Staff and Consultants
[ follow this link for staff biographies ]

Ruby Lerner, Chief Executive Officer/President
ruby [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Moira Brennan, Multi-Arts Production Fund Program Coordinator
moira [at] mapfund [dot] org

Kelly Cooper, Multi-Arts Production Fund Program Assistant
kelly [at] mapfund [dot] org

Sean Elwood, Director of Grants and Services
sean [at] creative-capital [dot] org
Sean Elwood oversees the administration of Grantee Services, and the Grantmaking process for Creative Capital and the Multi-Arts Production Fund. Contact: Please do not call. You may submit questions regarding Creative Capital’s grantmaking process by email to info@creative-capital.org. You may submit questions regarding the Multi-Arts Production Fund’s grantmaking process by email to mapinfo@mapfund.org

Pradeep Dalal, Program Assistant, Arts Writers Grant Program
pradeep [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Todd Griffin, Outreach and Technical Coordinator
todd [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Kemi Ilesanmi, Associate Director of Grants and Services
kemi [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Kevin McGarry, Communications Officer
kevin [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Eve Moser, Professional Development Program Assistant
eve [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Ethan Nosowsky, Consultant for Innovative Literature
ethan [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Celia O'Donnell, Director of External Affairs
Contact: If you have any questions about or interest in supporting Creative Capital's programs and/or grantees, please call (212) 598-9900 x 229 or email Celia O'Donnell at celia [at] creative-capital [dot] org.

Samantha Parkinson, Individual & Foundation Giving Coordinator
samantha [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Alyson Pou, Associate Director
Contact: For communications concerning the Professional Development Program, please email Alyson Pou at alyson [at] creative-capital [dot] org. Grantmaking and artist services communications should be directed to Director of Grantmaking and Artists Services Sean Elwood.

Blithe Riley, Technical Services Manager
tech [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Juliette Richey, Grants and Services Asisstant
juliette [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Artist Services Information Officer
paul [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Leslie Singer, Administrative Director
leslie [at] creative-capital [dot] org

Margaret Sundell, Director, Arts Writers Grant Program
margaret [at] creative-capital [dot] org

STAFF BIOGRAPHIES

Ruby Lerner, Chief Executive Officer/President
Ruby Lerner is the founding Executive Director and President of the Creative Capital Foundation, an innovative arts foundation modeled on venture capital concepts. Creative Capital was established in 1999 to provide support to individual artists in all disciplines and has funded 242 artists’ projects to date. Prior to Creative Capital, Ms. Lerner served as the Executive Director of the Association of Independent Film and Videomakers (AIVF) and as Publisher of the highly regarded Independent Film and Video Monthly. She has worked regionally in both the performing arts and independent media fields. She served as the Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS, a coalition of Southeastern performing artists, and IMAGE Film/Video Center, both based in Atlanta. In the late 1970's, she was the Audience Development Director at the Manhattan Theatre Club, one of New York's foremost nonprofit theatres.

A native of North Carolina, Ms. Lerner worked in the state's visiting artist program following graduate work in theatre at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her undergraduate degree is in comparative religion from Goucher College where she currently serves on the Committee of Visitors. During nearly 30 years in the arts, she has written and lectured extensively on arts issues, served on many boards, steering committees and grantmaking panels, and has consulted with hundreds of arts organizations on audience development and related areas of arts management. She is currently on the advisory committee for City at Peace and the annual Documentary Festival at the Museum of Radio and Television, on the steering committee for WNET's REEL New York, and was recently elected to the board of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

Ms. Lerner was the keynote speaker at the annual Arttable luncheon in April 2001, and in 2003 she received a Special Citation from Artists Space for her support of individual artists and the Artist Advocate award from the Alliance of New York State Arts Organizations.

Moira Brennan, Multi-Arts Production Fund Program Coordinator
Previous to her work with MAP, Moira Brennan was an editor at Ms. Magazine and Oxygen.com. In addition to her work with MAP, she frequently acts as a consultant on issues surrounding arts and civic engagement, and has written on the topics of art and social justice for American Theater, Ms., Community Arts Network and other publications.

Kelly Cooper, Multi-Arts Production Fund Program Assistant
Prior to her work at MAP, Kelly Cooper taught theater and performance art history at Lake Forest College and worked in administration and film programming for the Art Institute of Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center. Ms. Cooper is also a multi-disciplinary artist and dramaturg, working at spaces such as Chashama and the Ontological-Hysteric and with groups such as WaxFactory and The Builders Association. She has an M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Pradeep Dalal, Program Assistant, Arts Writers Grant Program
Pradeep Dalal is an artist and writer. He exhibited in New York recently at Orchard and has upcoming shows at PS122 Gallery, the New York Public Library, and TART projects in San Francisco. Dalal’s reviews and interviews have been published in ARTWURL, TeachingPhoto.com, Village Voice, and EGO Magazine. He is on the faculty at the International Center of Photography and served as a juror for the 2006 Scholastic National Awards and the CEC Arts Link Awards Program.

Sean Elwood, Director of Grants and Services
Curator & Collections Manager for the Seattle Arts Commission; Director for Special Projects at Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York; and managing the Visual Arts Residency Program for the Centrum Foundation in Washington. He founded SEEDITIONS Art Publishing Company and was co-owner of the Fuller/Elwood Gallery in Seattle. Currently, Sean is Vice President of the board of the Lower East Side Printshop, and serves as an advisory board member for The Literary Ventures Fund, Distributed Art Publishing Inc. (DAP), and The Precipice Foundation. He received a Max Beckmann Scholarship for Painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and holds a M.A. in Visual Arts from Hunter College. He is an occasional curator, publisher, writer, and a Sunday painter.

Krista Fabian DeCastro, Professional Development Program Workshop Manager
Before joining Creative Capital in 2007, Krista Fabian DeCastro served as program director of Robert Wilson's Watermill Center in New York, manager of the international programming department at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, and manager of Africa Exchange, a program of Brooklyn-based 651 ARTS which supported collaborative exchanges between performing artists in the United States and Africa. She has guest lectured at Duke University, Brooklyn College, and the Marché des Arts du Spectacle Africain and is the co-author of African Artists in the United States: A Handbook for Presenting and Exchange. She holds a BA from The New School and a MA in Arts Administration from Columbia University.

Todd Griffin, Outreach and Technical Coordinator
Todd Griffin is a songwriter/musician working in Brooklyn, New York. He has released two CDs on the Shiny Little Records label, has composed music for films and theater, including two full-length commissions for HERE in NYC, and collaborated with Pete Sillen, Jem Cohen and Michael Ackerman. Mr. Griffin has also worked as an actor, appearing on stages from PS 122 to the Guthrie and in independent movies, which apparently still surface very late at night on Showtime.

Kemi Ilesanmi, Associate Director of Grants and Services
Prior to joining Creative Capital in 2004, Kemi Ilesanmi was a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where she organized several exhibitions including To/From: Rivane Neuenschwander and The Squared Circle: Boxing in Contemporary Art, which was named the top contemporary art exhibition of 2003 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She also ran the Walker’s visual arts residency program, working with artists such as Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, Julie Mehretu, and Christian Marclay. She is on the board of The Laundromat Project, a social change and arts center soon to open in Brooklyn. She holds a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College.

Kevin McGarry, Communications Officer
Kevin McGarry was born in New Hampshire and educated at New York University. He is a co-director of the New York Underground Film Festival and has previously worked as the editor of Rhizome.org, a new media art organization affiliated with The New Museum of Contemporary Art. In the private sector, he has worked in diversity marketing. Each summer he teaches video production at the Mindflight Summer Enrichment Program at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.

Eve Moser, Professional Development Program Assistant
Eve Mosher is a visual artist combining drawing, sculpture, text and sound. She has shown work in museums, universities and alternative venues in the US, UK,Brazil and Australia. Currently living in Brooklyn, she draws from her life and environment to create her work.

Eve comes to Creative Capital with many years professional experience in events management and marketing and has dedicated her time to promoting art and artists through writing, curating and working with such organizations as Headlands Center for the Arts, International Museum of Women and ArtSpan, San Francisco.

Ethan Nosowsky, Consultant for Innovative Literature
Ethan Nosowsky is editor-at-large at Graywolf Press and was previously an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  Born and raised in San Francisco, he was educated at Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley.  Authors he has edited have received Lannan Foundation, NEA, Guggenheim, and Whiting awards, and have been winners or finalists for Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, Los Angeles Times, and PEN awards. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Threepenny Review, and Bookforum and he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University.

Celia O'Donnell, Director of Organizational Resources and State-Based Programming
Prior to joining Creative Capital, Celia O'Donnell was the executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, a national service organization for independent publishers. She is also a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization, which facilitates and promotes the writing, publishing and reading of literature in electronic media. Ms. O’Donnell holds a master's degree in English literature from the University of Massachusetts and has done coursework in arts policy at Ohio State University.

Samantha Parkinson, Individual & Foundation Giving Coordinator
Samantha Parkinson earned a M.A. in Museum Studies from New York University. Prior to moving to New York, she worked as the Membership Coordinator at the Tallahassee Museum of History and Natural Science in Florida. She earned a B.A. from Florida State University in the history and criticism of art, with a concentration in American Art and Museum Studies.

Alyson Pou, Associate Director
Alyson Pou has been making installation and performance work for over twenty years. With a background in visual art, dance, and writing, her work successfully combines movement, text, and objects. She has performed, exhibited and lectured at numerous museums, galleries, art centers and colleges around the country. Ms. Pou's performance work has been presented in New York by Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church, Performance Space 122, Franklin Furnace, The New Museum, Artists Space, Threadwaxing Space, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Creative Time, Dixon Place, HERE, and The Downtown Performance Festival. She is the recipient of the New York Dance and Performance Award (aka The Bessie Award) in the category of Choreographer/Creator for “To Us at Twilight….” Pou has taught classes on the history of performance art and has lead hands-on workshops and classes for multi-media performance production at NYU, Cooper Union, the New School for Social Research, NYC, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. and Smith College, North Hampton, Mass. She was the Director of Programming and Public Relations at Creative Time Inc. in NYC from 1985 to 1997. She has lectured extensively on the topic of temporary public art and the innovative projects that Creative Time has presented. She has extensive experience as a grantmaking panelist and as a developer of services for artists. An interview with her about fundraising for individual artists was recently published in Margaret Lazzari’s The Practical Handbook for the Emerging Artist and appears in the Creative Capital Artist Toolbox.

Blithe Riley, Technical Services Manager
Blithe Riley is an artist working with video, performance and installation. Her work has screened nationally and internationally at venues such as Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and The Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA, as well as The European Media Arts Festival, in Osnabrueck, Germany. Riley received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2005. In addition to her own work, she has organized and programmed video screenings since 1998 including the formation of Press Play Video Series in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 1999 she has worked as the editor and videographer for the Video Data Bank’s On Art and Artists series, a set of historical video interviews with artists from the mid '70s to present.

Juliette Richey, Grants and Services Asisstant
Juliette Richey is a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker living in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from the Pratt Institute, receiving a BFA in writing for performance, publication and media. Fresh out of college she started her own production company, Demonstrous Pictures. Before joining Creative Capital, she worked at the Tribeca Film Festival and on a feature length documentary film, A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory where she assisted Director, Esther Robinson.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Artist Services Information Officer
Paul Sepuya is a visual artist working primarily in photography and drawing. He has participated in several group shows in New York, and his work has been published in Nerve, AE Magazine, and Vaccine Magazine. Mr. Sepuya is the founder and mediator of Guild the Lily, a critique and project-based artist group in Brooklyn. He organized the group’s inaugural show in the summer of 2004. He is a recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and before joining Creative Capital worked with Blue Medium, Inc. and Simon Watson/ SCENIC, and as an artist assistant.

Leslie Singer, Administrative Director
Leslie Singer is a film and video artist. She began her career in San Francisco's underground performance and Super 8 art scene; a selection of her early work was featured in Big As Life at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). She edited and co-produced Laura Cottingham's video essay, Not For Sale: Feminism and Art in the USA During the ‘70s, which premiered at MOMA in 1998; and her most recent collaboration with Cottingham, The Anita Pallenberg Story, premiered in the Great Hall at Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her video works, Hot Rox (1988) and Taking Back the Dolls (1994), have been exhibited widely in museums and festivals in the U.S. and Europe. She has also worked in arts administration since 1994.

Margaret Sundell, Director, Arts Writers Grant Program
Margaret Sundell is a critic, editor and art historian based in New York City. A former art editor of "Time Out New York" and a founding editor of "Documents" Magazine, she has written extensively for these publications, as well as for "Artforum," to which she has been a regular contributor since 1999. Ms. Sundell has taught art history and critical theory at Columbia University, the Whitney Museum of American Art and, most recently, Parsons the New School of Design, where she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Criticism.