Kevin Corcoran

Kevin Corcoran leads communication strategy and outreach for Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation in Indianapolis committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. In this role, he oversees a communications strategy rooted in audience, narrative, and storytelling research. He also created a grant portfolio that supports public and nonprofit newsrooms and training organizations, including PBS NewsHour, Washington Monthly, and GBH in Boston.

Before assuming this communications role in 2016, Corcoran directed Lumina’s multi-state effort to rethink higher education business and finance models and draft related public policy principles rooted in nonpartisan research and analysis. His higher education fieldwork also focused on improving higher education productivity, using degree frameworks to accelerate progress on competency-based learning, supporting state authorization of online degree programs, and spreading and enhancing outcomes-based funding models.

Before joining Lumina in 2007, Corcoran worked as a newspaper reporter for nearly 20 years, ending his career as an investigative reporter for The Indianapolis Star. He received local, state, and national awards, including the George Polk Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel. In addition, groups such as Human Rights Watch and the National Mental Health Association, now known as Mental Health America, cited his work.

Corcoran earned a bachelor of arts in journalism and a master of business administration in corporate finance from Indiana University.