Jaan Whitehead currently chairs the board of the SITI Company, an ensemble theater in New York led by Anne Bogart. She has served on the boards of The Acting Company, Arena Stage, Living Stage, and The Whole Theatre Company, where her particular interests have been board development and institutional change. She has also been a trustee of Theatre Communications Group and the National Cultural Alliance, an arts advocacy group in Washington, and is a founding member of the National Council for the American Theatre. In addition to her work as a trustee, she has been executive director of Theatre for a New Audience in New York and Development Director of CENTERSTAGE in Baltimore.

Ms. Whitehead graduated from Wellesley College, holds and MA in economics from the University of Michigan, and, early in her career, works as an economist for private industry and the Federal Reserve Board. She received her PhD in political theory fro Princeton in 1988. She taught at Georgetown University for several years but, as her involvement in theater deepened, she made the arts her main work while retaining her interests in economic and political theory. Drawing on this background, she has recently been writing a series of essays on the challenges facing the arts in a commercial society.