William Jeffries was appointed Executive Director of the National Museum of African American Music (NMAAM) in 2025, after serving as Chief Operating Officer (COO) since August 2023 and Vice President of Development beginning in 2022.

In his development role, he secured a $2.5 million Lilly Endowment grant to fabricate a traveling exhibit to educate the world on the historically and culturally significant Jubilee Singers of Fisk University. As part of this grant request, he designed an innovative way to travel the exhibit to consortium host sites of HBCUs, Black churches, and museums in metropolitan areas across the southeast, supported by an extensive digital toolkit.

Over his 20+- year career in the cultural nonprofit world he has held positions at the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra; Clay Center for the Arts & Sciences of West Virginia; State University of New York, Purchase College; and Stepping Stones Museum for Children in Connecticut. The Association of Children’s Museums published an article he authored on his unique fundraising, innovation, and scaling model in 2015.

He also served as the project director for two year-long international cultural exchange projects, one in Brazil and the other in Romania, funded by the American Alliance of Museums and the United States Department of State. While with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, he created an education master plan recognized by the American Symphony Orchestra League and launched a cutting-edge multi-media music education program that expanded the orchestra’s reach to a three-state region to ultimately serve over 40,000 students and students annually.

He launched or supported a number of large scale collective and social impact projects including the incubation and scaling of an early learning initiative; a foodshed initiative to educate families about the food that they consume; an initiative involving Spanish speaking community advisors in converting museum text panels, programming, and other messaging to be bi-lingual; and a statewide initiative bringing northern and southern West Virginia students into a year-long collaborative project together to explore how extractive industries impact their communities.

A veteran of the United States Air Force, he completed a master’s degree in Community Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park and more recently a rigorous 8-month Executive Certification Program at the University of Pennsylvania on Social Impact Investments.