Announcement

Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School Announces the Selection of Five New Advisory Board Members 

Leaders in the Arts, Filmmaking, Photography, and Education Chosen as Members  

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School (TNS), a champion of the arts as an expression of political moments since its founding in 1992, is pleased to announce the selection of five new members to its Advisory Board. The new members are highly respected and prominent leaders in their respective artistic, educational and/or nonprofit fields, joining an already impressive advisory board that will guide the VLC through these critical times and into the future. 

New Board members include: Linda Earle, Professor of Practice in Arts Management/Art History at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture; Pia Infante, Trustee and Co-Executive Director of The Whitman Institute and an alumna of The New School; Louis Massiah, a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia; Alan Michelson, an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River; and Naeem Mohaiemen, an artist and educator whose work combines essay, film, photography, and installation to research socialist utopias, incomplete decolonization, shifting borders, unreliable memory, and family histories. 

This group is uniquely positioned to provide guidance to the Vera List Center in its embrace of social justice and further its ongoing commitment to equity and inclusion. These appointments coincide with the VLC’s expansion of its fellowship program from two to five fellows, and the new members will be engaged in supporting these artists as they undertake research-intensive and ambitious art projects that encourage social and political change. Read more about the full board here. 

“I am delighted that such a distinguished group will serve on our Advisory Board as the Vera List Center continues its mission to foster a vibrant and diverse community of artists, scholars, and policymakers, who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change,” says Carin Kuoni, the Director of the Vera List Center. “It is particularly gratifying that several of the new board members’ long-standing connections to the VLC as program presenters, curators, or writers now culminates with their guidance on the board. The new members will strengthen the VLC’s core efforts to bring diverse perspectives and compelling conversations to our public programs, exhibitions, and workshops.” 

“I am excited to welcome an outstanding group of new Board members and leaders who will be able to further the Vera List Center’s vital mission, a mission that is now more important than ever,” says James Keith Brown, chair of the VLC Advisory Board. “I look forward to the contributions that they will make and the valuable insight that each brings from their own work as artists, scholars, administrators, filmmakers, curators, and educators.”  

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a scholarly research center and a public forum for art, culture, and politics. It was established at The New School in 1992—a time of rousing debates about freedom of speech, identity politics, and society’s investment in the arts. A pioneer in the field, the Center is a nonprofit that serves a critical mission: to foster a vibrant and diverse community of artists, scholars, and policymakers. Today, debates around freedom of speech, deep political polarization, and identity politics make the VLC’s charge as critical now as it has ever been. 

Full bios of the Vera List Center’s Advisory Board additions are below: 

Linda Earle 

Linda Earle is currently Professor of Practice in Arts Management/Art History at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art + Architecture where her work focuses on cultural equity, aligning managerial practices with mission and ethics, and the expansion of new platforms for cultural practice, participation and discourse.  She has engaged arts and culture as educator, administrator, funder, curator including roles as Director of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Director the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New York Arts Program, and as a Program Director at NYSCA, where the Individual Artists Program was founded under her leadership. Linda has taught at Rutgers University, Hunter College, and Barnard College and has served on numerous grant and commissioning panels.  She currently serves on the boards of Art Matters, Poets House the Jerome Foundation. As a writer, she has held residencies at Hedgebrook and the Writers Room and has collaborated and advised on creative and curatorial projects over the years.

Pia Infante

As Trustee and Co-Executive Director of The Whitman Institute, Pia draws on decades of multi-sector experience as an educator, facilitator, organizational development consultant, executive coach, non-profit manager, business owner, writer, and speaker to advocate for trust-based practice. Pia speaks and teaches on radically embodied leadership and trust-based philanthropy in many settings including Harvard Kennedy School: Center for Public Leadership, Ashoka Future Forum, Net Impact, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, and Skoll World Forum. Pia serves on the board of directors for the Center for Media Justice. She is on Faculty for the M.A. in Leadership Sustainability at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources. She is an I.C.F. certified executive leadership coach, holds a M.A. in Education from the New School for Social Research, and a B.A. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. 

 The Whitman Institute advances social, political, and economic equity by funding dialogue, relationship building, and inclusive leadership. Its multi-issue portfolio reflects this belief with trust-based investments in civic community engagement, leadership development, human rights, movement building, and journalism. The Institute’s model has been to provide multi-year, unrestricted funding while making targeted grants to support emerging opportunities as they arise. This dual approach has enabled it to provide long-term, predictable grants to core partners with enough room to be nimble and responsive.

 Louis Massiah 

Louis Massiah worked on the team that produced The Taking of One Liberty Place (Scribe Video Center, 1987) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the FOUNDER of Scribe Video Center. He is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media has earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996-2001), two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in Four Voices (1996), two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002), have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe, and Africa. In 2011, he was commissioned to create a five-channel permanent video installation for the National Park Service’s President’s House historic site. 

Alan Michelson 

Alan Michelson is an internationally recognized New York-based artist, curator, writer, lecturer,and Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River. For over thirty years, he has been a leading practitioner of a socially engaged, critically aware, site-specific art grounded in local context and informed by the retrieval of repressed histories. His work has been widely shown and recent exhibitions include Wolf Nation, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Volume 0, Zuecca Projects, Venice. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellowship and an NEA Visual Artists Fellowship. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. His diverse practice includes award-winning public art, and Mantle, his large-scale monument honoring Virginia’s Indian nations, was dedicated at the capitol in Richmond in 2018. Michelson is co-founder and co-curator, with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, of the groundbreaking Indigenous New York series.  

Naeem Mohaiemen  

Naeem Mohaiemen (b. London, works in Dhaka and New York) combines essays, films, photography, and installations to research socialist utopias, incomplete decolonization, shifting borders, unreliable memory, and family histories. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); co-editor (w/ Eszter Szakacs) of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit/ Van Abbe/ Salt/ Tricontinental/ Asia Culture Institute, forthcoming); and co-editor (w/ Lorenzo Fusi) of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). His work is in the permanent collection of Kiran Nadar Museum, Delhi; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Art Institute of Chicago; British Museum, London; and Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates. He was a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow and a finalist for the 2018 Turner Prize. Naeem has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University and is currently Research Fellow at Heyman Center, Columbia University, and Senior Research Fellow (non-residential) at Lunder Institute of American Art, Colby College, Maine.