyotunji provided an immersive context for understanding African epistemologies outside Western academic structures, offering early exposure to concepts of ancestral memory, communal resposibility, cosmology, and the ethical diminsions of cultural continuity. This grounding would later inform her scholarly orientation toward education as a site of cultural transmission and transformation.
Dr. Kennedy pursued her academic training across California institutions, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Speech, a Master of Arts in Communication Studies from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Doctorate in Educational Leadership/Psychology from the University of Southern California. Her academic trajectory reflects an enduring interest in the intersections of community, identity, pedagogy, and institutional systems. Over the course of more than two decades in higher education, she has served in a range of institutional and administrative roles, including faculty appointments in Pan-African Studies and Communication Studies, where she taught courses on race, ethnicity, gender, globalization, and critical cultural theory. Her teaching has consistently centered students from historically marginalized communities, with an emphasis on cultivating critical consciousness and academic agency.
In addition to her faculty work, Dr. Kennedy has held leadership positions in educational program design and student development. She served as the Director of the Early Entrance Program at California State University, Los Angeles, where she worked with exceptionally gifted younger students entering university-level study at an accelerated pace. In this role, she focused the developmental, ethical, and structural complexities of educating minors within higher education environments, developing frameworks for student support, academic rigor, and institutional accountability. This experiencefurther shaped her understanding of the responsibilities inherent in educational leadership, particularly in contexts where intellectual advancement intersects with adolescent development.
Her administrative and programmatic expertise expanded into broader educational and community-based initiatives, including founding The Kennedy Approach: Education & Communication Consulting, LLC. Through this work, she has supported curriculum development, organizational strategy, and communication design for educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. She has also contributed to early childhood and youth-focused intiiatives, including directing programs that emphasized access, equity, and culturally responsive pedagogy.
In her current role at LACMA, Dr, Kennedy continues to expand the museum's educational and academic partnerships, advancing the integration of scholarly inquiry and curatorial practice. In this role she is particularly focused on how museums function as living archives—spaces where historical memory, contemporary practice, and creativity intersect. Her professional journey reflects a continuous engagement with questions of responsibility, knowledge and institutional transformation. Across all stages of her career, she has sought to align her work with a broader vision of education as a practice of cultural stewardship and social imagination.