About

Adam L. McMath

Arts administrator, writer, cultural architect, and multi-hyphenate artist.

I stumbled into this work. A former colleague, starting a new job, asked me to run a team-building exercise for her staff. The assignment I handed them: make a music video for "Rapper's Delight." Strangers in a conference room picked parts, argued over the chorus, taught each other the words, and shot the whole thing in an afternoon. By the end they weren't a department anymore. They had built something together, and you could see it on every face — they felt like they belonged.

That afternoon named something I'd been circling my whole career. Belonging is something people build, usually with their hands and usually together. Creative Belonging grew out of that one finding: shared making is how connection forms.

I lead this kind of facilitation with communities and organizations across the country — nonprofits, companies, schools, rooms full of people who have everything in common except a reason to trust each other yet. The work outgrew one set of hands, so a small group of facilitators now carries the approach into rooms I can't reach myself. Each of them found their way here the way I did: by using art to work through their own struggle with belonging.

Alongside Creative Belonging, I run an arts nonprofit whose work reaches across the country and, increasingly, past its borders.

The Art of Belonging — the book and the 30-day program — is the distilled version of what I've watched happen in those rooms.