Deborah Cullen-Morales Appointed New Program Officer at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
New York, NY, April 28, 2020 - The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the appointment of Deborah Cullen-Morales as the Foundation’s new program officer for Arts and Cultural Heritage. Cullen-Morales will join the Foundation on May 1.
As a program officer, Cullen-Morales will help shape and direct work in the visual arts across a range of grants and research initiatives supporting art museums, cultural heritage preservation, and conservation.
“Having led multiple arts institutions, including museums, university galleries, and artist-run spaces, Deborah brings to the position field-wide perspective, deep appreciation of the central role of artists in shaping arts organizations, and a vast network of relationships with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural leaders,” said Elizabeth Alexander, president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “We are thrilled to welcome Deborah and look forward to working with her.”
“As a renowned curator and widely published scholar of Latinx, Caribbean, and African American contemporary art, Deborah has deep and relevant experience that will help grow and support the Foundation’s programmatic initiatives, particularly as we partner with arts organizations and artists that are increasingly pursuing work centered around questions of equity, representation, and social conscience,” added Emil Kang, program director for Arts and Cultural Heritage at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Most recently, Cullen-Morales was a research scholar at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA. Previously, she served as Executive Director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts, where she helped secure the final $3.9 million in capital funding needed for an upcoming renovation project; oversaw the most successful benefit gala in the museum’s history, raising more than $1 million in support of its free programming; and supervised the opening of a new Tribeca incubator expanding the museum’s professional training program for artists.
Prior to her appointment at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, she served as director and chief curator of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University where she oversaw the venue’s expansion into the Lenfest Center of the Arts on Columbia’s new campus in West Harlem; founded Uptown, a new triennial of contemporary art launched in 2017 in collaboration with 12 other upper Manhattan institutions that spearheaded efforts to increase engagement with the surrounding community; and, over four years, created the capacity for the Wallach to organize Denise Murrell’s groundbreaking exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (2018)...