Tabor Banquer (MS, Columbia University; BA, Louisiana State University) is a non-profit and fundraising executive with fifteen years of progressive experience securing transformative philanthropic investments for New York City-based arts and culture, healthcare, social services, and higher education organizations.

In January 2022, he joined the VLC’s team as the inaugural Director of Strategy and Advancement, a role he helped create with the intention of amplifying the VLC’s core capacities in the areas of strategic planning, fundraising, communications, marketing, public relations, and partnerships.

In his prior role as a Senior Director of Development at The New School, he oversaw the comprehensive fundraising programs for Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and the VLC. At Lang, he designed and led the successful rollout of the college’s first multi-year campaign, raising $21 million to support students, faculty, and innovation in the curriculum. At the VLC, he has raised more than $6.8 million to enhance and expand the center's work with artists and public programming. He has been responsible for significantly increasing funding from individuals, including the endowment of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, as well as from foundations including The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and many others. Before joining The New School in 2012, he held fundraising positions at the Jewish Guild for the Blind, ICD-International Center for the Disabled, and Met Council, one of New York City’s leading multi-service anti-poverty organizations.

Tabor is a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lives in Brooklyn.

banquert@newschool.edu.

Re'al Christian (MA, Hunter College; BS, New York University) is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center, a newly created role in which she edits and manages the center’s publishing projects, including anthologies, artist books, exhibition booklets, communications, and the digital series Post/doc.

As an independent writer, her work explores issues related to identity, diasporas, and media. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor. She has written texts for catalogues and anthologies including And ever an edge (Studio Museum in Harlem), Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism (Paper Monument), Howardena Pindell: Numbers/Pathways/Grids (Garth Greenan and Dieu Donné), and On the Town: A Performa Compendium 2016–2021 (Gregory R. Miller & Co.), among others. She has presented exhibitions and public programs at Dieu Donné, Miriam Gallery, the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP), the Rubin Foundation, and Smack Mellon. Previously, she was a graduate curatorial fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, where she worked on the exhibitions The Black Index (2020–21) and Life as Activity: David Lamelas (2021), as well as their accompanying publications. Christian has also held appointments at the College Art Association, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Grey Art Gallery at New York University.

She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College and holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

rchristian@newschool.edu.

Carin Kuoni (MA University of Zurich; BA Sorbonne) is a curator, writer, and arts administrator whose work examines how contemporary artistic practices reflect and inform social, political, and cultural conditions. She is the Senior Director and Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at the university. From 1998 to 2003, she was director of exhibitions at Independent Curators International (ICI) and from 1992 to 1997 director of The Swiss Institute.

A founding member of the artists' collective REPOhistory, Kuoni has curated and co-curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions on issues such as contemporary Native American identity and colonial, 19th-century portraiture (Red River Crossings, Swiss Institute); democratic, participatory processes (OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding, Parsons School of Design); artistic and social networks (The Grand Tour, Swiss Institute; #searchunderoccupy, Parsons); new notions of transient and temporary spaces (Thin Skin, ICI traveling exhibition); or agency (The Puppet Show, ICA Philadelphia et al; Post-Speculation, P!, New York). Many are accompanied by exhibition catalogues.

Kuoni is editor and co-editor of several anthologies, among them Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (Four Walls Eight Windows); Words of Wisdom: A Curator's Vademecum (ICI), Considering Forgiveness (Vera List Center), Speculation, Now (VLC/Duke University Press), Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide to Art and Social Justice (Duke University Press/VLC, Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (VLC), and ART. An Index to (see also POLITICS): 25 Years of Vera List Center Fellowships (VLC).

Kuoni is the recipient of a 2014 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship, directed SITAC XII: Arte, justamente in Mexico City in 2015, and is a Travel Companion for the 57th Carnegie International in 2018.

kuonic@newschool.edu.

Eriola Pira is curator at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Most recently, as Director of Programs, Pira led Art in General's international collaborations, residencies, public events, and fellowship programs building on her professional networks and experiences as Program Director and Curator at the artist-founded NARS Foundation, as Program Director for The Foundation for Culture and Society, where she led a network and exchange program between 12 art organizations throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the US. In this capacity, she also organized a number of international exhibitions, publications and symposia, and created a Curatorial Fellowship.

She has presented exhibitions, talks, and collaborated with institutions worldwide including: BRIC (New York), Dokufest (Prizren), ExitArt (New York), Center for Contemporary Art Futura (Prague) Independent Curators International (New York), International Studio and Curatorial Program (New York), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul), Jindřich Chalupecký Society (Prague), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York), New York Foundation for the Arts (New York), Residency Unlimited (New York), Rubin Foundation (New York), Slought Foundation (Philadelphia), Slovak National Gallery (Bratislava), Studio Museum in Harlem (New York), Stacion Center for Contemporary Art (Prishtina), Swimming Pool (Sofia), Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art (Tirana), and many others. Pira was a Curatorial Advisor for the 2019 BRIC South Brooklyn Biennial and has served as editor at Guernica magazine.

A native of Albania, Pira has an MA in Visual Culture Theory from New York University and is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Global Cultural Leadership Fellowship, and a Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship.

pirae@newschool.edu

Adrienne Umeh (AB Princeton University) is the Director of Operations and Budget at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She spent over nine years as the Executive Director of the Arthur Ashe Learning Center, an educational nonprofit that created curricula, exhibits and other programming to promote the life and legacy of Arthur Ashe. She has managed a fundraising project that leverages art portfolios to support educational scholarships, logistics for various traveling exhibitions, taught middle school English in rural Tanzania and has helped publish multiple books and exhibition catalogs.

umeha@newschool.edu

Eliot Lambert is an artist from London currently pursuing an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design. She studied a Liberal Arts BA at the University of Bristol in England and majored in filmmaking and literature. Her experience so far has been grounded in feminist politics; she has interned for PEEQUAL, the UK’s first women’s urinal startup, co-ran an intersectional feminist student magazine, and written her thesis on the intersection between AI and feminism. She wants to design speculatively, and to be a public-facing artist fueled by a social justice agenda. Her other research interests include critical design, postmodernist fiction, late-stage capitalism, and the absurdity of the internet/popular culture.

Jan is the Justice Capital and Public Engagement Fellow supporting art and politics programs with the Vera List Center. She is also a Music and Podcasts Content Strategy Lead at YouTube, where she is responsible for cultural campaigns and operations for a global team. She previously worked at Atlantic Media.

Jan completed her undergraduate studies at UCLA, holding degrees in World Arts & Cultures and Political Science. She is interested in building a softer and more just world. She enjoys carving out calmness, finding balance and engaging with the documentary arts.

She was born in the Virgin Islands, raised in San Francisco and currently lives in New York.

Sabrina brings her background in film exhibition, publishing, and sustainability to her work at the Vera List Center while pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing with a nonfiction focus and minor in Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies. She is currently working on a hybrid book of photography, collage, poetry, and nonfiction engaging with identity, generational trauma, and feminine intuition. She is passionate about exploring the role of and using art to shift social paradigms, specifically related to consumption, biodiversity, mental health, and the way we communicate in relationships.

She was born and raised in Rockland County, New York and currently resides in Manhattan and Beacon, New York.

Yanni Young is a queer Black artist from NYC. Yanni has explored and created art within different mediums from podcasting, singing/songwriting, to presently documentary/archive work and quilting. They are currently a student, and are continuing their documentary work archiving the experiences of people within the African diaspora, through audiovisuals and quilting.

Ariana Kalliga, CCS Bard Summer Fellow, 2024
Camila Palomino, Curatorial Assistant, 2021-2024
Zano Nkosi, Student Assistant, 2023–2024,
Finance Bella De Angelis, Programs Intern, 2023–2024
Melisa Erşan, Graphic Design Student Assistant, 2023–2024
Zaria George, Graduate Student Fellow, 2022–2024
João Eduardo Pecanha De Freitas, Graduate Student Fellow, 2022–2024
Paria Ahmadi, Curatorial Intern, 2022–2023
Anna Hope Emerson, Finance Student Assistant, 2022–2023
Rebecca Rivera, Database Management Student Assistant, 2022–2023
Ash Moniz, Graduate Student Assistant, 2021–2023
Angelica Hom, Evaluation and Reporting Senior Student Assistant Specialist, 2022–2023
Chidinma Adi, Programs Student Assistant, 2022–2023
Aryana Elizabeth Ghazi Hessami, Art and Social Justice Fellow, 2020-2022
Tania Aparicio, Graduate Student Fellow, 2020–2022
Marianne Hughes, Database Management Student Assistant, 2021–2022
Regan Loggans, Borderlands Curatorial Fellow, 2021–2022
Molly Ragan, Graduate Student Assistant, 2021–2022
Nelly Kobanenko, Graduate Student Assistant, 2021
Sofia D’Amico, CCS Bard Summer Curatorial Fellow, 2021
Heran Abate, Curatorial Assistant, 2019–2021
Wen Zhuang, Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives, 2020–2021
Gabriela Ramos, Justice Capital Initiative Student Fellow, John Jay College, 2021
Maryna Arabei, Graduate Student Assistant, 2020–2021
Joshua van Biema, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2020
Kevin Martinez, Student Assistant, 2020
Gabriela Lopez Dena, Curatorial Associate, 2018–2019, and Vera List Center Graduate Student Fellow, Art & Social Justice, 2017–2018
Bernadette Figueroa, Graduate Student Assistant, 2018–2019
Katherine Jackson, Editorial Assistant, 2018–2019
Corby Johnson, Vera List Center Graduate Student Fellow, International Affairs and Media and Culture, 2018–2019
Emily Donnelly, Manager of Programs and Administration, 2014–2019
Sonia Zhang, Graduate Student Assistant, 2017–2018
Lara Fresko Madra, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2019
Diana Cao, Graduate Student Assistant, 2018–2019
Amanda Parmer, Curator, 2015–2018
Zoe Carey, Associate Editor, 2013–2018
Jinglun Zhu, CCS Bard Summer Curatorial Intern, 2018
Pooja Seshadri, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2018
Nailah F. Davis, Student Assistant, 2017–2018
Nina Olivetti, Graduate Student Assistant, 2017–2018
Michael Castrovilla, Graduate Student Fellow, International Affairs, Media and Culture, 2017
Sanna Almajedi, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2017
Bianca Rogers, VLC Graduate Student Fellow, International Affairs, Media and Culture, 2015–2016
Marta Cacciavillani, CCS Bard Summer Curatorial Intern, 2016
Eli Nadeau, Graduate Student Fellow, Art & Social Justice, 2016
Johanna Taylor, Programs Associate, 2012–2016
Sascia Bailer, Graduate Student Fellow, Art & Social Justice, 2014–2015
Kaitlin Chan, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2015
Hannah Rocchi, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2015
Kyle Robert Nelson, Editorial Assistant, Speculation, Now
Chelsea Haines, Curatorial Associate, Biennial Prize Reader, 2012–2015
Alani Bass, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2014
Juliet Tarantino, Fellowship Research Assistant 2012–2014
Elizabeth Larison, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2014
Samantha L. Plesser, Summer Intern, 2014
Naomi Miller, Programs Manager, 2013–2014
Jocelyn Edens, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2013
Miina Hujala, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2013
Annie Shaw, Senior Office Assistant, 2010–2013
Agnes Szanyi, Archivist, 2012–2013
Helena Vilalta, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2011
Sonia Louise Davis, Summer Curatorial Intern, 2011
Alyssa Pheobus, Senior Office Assistant, 2008–2009
Julie Hartshorn-Snavely, Archivist and Special Projects Administrator, 2008-2012