Emerging Curator Program
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Program Overview

VisArts’ Emerging Curator Program offers a unique opportunity for an Emerging Curator to work with an experienced Mentoring Curator to develop and present an exhibition and assist in the presentation of the mentor’s exhibition.

VisArts provides the Emerging Curator with an exhibition budget of $10,000. Additional funding and staff support for printing, promotions, and execution of exhibition programming is available.

The program is one year and begins every January. The selection panel includes VisArts’ curators, the Artist Advisory Council, and the Mentoring Curator.

The Emerging Curator and Mentoring Curator work together to expand education programming and enhance visitor experiences by developing tools, templates, technological enhancements, and funding strategies to support public programming that promotes social interaction, creative exchange, and audience engagement.

The Emerging Curator Program provides Emerging Curators with practical, hands-on experience at a community arts organization.

It’s designed to support diverse exhibitions presenting a broad spectrum of ideas and curatorial approaches, and to enhance the VisArts exhibition experience by developing educational initiatives, public programming, and opportunities for community engagement through expanded use of interactive, interpretive media.

VisArts’ Emerging Curator Program is generously supported by a grant from the Windgate Foundation.

Current Curators

Rebecca Cross

As the owner and director of Cross MacKenzie Gallery from 2006 – 2022, Cross presented nearly 300 artists in over 150 art exhibitions, and art fairs in NYC, LA and Venice Italy. She was a guest curator for the American University Art Museum at the Katzen Center – “MORE CLAY- The Power of Repetition” and curated “Macho the Mask of Masculinity” for DCAC. Post college, while living in a coffee bean warehouse in Wapping, London, she assisted renowned sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro and taught part-time at Southwark College. Her early studio practice featured solo painting shows at Addison Ripley Gallery, DC, group shows including “Hypercolorism” at Gallery D’este in NYC and commissioned work for hotels and restaurants. She designed sets and costumes for Bresee Danskompani’s “Unstill Lives” performed in Oslo and the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theatre, and for City Ballet of Boston’s “Urban Nutcracker” by Tony Williams, now in its 25th year.

A MacDowell Fellow, Cross’ public collections include the Washington Convention Center, Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery and the US State Department. Her ceramics were long sold through Barney’s New York, Costa Mesa and Japan. Cross has participated as a juror, lecturer or panelist for multiple arts organizations including The Smithsonian Craft Show, the Virginia AIA, Women’s Caucus for Art, Bethesda Fine Art Festival and the Washington Project for the Arts. Her awards include grants from DC Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Scandinavian American Society. She served on the board of the Renwick Alliance for Craft from 2007-2014 and is a member of the Craft Advisory Council for VisArt’s Center for Craft Studies.

For more information visit www.crossmackenzie.com 

2025

Storm Bookhard

Storm Bookhard is writer, curator, and scholar of visual culture based in Los Angeles, California. Her practice centers how artists of color and other marginalized practitioners are inscribed within archival, museological, and institutional histories. This work has included conducting research for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) feminist performance art initiative, authoring artist biographies for the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), and programming immersive performance artworks in Southern California. Bookhard also served as a collaborator on the first Los Angeles institutional exhibition highlighting the Guerrilla Girls’ 40 years of activist interventions which will open in the fall of 2025 at the GRI.

She has held positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and David Zwirner (New York) in addition to several other art institutions. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, and published by Harvard University Press and the Boston Art Review (forthcoming, 2025).

Bookhard holds a BFA in Fine Art (2022) as well as an MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere (2023) from the University of Southern California. She is currently the Project Manager and Curatorial Director of GĒR Collective, a performance art collaborative, as well as a Gallery Assistant at Regen Projects.

2025

Past Curators

Learn more about our past Emerging Curators