staff bios
Nora Halpern
Vice President of Leadership Alliances
Trained as an art historian and curator, Nora joined Americans for the Arts in 2001, following four and a half years in Oxford, England, where she served as thesis advisor to graduate students of art history at Oxford University while continuing her work as an independent art advisor to private collections and art foundations. Prior to living in England, Nora, a New York City native, spent much of her career in Los Angeles, where she was curator of the Frederick R. Weisman Collections, founding director of the museum at Pepperdine University, and vice president and director of fine arts for Sotheby’s, Los Angeles. Nora received both her B.A. and M.A. (with honors) from the University of California Los Angeles. She has written and lectured extensively on modern and contemporary art issues as well as served as an art critic for a number of national and international publications. She is a recipient of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Award of Merit and Helena Rubinstein Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and was a Rhodes scholar finalist from the University of California. She has served on the board of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the Advisory Board of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. Nora is the co-founder of Street Scenes: Projects for DC, an independent public art program which organized a number of public presentations of work by artists in all disciplines including The Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Yoko Ono, and Jenny Holzer. Nora is on the board of PS Arts, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that works to put the arts back into public schools.
E-mail Nora.
