Eric Cook

Director, So+Co Community

Eric Cook works to close the access gap for emerging artists in Nashville. As co-founder and director of So+Co Community, he funds pre-professional and professional training programs — removing or lowering the cost of serious training so the artists ready for it can pursue it.

Eric and his husband, Jason Somerville, moved to Nashville from Los Angeles in 2017. The city welcomed them the way it welcomes so many newcomers: with inclusion and a community built on purpose. Eric was a lawyer then, most recently a senior in-house counsel at Lyft. He stepped away from that career when he and Jason started the fund they had been talking about for years, in the city that had made room for them.

For Eric, the arts — and especially the performing arts — are a uniting force. They make us more human and build community. A city that grows as fast as Nashville has must work to keep that alive, and So+Co exists to do some of that work.

Eric serves on the boards and executive committees of the Nashville Symphony and the Nashville Ballet, where he also chairs both development committees, and sits on the board of the Arts & Business Council of Greater Nashville. He chairs the board of the Centennial Park Conservancy and is a member of the Leadership Nashville Class of 2026.

That work has given him a multi-faceted view of how the city’s creative ecosystem functions — from flagship institutions to individual artists — and a conviction that the creative community is strongest when its institutions lift each other up.

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