“I came into ballet kind of by accident,” Darin Conley-Buchsieb tells Limelight between sessions at the Communicating the Arts conference in Sydney, where he recently delivered a presentation titled “Silently Loud – How Our Inaction Is Keeping Us from Meaningful Change in Arts Culture.”

Darin Conley-Buchsieb

Before moving into the arts world, Conley-Buchsieb – who worked for many years on behalf of prisoners sentenced, as juveniles, to life without the possibility of parole – was HR Director at the San Francisco Unified School District. “My window looked outside right into the ballet offices, into the dancer level. So I’d see all the dancers perform, like my own free private show every day. So when I would get annoyed at the bureaucracy of government, I turn around and I look at the ballet dancers and just get happy and centred.”

It wasn’t long before Conley-Buchsieb was himself working for the San Francisco Ballet, as the organisation’s Human Resources Director and Head of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. “If I got paid for every letter that was in that title, I’d be very well off,” he laughs. “One of the reasons I decided to take the...