Ahava Silkey-Jones Bio

Ahava Silkey-Jones is a national leader in the arts, education, and civic sectors. She is a former K-12 Principal and Executive Director and currently serves as the Vice Provost for the School of Creative Arts, Entertainment and Design at Dallas College.  She is passionate about supporting programs and organizations that are working to connect, build pathways, and inspire through the arts.  At Dallas College, she provides strategic leadership for the arts, manages 12 galleries and 7 performance halls, supports 300 faculty and staff and over 22,000 students across seven campuses.

A dedicated champion for arts education, she serves as Board President of the Professional Theatre and Dance Youth Academy, an organization she co-founded in 2011 to provide arts programming for youth in Chicago Public Schools, and she served two-terms as a Commissioner for the Minneapolis Arts Commission. She was named a 2025 Top Woman Leader by Women We Admire, is a proud alum of DCEO’s Emerging Women’s Leadership Network, ENGAGE Dallas and the Business Council for the Arts Leadership Arts Institute. She was a 2023 Global Leadership Alliance Fellow, a 2021 Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellow, and a 2019 New Leaders Council Fellow. Her academic journey includes earning an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from Harvard Graduate School of Education, a M.A. in Educational Leadership from Roosevelt University, and a B.A. from DePaul University, as well as a school principal and superintendent license. 

At the heart of her work is a passion for supporting students, fostering community and business partnerships, and championing the arts as a tool for transformation. She has a passion for bridging gaps and nurturing pathways for students to build meaningful career pathways through the arts and she is fiercely committed to working on system-level initiatives to ensure equity in access to the arts for all.