New Museum appoints Julia Kaganskiy as Director of Incubator for Art, Technology, and Design

NEW YORK, NY.- Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, announced today the appointment of Julia Kaganskiy as Director of the institution’s new incubator for art, technology, and design. Opening in summer 2014 in the Museum’s adjacent building at 231 Bowery, this not-for-profit initiative will create a hybrid educational and professional workspace—a dynamic 24/7 center where creative start-up entrepreneurs and artists will form a vibrant interdisciplinary community geared toward collaboration and innovation. The initiative is a first for the museum field.

As the director of the incubator, Kaganskiy will oversee a community of over sixty full-time and part-time members working in close proximity with anchor member Studio-X, part of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She will be responsible for member recruitment, partnerships, and programs, and will report to the New Museum’s Director Lisa Phillips and Deputy Director Karen Wong, the incubator’s founders.

Julia Kaganskiy is a recognized cultural producer across the art and technology fields. Photo Alexander Porter.

Julia Kaganskiy is a recognized cultural producer across the art and technology fields. In 2008, she founded #ArtsTech Meetup, which brings nearly four thousand professionals from New York City’s museums, galleries, art-related start-ups, and digital artists together with tech companies to discuss how technology is transforming the art world on both the institutional and creative fronts. Most recently, she served as Global Editor of the Creators Project, a partnership between VICE Media Group and Intel that has garnered awards from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (the Webby Awards), and AdAge. Steering both content and relationships at the Creators Project, Kaganskiy developed a network of artists, nonprofits, and technology companies who share a passion for exploring the relationship between art and technology. She has consulted for the Barbican Centre, London; Future of Storytelling (FoST), NYC; Google Creative Lab, NYC; and Sonos, Santa Barbara, CA; among others. She has been cited by Fast Company (2011) and Business Insider (2013) as one of the most influential women in technology and profiled in the 2012 AOL/PBS series MAKERS honoring women leaders. This year, Time magazine named Kaganskiy’s one of the “Top 140 Best Twitter Feeds.” Kaganskiy was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in Brooklyn where she currently lives.

“We are very pleased that Kaganskiy will be joining our team to lead this important initiative,” said Phillips. “Her experience in the art and technology start-up community, along with her exceptional combination of skills in launching interdisciplinary projects, will help accelerate our exploration of new twenty-first-century models. Nimble and forward thinking, Kaganskiy embodies what the incubator is all about.”

Kaganskiy said, “It is a great honor to become director of a space dedicated to fostering and supporting nascent endeavors in the cultural innovation sector. Many of these studios and start-ups have unique needs and few resources because they fall outside the scope of tech incubators and traditional cultural institutions. The New Museum’s cultural incubator will capture the spirit of experimentation and collaboration this community already embodies, and catalyze it with new energy. We hope to bring bold and unlikely ideas into existence through focused research and development.”

New Museum programs such as IDEAS CITY, the Generational Triennial, Digital Archive project, and its affiliate organization Rhizome will be a critical part of the larger incubator community. Rhizome will also support the incubator through its expertise and leadership in the intersection of art and technology.

Amplifying the New Museum’s mission to explore new art and new ideas, the incubator is the latest in a series of programs developed by the institution to challenge the boundaries and expand the relevance of museum practice in the twenty-first century, foster creative cultural production, and reinforce the Bowery as a place of meaningful innovation.

Members will be selected by the incubator’s Director and a staff committee through a competitive application process (to be announced in early 2014) and will pay a monthly membership fee in exchange for workspace, support services, and a full complement of programs. Additionally, artists, thought leaders, and engineers will be invited for special guest residencies and will participate in activities providing further opportunities for collaboration. The incubator’s community will be supported by a robust schedule of weekly educational classes and workshops, seminars and presentations, and professional and mentorship events. The New Museum will leverage its Board and staff expertise, as well as its extensive network of affiliations to provide special development opportunities for incubator members. New Museum Trustee David Heller will chair a special advisory board. Members will also have the opportunity to share their work with each other and the public, fostering far-ranging dialogues and information exchange.

The incubator will be located next door to the Museum’s SANAA-designed building in a nineteenth-century structure that once was home and studio to such artists as James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann. It will offer eleven thousand square feet of shared workspace, informal gathering spaces, conference rooms, screening rooms, studio space, and other amenities. The facility will be designed by SO-IL architects (Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu) in collaboration with Gensler. SO-IL has received international recognition for their design of the Frieze New York Art Fair tent and Idenburg was the project architect for SANAA’s New Museum design. Gensler has also been a long-time collaborator of the New Museum as architect of record for the SANAA building and other projects.