// FAMILY OWNED AND OPERATED SINCE THE START
Artists Simply Human has been family owned and operated since 2011. Braham Logan Crane founded ASH and still directs it today, and the name itself is a family one — Crane named the company for his brother Asher, folding that name together with the words that became the acronym: Artists. Simply. Human. Fifteen seasons later, ASH is still independently owned by the family that started it. There is no parent company, no outside investment group, and no corporate board setting the calendar. The people who built this convention are the same people who hire the faculty, answer the phone, and stand at the back of the ballroom on a Sunday afternoon watching the closing show.
Family ownership is not a line in a brochure; it changes how the weekend actually runs. In a family-run company, the person making the decision is the person who has to live with it, so decisions get made quickly and they get made by someone accountable. A studio owner with a problem on Saturday morning is not routed through a service desk — they are talking to the family. When a dancer needs a scholarship, a schedule needs to shift, or a policy needs rethinking, there is no approval chain to climb. That closeness is also why the standards hold. The same family sets the tone in the first city of the season in November and is still setting it in the last city in May, and every faculty member, professional assistant, and staff member hired along the way is chosen by people who will be in the room to see the result.
Fifteen seasons is long enough to watch dancers arrive as ten-year-olds and come back as teachers. That continuity is the thing a family business can offer that a rotating corporate structure cannot: the same values, the same faces, and the same purpose behind every event since 2011 — to give dancers an experience that challenges them as artists and sends them home better than they arrived. Studios that joined ASH in the early seasons are still on the tour today, and the families who trust us with their dancers are trusting a company run by a family that understands exactly what that means.