Sage Crump and Caitlin Strokosch Named Co‑Executive Directors of NPN

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NPN Co-Executive Directors Caitlin Strokosch and Sage Crump stand together outside. The concrete wall behind them is teal and has a mural painted on it, only part of which is visible.
NPN Co-Executive Directors Caitlin Strokosch (left) and Sage Crump (right). Photo by Daniel Pruksarnukul.

National Performance Network Names Sage Crump and Caitlin Strokosch Co‑Executive Directors, Putting Its Commitment to Shared Power Into Practice

New co-leadership model builds on NPN’s 40-year history of advancing collective action, cultural power, and systems change

NEW ORLEANS, LA (September 28, 2026) — New co-leadership model builds on NPN’s 40-year history of advancing collective action, cultural power, and systems change

For 40 years, the National Performance Network (NPN) (https://npnweb.org) has worked from a fundamental belief: artists and cultural organizations are stronger when knowledge, resources, and power are shared. Now, at a moment of profound change for the cultural sector, NPN is bringing that principle to the structure of the organization itself.

NPN today announced that Sage Crump (https://npnweb.org/contact/sage-crump/) and Caitlin Strokosch (https://npnweb.org/contact/caitlin-strokosch/) will lead the organization as Co-Executive Directors, marking a new chapter for the national arts and social justice organization. The co-leadership model recognizes the complexity of the moment facing artists and cultural organizations and reflects NPN’s longstanding commitment to collective responsibility and cultural power.

“NPN is guided by a deep trust in artists’ ability to imagine differently, hold complexity, and show us new ways of working together,” said Salome Asega, NPN Board Co-Chair. “This new co-leadership model is deeply aligned with that ethos. NPN has always understood that knowledge, resources, and leadership are strengthened when they are distributed rather than concentrated in one place. With Sage Crump and Caitlin Strokosch as co-leaders, NPN is making that belief structural.”

Crump steps into the Co-Executive Director role after 12 years of leadership at NPN, where she has shaped the organization’s programs and launched its Department of Racial Justice and Movement Building (https://npnweb.org/drjam/). An artist, cultural strategist, and movement facilitator with 30 years of experience at the intersection of art, culture, and justice, Crump brings deep relationships across the arts and social justice sectors to the role.

Strokosch has served as NPN’s President & CEO since 2016, stewarding the organization through a tumultuous decade. During this tenure, NPN explicitly committed to racial and economic justice and embedded those values into the organization’s mission.

“National Performance Network understands that advancing racial justice requires institutions to examine not only what they do, but how they lead,” said Regina R. Smith, managing director of the Arts & Culture Program at The Kresge Foundation. “By establishing a co-leadership model, NPN is practicing the very principles of shared power and collective responsibility that it champions across the field. Sage’s visionary leadership in cultural movement building, paired with Caitlin’s trusted stewardship, models the kind of structural change needed to ensure artists and culture bearers are at the heart of building just and equitable communities.”

Crump’s appointment alongside Strokosch reflects an evolution already underway within NPN: toward an organization that understands cultural work not simply as the support of individual artists, but as part of a broader project of building collective power.

NPN Co-Executive Directors Sage Crump and Caitlin Strokosch stand together outside under a blue sky with large white clouds. They are both laughing at something on Caitlin's phone. Extending into the distance behind them is the wall of a long building, with sections painted in murals of predominantly purple, teal, or yellow.
NPN Co-Executive Directors Sage Crump (left) and Caitlin Strokosch (right). Photo by Daniel Pruksarnukul.

Stephanie Guilloud, Senior Strategist and former Co-Director of Project South, saw that approach firsthand while working with Crump and a team of artists on a three-day Cultural Movement Assembly at NPN’s national convening.

“What I witnessed was a rigorous and beloved leader moving in her element to conjure the convening towards clarity, strategy, and power,” Guilloud said. “My confidence is firm that their combined strengths will steward a national network to its highest potential, in a time when we need artists and cultural practitioners to create, to disrupt, and to lead. Our social movements are grateful that Sage is in this leadership position, and Project South looks forward to supporting and working with NPN in this new era.”

The shift also builds upon a much longer history of experimentation within NPN. For decades, the organization has operated as a network rather than a traditional centralized arts institution, connecting artists, presenters, funders, and cultural workers across geography and discipline and creating structures through which resources and wisdom can circulate.

“National Performance Network has been a steady drum of knowledge for decades,” said Anne Ishii, NPN Board Co-Chair. “It has shown me and so many other leaders how knowledge is capital that must be shared—inherently, explicitly, and with generosity.”

For Ishii, the significance of the announcement lies not simply in adopting a co-leadership model, but in making visible a way of working that has long characterized NPN. “The model of shared executive leadership is far from novel, but publicly announcing NPN’s co-leadership, and naming the magnitude of Sage Crump’s visionary leadership, joining Caitlin Strokosch on the director’s dais, is a mighty reflection of all of the cooperative and coterminous power sharing they have always embodied in the field.”

At a time when artists and cultural organizations are navigating shrinking resources, political pressure, and profound uncertainty about the future of the sector, NPN sees an opportunity to move boldly rather than retreat. Its co-leadership model is designed to create greater capacity for responsiveness while grounding decision-making in multiple perspectives, relationships, and areas of expertise.

Together with NPN’s national network and a committed, experienced staff, Crump and Strokosch will deepen the organization’s work at the intersection of art, justice, and movement building; continue supporting artists whose practices challenge dominant systems and imagine alternatives; and strengthen alliances with cultural and social justice organizations working toward a more just world.

About the National Performance Network (NPN)

NPN works at the intersection of arts and social justice to cultivate the relational, ideological, and material conditions for coordinated cultural power. For 40 years, the National Performance Network has operated as a national funding and field-building intermediary in the arts, with a national coalition of 60 arts presenters and grantmaking programs that support nearly 1,000 artists a year with the resources needed to develop and present new, risk-taking work.

NPN contributes to a more just and equitable world by building artists’ power; advancing racial and cultural justice in the arts; fostering relationship-building and reciprocity between individuals, institutions, and communities; and working toward systems change in arts and philanthropy. NPN stewards communities within the arts ecosystem toward collective action throughout the sector and alongside others working for a just world.

Contact: For further inquiries, please contact

Biographies, photos, and professional headshots for Sage Crump and Caitlin Strokosch are available for download at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eDWoAV3YxBFQwtpwRHqZTXJB3ZWNN68a?usp=sharing