Cleveland resident Matty Bengloff named BPAC executive director
Matty Bengloff takes over BPAC with a mandate that reaches beyond the stage, from school partnerships to downtown activity in Cleveland.
Delta State University named Cleveland resident Matty Bengloff executive director of the Bologna Performing Arts Center, putting a longtime local leader in charge of one of the city’s most visible cultural institutions.
Bengloff will oversee the center’s operations, programming and community partnerships, responsibilities that affect far more than the Delta State University campus. BPAC serves school groups, campus partners, touring acts, nonprofit events and families across Cleveland and Bolivar County, so leadership choices there often ripple through the city’s arts calendar and the traffic around downtown.
The center itself has long been built for that kind of reach. Funded by the Mississippi Legislature in 1994 and opened on Sept. 1, 1995, BPAC spans about 41,500 to 43,000 square feet and includes a state-of-the-art theater, a 145-seat recital hall, an 85-foot flyway and an orchestra pit with a lift. The main performance space is listed as the 1,132-seat Delta & Pine Land Theatre in one source and as seating just under 1,200 patrons in another. That scale makes the executive director’s job operational as well as artistic, from scheduling to school matinees to the logistics that keep the building running.
The appointment also marks another leadership change at BPAC in less than two years. Delta State named Lauren Powell executive director on March 28, 2024, and university cabinet minutes from March 23, 2026, note that BPAC had a new executive director, Mr. Matty Bengloff. BPAC’s staff page now lists Bengloff as executive director alongside Elizabeth Branton, Cade Holder, Loyd McDowell and James Griffing.
Bengloff’s background points to a leader comfortable moving between business, education and civic life. He and Suzette Matthews opened Delta Dairy Ice Cream & Frozen Yogurt downtown in 2013, and he has been active with the Cleveland-Bolivar County Chamber Executive Board, Team Cleveland, Aspire Mississippi and the Delta Arts Alliance. Earlier, he worked with Teach For America in Mississippi and Arkansas and served as a project director for a Race to the Top grant in Clarksdale.
What happens next will be measured in practical terms: whether BPAC deepens its ties to schools, broadens the audiences it draws into the theater and keeps the downtown corridor active before and after performances. For Cleveland, the hire is more than a staffing update. It is a bet on how one of the city’s signature venues can keep serving the community as both an arts destination and a daily public asset.
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