I first met Perry standing in front of the bar at The Mill (R.I.P.). He was memorable for his manner: he pays attention, asks probing questions, looks you in the eye and seems to actually care about what you say. At the time he had a band, The LonelyHearts, and was working on an MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa. The Mill hired him as their music booker.
“I’ve got three homes: D.C., San Francisco and Iowa City,” Perry told me over a call. “D.C. is where I came up. San Francisco, where I moved when I was 21, 22. I lived there five years, but I think the amount of experience and learning that happened there made it one of the most impactful places that I’ve lived. Then I moved here [Iowa City] to come to school, and as you know, I’ve been here for 20 years.”
Perry and friends like Craig Ely created the Iowa City Mission Creek Festival in 2006, an off-shoot of Jeff Ray’s Mission Creek fest in San Francisco. In 2010, Perry was hired to lead the Englert Theatre. He left the role in 2021 to serve as executive director at Hancher Auditorium.
His responsibility, as he sees it, is to ask, “How can we open up doors, give students [and] us as community members an opportunity to engage with or make art?”
“That’s part of what I live for,” he said. “Anything that’s gonna push that along, I’m all in.”
In April, Perry’s team at Hancher will present Stop/Time, billed as a brand-new, two-day, multi-venue, multi-artist festival. Like Mission Creek, programming will extend across the UI campus and Iowa City community, including the Englert, Voxman Concert Hall, the Masonic Lodge, Gabe’s and Riverside Theatre. International artists Branford Marsalis and Tortoise, local musicians such as Miracles of God and Pieta Brown, as well as up-and-coming jazz artists will be featured.
It’s hard not to be impressed by what Perry’s done in two decades in Iowa City. He wasn’t alone in building the artistic institutions he’s directed, but his enthusiasm is especially contagious. LV caught up with Perry about what to expect at Stop/Time, how he courts art patrons at Hancher and who he sees as his audience. (Spoiler: everyone.)
What were the inspirations that informed which artists were booked for Stop/Time?
We’re learning. It’s year one. If you’re to ask me in two months, I’ll probably know more than I know today. It’s just the spirit of innovation, specifically in music, but also in all these other disciplines of the arts. We’re really interested in connections between downtown Iowa City, the campus and the University of Iowa. You’ve got this university that has really invested in creative culture for over 100 years. Those of us who are also in the community, maybe we went there, maybe we didn’t, but we start building our own things downtown and then beyond, out to the farmlands.
We’re honoring all that innovation that’s happened over the years. You think of the teachers and artists who maybe weren’t associated with the university, the students who come through, that’s been a thing that is in our DNA. We want to honor the person who learned to play classical music, or learned to play jazz, whether in the community or the conservatory, then just went in a totally different direction. We’re really interested in those left turns that artists who come out of a different tradition make. How do we celebrate that?
Discovery remains important to me, and to our team. There’s a lot of stuff we know that’s cool that just doesn’t get on as many stages. We live in a community that supports that, but you still have to tend to it. Stop/Time is a pilot program for spreading out in the community a little more.
I think we have such great spaces in this community, in town, official, non-official, on campus, off campus. I think celebrating them and doing stuff in them is part of continuing to push the culture forward. We’re gonna do a thing on the Pentacrest. We’re going to have this poet do what we’re almost calling the Stop/Time Convocation, where we come together to hold a service. This brass band, the Westerlies, is coming out to play this collection of traditional American and shape-note music. Family Folk Machine, half of their choir is going to sing on it. Some of the kids in the School of Music brass are gonna come out and play. It’s a celebration of that space.
We’re only joking when we call it the “Anti-Homecoming Concert.” But instead of being a massively popular band or rap artist or DJ, it’s going to be a ragtag group of writers and poets and singers and brass players. We’re just gonna set up, right in the center of town by the Old Capitol.
The adjustment of going to Hancher, even from the Englert, must have been a step up professionally, but you’re dealing with a completely different set of people, particularly the people that underwrite the shows, contributors. You have to actively court and charm those people a bit.
For me, it’s … I don’t want to say easy, but I just say what’s going on, and try to always be speaking from the heart. There’s no real prep, there’s just, “Here’s what’s important. Thank you for supporting.” Just being straight-up with people. Part of my job is to, at least as I see it, help people figure out how they can meaningfully invest in the community they’re in.
I know not everyone loves that, but for me, it’s part of how we determine the culture and the support and the foundations that we have in this town, in this area. My work at the university is just one little sliver of that. Many other people are doing that all over our community.
So, to your question, was that an adjustment? Sure, in that, some of the folks are new, and you’re getting to know people, trying to understand where people are coming from. But I think I very much understood that that was a big part of the job. I really believe in the project, which is not just Hancher, it’s Performing Arts at Iowa. Larger than that, it’s being committed to the creative culture of the campus and the community that’s around us.
Do you have plans for the future of Hancher that you can talk about, or how you want to see Hancher changing over time? What are your ambitions?
My ambitions are very transparent. How do we continue to build a revelatory arts culture at the University of Iowa that’s going to benefit the students, those who live here, those who work there, those who live in this whole state? How do we keep pushing that forward? How do we bring in support for students? How do we bring in support for the teachers? How do we collaborate with the community? That’s it. The vision and the mission and the drive is to get to everyone.
Upcoming event:
Stop/Time Festival, Friday & Saturday, April 3 & 4, various times and venues
This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2026 issue.
