Brian Boyles

Brian Boyles is Executive Director of Mass Humanities, a foundation that creates opportunities for the people of Massachusetts to transform their lives and build a more equitable commonwealth through the humanities.  

 Boyles joined Mass Humanities in 2018. He previously served as Vice President of Content at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, where he directed programming at the Louisiana Humanities Center in New Orleans, including oral histories of brass bands, politicians and piano players navigating the city’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Boyles was publisher of LEH’s award-winning quarterly magazine, 64 Parishes and Executive Publisher for New Orleans & the World: 1718-2018 Tricentennial Anthology, a landmark book published by LEH in partnership with the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, and the 2018 NOLA Foundation. Boyles was named to Gambit’s 40-under-40 list in 2011, and his first book, New Orleans Boom & Blackout, was selected as the citywide read in 2015.  

 Under his leadership, Mass Humanities has grown its impact as a grant maker focused on supporting grassroots organizations, delivering more than $9 million in direct funding to nonprofits across Massachusetts. In 2021, Mass Humanities launched the Expand Mass. Stories initiative to support new narratives about the Commonwealth, funding projects to date that explore the lives and experiences of communities previously underrepresented in public histories of Massachusetts. In 2022, the organization began a partnership with the Smithsonian Institution to bring traveling exhibits to small towns in Massachusetts. Since 2020, Mass Humanities has tripled the number of communities that read Frederick Douglass’s speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, with more than 70 hosted events in 205. In 2020, Boyles launched a new publishing initiative for the Clemente Course in the Humanities, a groundbreaking adult education program supported by Mass Humanities in Holyoke, New Bedford, Worcester, Springfield, Dorchester, and Brockton; a third anthology of student writing was published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2024.  

 Boyles co-chaired the Special Commission on the Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth, currently serves on the state’s Special Commission on the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution, and is co-chair of Everyone 250, an initiative of Embrace Boston to produce a citywide, curated cultural experience in Boston in 2026. He previously served on the boards of the Tennessee Williams Festival, New Orleans Video Access Center, and Cripple Creek Theater Company. A native of Pittsburgh and a graduate of Tulane University, he lives in Leverett with his family.  

 bboyles@masshumanities.org
413-584-8440, ext. 100