Creative Capital Foundation Announces New Members of the Board of Directors

September 23, 2026 (New York, NY)—Creative Capital Foundation, the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting artists across America in the creation of new work, is pleased to announce the appointment of four new members to its board of directors: Aliza Nisenbaum, James Schamus, Sarah Duzyk, and Tyler Horan. Creative Capital also honored National Advisory Council Co-Chairs Catharine R. Stimpson and Fred Wilson with emeriti roles.

“Creative Capital is delighted to welcome this distinguished group of arts and business leaders to the board of directors,” said Reginald M. Browne, Board Chair. “We appreciate the expertise and contributions that each will bring to Creative Capital. This moment in time is just as dynamic, if not even more so, as when the organization came into being. In the coming years, we must continue to help people to connect not just with us but with each other—to the benefit of artists everywhere.”

In keeping with Creative Capital’s ethos of including artists in the governance of the organization, Aliza Nisenbaum (2024 Creative Capital Awardee, Visual Arts) is the most recent artist appointed to its Board of Directors. Nisenbaum’s Creative Capital–awarded project and landmark commission for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Reading Circles/Weaving Dreams/Seeding Futures, unveiled in June, is a sweeping 70-foot painted mural, depicting moments of civic life within a public library, and offers a vibrant portrait of a community in action.

“I am thrilled to join Creative Capital’s Board of Directors,” said Aliza Nisenbaum. “Having experienced firsthand the transformative impact of their support as a grantee as I worked for the past two years to complete my mural for the Obama Presidential Center Library, this appointment feels like a profound full-circle moment. I have long admired Creative Capital’s fierce dedication to championing risk-taking artists, and I am honored to help guide and amplify that vital mission from the board.”

New board member James Schamus said, “One thing I love about Creative Capital—it sees support for individual artists as a communal effort; we know that in uplifting unique voices, what we are really doing is helping those voices raise up the multitudes they themselves inspire, engage, nurture, and co-create with.”

Through the Creative Capital Award and State of the Art Prize, Creative Capital supports individual artists across all 50 states and U.S. territories in creating groundbreaking and experimental new work across the visual arts, performing arts (dance, theater, and music/jazz), film, literature, technology, and multidisciplinary and socially engaged practices.

New Board Members

Aliza Nisenbaum received the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Painting and is a New York–based artist born in Mexico City. Nisenbaum makes portrait paintings that are manifestations of exchanges with her subjects over time.

In June, the artist’s site-specific commission for the Obama Presidential Center Library in Chicago opened to the public. Centered on the idea of libraries as places for dreaming and planting the seeds of knowledge, her mural celebrates them as vital gathering spaces.

Nisenbaum’s twelve painted panels move from day to night across three scenes exploring learning and storytelling. Textile motifs inspired by Otomi embroideries from Mexico and Kanga textiles from Kenya flow throughout the composition, weaving together the depicted spaces and communities. At the composition’s center, a diverse reading circle gathers writers as custodians and transmitters of knowledge: Walt Whitman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Juan Felipe Herrera, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Maxine Hong Kingston are all present. Nisenbaum also draws on Chicago’s artistic legacy, incorporating visual citations of works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Roger Brown, and Joseph Yoakum, alongside a pre-Columbian storyteller figure from the Art Institute of Chicago. In the fall of 2024, Nisenbaum’s work was on display at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Curated by Dodie Kazanjian, director and curator of Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, the four paintings on view chronicled Nisenbaum’s yearlong relationship with the “Divas” (singers) of the opera La Traviata, as well as the support staff who are essential to the opera house’s operations. In the spring of 2024, the artist unveiled a mosaic, commissioned by the Queens Museum and LaGuardia Airport, at the airport’s new Terminal C. Nisenbaum’s mural focuses on sixteen Delta and Port Authority employees.

In April 2023, Nisenbaum had her first institutional exhibition at the Queens Museum entitled Queens, Lindo y Querido. Adapted from the popular Vicente Fernández song “México Lindo y Querido”—translated as “Mexico, Beautiful and Beloved”—the exhibition title highlights Nisenbaum’s personal and artistic relationships to the sitters and their environments. In 2021, Nisenbaum’s portraits of salsa music and dance communities in Kansas City were the subject of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s sixth annual Atrium Project. From 2020 to 2021, Nisenbaum’s solo exhibition at the Tate Liverpool featured a series of portraits of health-care workers in the United Kingdom, made during the COVID-19 pandemic, through extensive interviews.

Nisenbaum’s work has been represented across exhibitions and collections at major institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum; ICA Boston; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; the Drawing Center, New York; New Britain Museum of American Art, CT; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has also presented her work at the Whitney Biennial, New York; Biennial of the Americas, Denver; the Gwangju Biennial; and the Rufino Tamayo Painting Biennial, Mexico City.

James Schamus is an award-winning screenwriter (The Ice Storm), producer (Brokeback Mountain), director (Indignation), and former CEO of Focus Features (Dallas Buyers Club, Lost in Translation, Milk, The Pianist). Schamus recently served as consulting producer and writer on the Duffer Brothers’ new series The Boroughs. Works from his New York–based production company, Symbolic Exchange, include Kitty Green’s The Assistant, starring Julia Garner; Andrew Ahn’s Driveways, starring Hong Chau and the late Brian Dennehy; Rhys Ernst’s award-winning trans comedy Adam, starring Margaret Qualley; Minhal Baig’s acclaimed We Grown Now; and Andrew Ahn’s reimagining of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet, starring Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Joan Chen, Kelly Marie Tran, and Youn Yuh-Jung, which Schamus co-wrote and produced, as he did with the original. Schamus is in his fourth decade as Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he teaches film history and theory. He currently serves on the Writers Guild’s AI Task Force.

Sarah Duzyk is the founder of SKD Consulting, a strategic communications practice advising clients across the arts, luxury, and cultural sectors on brand strategy, communications, and high-touch client relations. She most recently served as Head of Communications and Client Relations at Eittem, a Manhattan-based luxury handbag atelier. Previously, she spent eleven years at Gagosian, one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries, where as a director she led strategic communications and cultivated relationships with collectors, artists, and institutions across the gallery’s global network. Duzyk serves on the board of the International Studio & Curatorial Program, and she joins the Creative Capital Board of Directors following her service on its Advisory Council. She holds an MA in History of Art and the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary Art from Christie’s Education and BA degrees in political science and English from Wake Forest University, and is currently pursuing an MS in integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University.

Tyler Horan is a researcher and author who examines how artificial intelligence and platform economies are reshaping work, creativity, and public life. He is the founder of Digion, a consultancy advising organizations on AI strategy and responsible technology, and he teaches data analytics and computational social science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of three forthcoming books with NYU Press, Bloomsbury, and Johns Hopkins University Press that explore technology’s impact on work, human formation, and the future of the university. A computational social scientist by training, he holds a PhD from the New School for Social Research. He also serves in advisory roles with organizations focused on AI accountability and humane technology.

About Creative Capital Foundation

Founded in 1999, Creative Capital Foundation defends and fosters artistic freedom by supporting individual artists creating innovative new work through a national, multidisciplinary, open call grantmaking process, and by building accessible professional development and educational resources designed to help sustain creative careers.

Through the Creative Capital Award and State of the Art Prize, Creative Capital Foundation supports individual artists across all 50 states and U.S. territories who are creating groundbreaking, experimental new work in the visual arts, film, dance, theater, music/jazz, technology, literature, and multidisciplinary and socially engaged forms. The Creative Capital Artist Lab provides artists with online professional development courses and webinars.

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