(New York, NY – July 8, 2021) — Creative Capital is pleased to announce the appointment of Aliza Shvarts as its next Director of Artist Initiatives. The appointment comes after an extensive national search. In her new role, Shvarts will lead the annual Creative Capital Awards cycles, oversee the development of educational programs and artist services, and advocate for the arts and arts funding. She will formally join Creative Capital on July 12, 2021.

“Aliza is a radical thinker, a risk-taking artist, an accomplished queer feminist scholar, and a powerful, genuine voice articulating how artists can shape culture for the future,” said Creative Capital President and Executive Director Christine Kuan. “Her deep experience in performance, visual arts, writing, and multidisciplinary practices will be vital to how we continue to expand upon our transformative grant-making approach to support the creation of groundbreaking artists’ works.”

“I am thrilled to be joining an organization that has led the way in always putting artists first,” said Shvarts. “Creative Capital has an exceptional record of not only providing direct financial support to artists, but also access to the critical discourses and professional practices that form our field. Now more than ever, it is of vital importance that we continue to develop new models to support artists: models that prepare artists not only to navigate the professional art world, but to lead it.”

An artist, writer, and scholar, Shvarts’ art and writing takes a queer and feminist approach to reproductive labor and language. Her recent work focuses on testimony and circulations of speech in the digital age. In addition to her own artistic practice and scholarship, Shvarts has worked extensively in artist education, professional development, and cultural philanthropy. She cofounded the Arts Research Collective (ARC), an incubator for experimental and socially engaged arts education; developed queer theory curriculum as Faculty for the Leslie-Lohman Museum Queer Artist Fellowship; and has served on grantmaking panels for the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation.

Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Tate Modern in London; Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA in Prague; Athens Biennale in Greece; the LOOP International Film Festival in Barcelona; Art in General, SculptureCenter, A.I.R, Participant Inc, Abrons Art Center, Lévy Gorvy, and Matthew Gallery in New York; LACE in Los Angeles; and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, and her writing has been published in Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art: Practice, The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader; The Journal of Feminist Scholarship, TDR/The Drama Review; Women & Performance, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Shvarts was a recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2014, The Paulette Goddard Scholarship for Excellence in 2014, the Franco Coli Dissertation Award in 2017, and the Young Scholar Award from the International Association for Aesthetics in 2019. She was a Recess Critical Writing Fellow in 2017, a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum from 2015-19, an A.I.R. Artist Fellow in 2019-20, and a National Arts Club Artist Fellow in 2020. She has taught at New York University, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, Barnard College, and was most recently MA Faculty in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art-New York.

She is a graduate of Yale University, was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Her dissertation, The Doom Performative: Aesthetics in the Space of Interdiction, was awarded the Monroe Lippman Memorial Award for Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation.

About Creative Capital
Founded in 1999, Creative Capital is a nonprofit organization that has awarded more than $50 million to groundbreaking artists in the performing arts, visual arts, literature, film, and multidisciplinary arts. Creative Capital also provides professional development workshops, educational programs, and public programs which have served more than 30,000 artists nationwide. Creative Capital seeks to amplify the voices of artists working in all creative disciplines and catalyze connections to help them realize their visions and build sustainable practices.

Creative Capital has provided funding to 783 artists and 631 projects. Creative Capital Awardees impact global arts and culture and have gone on to receive additional prestigious honors, including: 127 Guggenheim Fellowships, 17 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships, 3 Academy Awards and 13 nominations, 1 Booker Prize, and countless other accolades.

Creative Capital receives major support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Surdna Foundation, Lambent Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Scherman Foundation, William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham, Margaret Silva, Paige West, and over 100 other institutional and individual donors.

Press Contacts
Ed Winstead
Director, Cultural Counsel
[email protected]

Michael Gibbons
Director of Marketing & Communications, Creative Capital
[email protected]