Gail Nathan is an interdisciplinary artist with expertise in arts administration, arts education, and arts-based community development. She is a successful fundraiser and has led strategic and capital planning campaigns for museums,city governments, and non-profit institutions. Throughout her career, she has advocated for cultural, environmental, and educational justice, supporting the position that the arts can be an equalizing factor in the revitalization of under-served communities. Her most recent capital development project, an $8,000,000 award-winning (NYC Design Commission Award for Design Excellence) renovation of the Bronx River Art Center, has brought her to the forefront of sustainable design practice.
A native New Yorker, Nathan was born and raised in the Bronx and attended nationally-recognized public schools, including the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art, the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, and Rutgers University Graduate School (now the Mason Gross School of the Arts). Her additional education experiences include fellowships to the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art, the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and the J. Paul Getty Museum Management Institute, programs which have allowed her to contextualize her education into an aesthetic perspective on culture and society.
Committed to public service, she has held management positions in museums, city agencies, and non-profit arts spaces, including: Director of Public Relations and Marketing for the Bronx Museum of the Arts; Public Art Administrator for the City of Richmond, Virginia; and, since 1999, Executive Director of the Bronx River Art Center, a 23-year-old, community-based multi-art center, with an interdisciplinary art and environmental justice focus. Nathan was a founding Board Member of the Bronx River Alliance - a consortium of organizations committed to preserving the ecological life of the Bronx River. Over the past decade, she has been a recognized leader in the South Bronx for her creative approaches to after-school enrichment programming and for her advocacy for arts-led community revitalization.
Nathan has extensive experience as a visiting professor at some of the top art schools in the country, including: The School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University; Maryland Institute, College of Art; Kansas City Art Institute; the University for the Arts, Philadelphia College of Art and Design; the Visual Arts Program at Princeton University; and the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. At these schools, she has served a critical role to connect academic communities to current trends in artistic practice. She has also held adjunct teaching positions at universities and colleges throughout the New York metropolitan area, including: New York University, Parsons School of Design, Montclair State University, Ramapo College, and Douglass College of Rutgers University.
As a nationally-recognized artist, Nathan has been awarded several prestigious fellowships and grants, including a Virginia Museum Professional Fellowship, an Individual Support Grant from the Adolph and Ester Gottlieb Foundation, residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Art Awareness in Lexington, NY, and the Karolyi Foundation for Artists and Writers in Vence, France. Nathan’s paintings are included in public and private collections, including: the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Frederick Weisman Collection in Los Angeles, California, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she was included in the 1998 Triennial of Contemporary American Art. Nathan has produced several public art commissions for the cities of Richmond, VA, New Orleans, LA, and New York City, and she has been a recipient of numerous Public Service Awards from city and state agencies.