Co-Executive Director

 

Elizabeth Spavento is a curator, arts administrator and artist born and raised in Buffalo, NY. She has over 14 years of hands-on experience overseeing large- and small-scale curatorial programs in a variety of settings. She was named one of eighteen 2023-24 Creative Corps Fellows with the California Arts Council and the 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles, for which she received $110,000 in funding for curatorial projects, the largest individual artist grants to be given out in the state of California. In Portland, Maine, she ran a statewide artist grant program as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s regranting network and a residency program that highlighted the contributions of gender- and racially diverse artists.

From 2021-22, she served as the Executive Director for the Arts Council of Kern, in Bakersfield, CA, the county’s leading arts and culture organization. There, she provided leadership for programs including the Arts in Corrections and Community Grants Programs.

As an artist, Spavento organized multiple exhibitions and published many texts between 2016-25 as Co-Founder and Co-Director of the curatorial collective, Border Patrol, including collaborating with residents of Bakersfield’s Mesa Verde ICE Processing center. She is a recipient of an Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Project Grant and a three-time recipient of an Alliance for California Traditional Arts Living Cultures Grant; and she has been awarded residencies with Iris Project (Los Angeles, CA); ACRE (Steuben, WI); and the Centre for the Study of Substructured Loss (London, England). She has lectured about curatorial practice and artist-centered systems at institutions such as Alfred State University, the Maine College of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and Henry Art Gallery. Spavento also served as a juror and panelist for the Brink Award, Creative Time and Charlotte Street, among others.

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Photography by Ashley Elwell
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