Many first hear about NCAPER through a presentation or workshop at a conference or professional gathering. Content can be tailored to audiences ranging from artists and arts funders to elected officials, arts organizations, emergency managers, and first responders. Our goals are to encourage and assist the arts sector in developing readiness and mitigation plans; to help city, county, and state representatives retain creatives and engage them in response and recovery efforts; and to help the arts and emergency sectors better know and understand each other.
NCAPER welcomes invitations to present at conferences and convenings; contact jnewcomb@ncaper.org.

Recent and upcoming events include:

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November 5, 2023

 

 

Grantmakers in the Arts Preconference, San Juan, PR
Collaborative Solutions: Shaping Meaningful Disaster Response
Co-organized by the National Coalition for Arts Preparedness (NCAPER), and Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+)

In the face of our current permacrisis, figuring out ‘How I can be of the best assistance' can feel daunting. 'How can my organization be most effective?’ The needs are significant, the crises keep coming, and the levels of inequity and injustice keep growing. However, there is hope! Through informed collaboration, you can develop an appropriate and impactful response. With Puerto Rico as our learning setting, this day is a conversation among artists, funders, service organizations, and trainers/coaches. Together, we’ll examine recent disasters, and uncover how the arts and creative communities can prepare and respond in tangible ways.

Speakers:
Bao-Long Chu
Long is Program Director – Arts and Parks, Houston Endowment. Long oversees our strategy to support and grow Houston’s arts, culture, and parks ecosystem. He collaborates with artists and community leaders toward a shared vision of a vibrant city with abundant opportunities to create and connect. The power of art to share and connect human stories inspires his work.

He is a storyteller. Originally from Vietnam, his passion for writing led him to the MFA creative writing program at the University of Houston. He has written and presented extensively on writing pedagogy, the connection between art and the refugee experience, and nonprofit programming. During his role as the associate director of the literary-education nonprofit Writers in the Schools, he developed his extensive background in literacy, arts, and community engagement.

Long’s poems and essays have been published in several anthologies, including The New Anthology of American Poetry: Postmodernisms 1950-Present and From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath. His libretto for the opera Bound, composed by Huang Ruo, premiered in Houston in 2014 and in New York in 2019.
 

Long holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Psychology from Houston Baptist University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

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Tom Clareson
Tom is Project Director of Performing Arts Readiness, funded by the Mellon Foundation to help performing arts organizations protect their assets, sustain operations, and prepare for emergencies. He serves as a Senior Consultant for Digital and Preservation Services at LYRASIS, focusing on preservation,
disaster preparedness, digitization, funding, and advocacy for arts and cultural organizations. Clareson is Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation and Vice President, the National Board of Advisors, Richard M. Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University.

 

Beth Flowers
Beth is the Air Institute Executive Director and has over twenty-five years of executive-level experience with non-profits, governmental agencies, broadcast media, and the arts. She is a visionary thinker and a talented communicator. Beth has created messaging and strategies for victorious political candidates and issues, inspired citizen participation in government, managed public planning efforts, repositioned struggling organizations, and developed innovative programming that connects people. Beth is a national leader in the fields of arts professional development, community development, and entrepreneurship. As the creator and Executive Director of the AIR Institute, she is at the forefront of connecting artists and creatives to their communities in new ways that truly raise the value of art and
creativity.

Beth is a voracious reader, cook, gardener, and singer. She had ten years of classical piano training and played in the 1983 Montreaux Jazz Festival with the University City High School Jazz Band. Beth is still working on a multi-generational novel about Midwestern women musicians and strives to understand string theory.

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Ruby Lopez Harper
Mexican, Mother, Wife, Dancer, Photographer, Poet and Social Justice Warrior.

 

Ruby’s work has included external equity strategies and field education, leadership development, local arts advancement, and tools, training, resource development, and cohort building for the local arts agency field, arts and culture administrators, and arts marketers.
 

Ruby’s experience includes supporting individual artists, community development, economic development, cultural tourism, and public art. She draws on a varied background, including corporate affairs, community relations, volunteerism, employee engagement, marketing, 
communications, and business administration.

 

She currently works on projects with the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums; is an Adjunct Professor with George Mason University and has consulted with numerous local, state, regional, and national organizations on grantmaking, equitable practice, leadership, and cohort programming and capacity building initiatives.

She was selected for the 2021 BIPOC Leadership Circle Cohort with Artequity. She was a 2019 Arizona  State University Practices for Change Fellow. She was recognized as a 2019 Inspirational Woman (Arts Advocate) by “And I Thought” Women in Literature. She serves on the Maryland State Arts Council, is a steering committee member for the National Coalition on Arts Preparedness and Emergency Response, serves as Chair of the Robert E. Gard Foundation, serves as Advocacy Chair on the board for the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County and serves on the WETA Community Advisory Council.
 

She served on the Emerging Leaders Council for Americans for the Arts, was the primary contact for the Arts and Economic Impact Study for Central Ohio, and served as a mentor with Arts Administrators of Color Network. She is a 2017 National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Advocacy Leadership
Institute Fellow, Class of 2017 American Express Leadership Academy Alumni and Class of 2010 Next Generation of Leaders Fellowship program.

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Janet “Jan” Newcomb
Jan is the Executive Director of NCAPER, the National Coalition for Arts Preparedness and Emergency Response, and the Performing Arts Coordinator for the Performing Arts Readiness (PAR) project at Lyrasis. During her career, Jan has directed ten arts organizations, including the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, four arts councils in NY and SC, and a community arts center. She served as Director of Grants at the SC Arts Commission and taught modern dance at the University of Buffalo and the University of SC. She currently serves as Professor, Volunteer Title Series at the University of Kentucky. In 2009, Jan began consulting on leadership transition and development for arts organizations; her clients include Long Wharf Theatre, Lexington Philharmonic, Miami Summer Music Festival, South Arts, and others. In 2015, she designed and was asked to direct the MA in Leadership in the Arts and Entertainment Industries Program at NYIT in Manhattan. In 2009, Jan received the Community Achievement Award from Mayor Joseph Riley, Charleston, SC. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Service Award from The Arts Council of the Southern Finger Lakes in her hometown of Corning, NY. She holds a BA in Music from Hood College, an MA in Dance from  George
Washington University.

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Mollie Quinlan-Hayes
Mollie works primarily with two institutions committed to the readiness and recovery of artists and arts organizations in crisis. She serves as the Fund Development and Program Officer for NCAPER, the National Coalition for Arts Preparedness and Emergency Response. This arm of her work addresses
both policy and practice to build resiliency in the national arts sector. For the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), she coordinates NYFA’s Rauschenberg Emergency Grants for individual artists. Working
out of Atlanta, Georgia, she also consults widely for arts organizations throughout the United States on strategic planning/organizational development, readiness planning, grantmaking, and program design. She also serves as a skilled facilitator in diverse settings. Recent projects include the redevelopment of the Folk and Traditional Arts Program for the Georgia Council for the Arts, and teaming on a new strategic plan for the Santa Cruz County Museum of Discovery.

While serving as the Deputy Director and Accessibility Coordinator of South Arts, Mollie designed and guided programs, including ArtsReady, the South Arts State Fellowships and Southern Prize, Jazz Road, and the Dance Touring Initiative. She led partnerships, including the Southern region Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit and arts education research in the South. Prior to joining South Arts, Mollie was the Assistant Director and Accessibility Coordinator of the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She graduated, from the inaugural class of the Executive in Arts and Culture Strategy program at the University of Pennsylvania/National Arts Strategies.

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Chemi Rosado-Seijo
Chemi (b. Alta Vega, Puerto Rico. 1973) is a socially engaged artist whose practice juxtaposes architecture and the urban landscape, work and social action, and art, and its history. He graduated from the painting department of the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts in 1997. In 2000, Rosado-Seijo had his first solo show at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona, which included interventions on billboards around the city. He inaugurated the widely documented project El Cerro in 2002, which is ongoing, working with residents of the El Cerro community, to present public art projects, workshops, and other community initiatives. In Historia sobre Ruedas (History on Wheels), his 2005 project with Art in General, Seijo mapped Manhattan from a skateboarder's perspective, re-drawing the city regarding its skating sites. Seijo has participated in numerous exhibitions and biennials, including The Whitney Biennial (2017, 2002), the Prague Biennial (2005), the Pontevedra Biennial (2010), the Havana Biennial (2015) and the first Thailand
Biennial in Krabi (2018). In 2011, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. In May 2015, Rosado-Seijo was granted The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship for El Cerro, honoring artists pursuing ambitious creative projects with a social purpose. In 2020, Rosado-Seijo was
commissioned by the MoMA Education Department as part of the Catalyst Program for a project entitled Beyond the Uniform, which engaged MoMA's security department. Later that year, he had a solo exhibition at the Maria and Alberto de la Cruz Art Gallery at Georgetown University curated by Al Miner.
He currently has a long-term site-specific sculptural skate bowl on view at Art Omi, commissioned by Zach Feuer. His work is included in many public and private collections, most recently at The Whitney Museum.

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Gretchen Ruiz Ramos
Gretchen is an arts and culture administrator, museum professional, historian, and photographer with over twenty years of experience working with Puerto Rico’s arts community. She has excelled in directing her art gallery for ten years, teaching in academia, and exhibiting her fine art
photography in Puerto Rico and internationally. After hurricanes, Irma and María impacted the Island in 2017, she began a career as a cultural emergency responder, and, for the past six years, she has been supporting the long-term recovery and resiliency of Puerto Rico’s cultural heritage, while supporting arts organizations, and artists. Gretchen is an active philanthropist; she leads Pitirre Proyectos, an NGO founded in 2010 to support Puerto Rican artist's careers. She is also co-founder of the Alliance for Cultural Emergencies Puerto Rico. Her academic background is multidisciplinary, including a Bachelor’s in Business Administration with a major in Finance, a Master of Arts in Education with a major in Museum Studies, a Post-Graduate in Creative and Commercial Photography, and is currently a PhD candidate in History at the Center for Advanced Studies of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.

 

Pamela C. Silva Diaz
Pamela is a mechanical engineer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her work focuses on strengthening climate resilience and adaptation through collaborative innovation. Through her business, PamLab Design and Engineering, she facilitates participatory design processes in community contexts and provides engineering services to develop technological solutions. She is currently managing "Centers for Cultural Response" - an initiative led by the Flamboyán Arts Fund that aims to transform cultural
centers into hubs that support emergency preparedness and response in their communities.

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