NPN Welcomes New Board Members and More
July 1, 2023 • 2 minute read
New NPN Board Chair: Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Artistic Director at Brooklyn Arts Exchange
NPN is excited to welcome seven new members to our Board of Directors as of July 2023, along with a new slate of Board Officers. We also bid farewell, with enormous gratitude, to four board members who completed their terms.
As a constituent board, NPN seeks trustees who wish to collaborate with and challenge each other toward a more liberatory future and who represent the diverse demographics, aesthetics, backgrounds, geographies, and skill sets essential to a healthy and informed national organization based in the South.
“This incoming class of trustees is an incredible group of artists, presenters, and colleagues, some who have been part of NPN’s network for years and others who are newer to our work,” says NPN President & CEO Caitlin Strokosch. “I am excited to learn alongside them and see how their perspectives shape our work at NPN in the years to come.”
New trustees include:
- Renee Benson, Artist (New Orleans)
- Rosie Gordon-Wallace, Founder, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (Miami)
- Anne Ishii, Executive Director, Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia)
- Meena Natarajan, Executive and Literary Director, Pangea World Theater (Minneapolis)
- Mary Prescott, Artist (Minneapolis & New York City)
- Juan Silverio, Assistant Director of Programming, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions/LACE (Los Angeles)
- Haowen Wang, Director of Regranting, DanceUSA (Baltimore)
Along with the new trustees, NPN’s board elected all-new officers: Chair, Marlène Ramírez-Cancio, Artistic Director at Brooklyn Arts Exchange; Vice-Chair, Edgar Miramontes, Executive and Artistic Director of Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA; Secretary, Salome Asega, artist and Director of NEW INC at New Museum; and Treasurer, Louise Martorano, Executive Director of RedLine Contemporary Arts Center.
“In my three years on the board, I’ve seen this network take such extraordinary leaps forward,” says incoming Board Chair Marlène Ramírez-Cancio. “I am thrilled to deepen my work with NPN in this new role, to continue the work of building artists’ power, and to do it all with a spirit of reciprocity, relationship-building, and joy.”
NPN also offers a huge thank-you to the departing board members, three of whom have served as officers: Rachel Cook, producer/curator; Joan Osato, YouthSpeaks, who has led the board as Chair for the last two years; Stephanie McKee-Anderson, Junebug Productions, Vice-Chair; and Harold Steward, The Theater Offensive (now at New England Foundation for the Arts), Treasurer. “Joan, Stephanie, and Harold joined the board at the same time I came on as CEO,” writes Strokosch. “In our first year of working together, they helped NPN move from financial crisis to stability, undertake organizational restructuring, and develop a new mission and vision. Just as they were stepping into board leadership roles, we were faced with the pandemic and its impact on our field. It has been a wild and bumpy seven years, and I can’t overstate how crucial their wisdom, collaboration, commiseration, kicks in the pants, and conviction have been to guiding NPN and my leadership during this time. These three rockstars will be sorely missed, but I know their imprint stays with us.”