Mara Manus is leaving her function as CEO of Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts and science-focused non-profit area based by artist Dustin Yellin. That wraps up a short tenure that started in 2023 and marked a swift interval of transformation for the establishment.
Gabriel Florenz, who has served as a founding creative director at Pioneer Works because it opened in 2012, will transfer into an expanded function as government director.
In an interview with ARTnews, Florenz stated that Manus met the group’s fundraising targets a number of months sooner than their authentic two-year purpose and arrange Yellin and Florenz (Yellin’s second cousin) to proceed on their artist-academic-led mission. (Janna Levin, the founding director of sciences, will proceed in her function.) Below Manus’s course, the group finalized the third section of a $30 million capital marketing campaign, which was accomplished in early 2025.
“The plan was for Mara to come back in construct the infrastructure and end the marketing campaign,” Florenz stated. “We don’t wish to be a single-point establishment. We like collectivity; we wish to be an artist-scientist-led group. She helped us get via lots of intense institutional frameworks that we in-built a brief period of time.”
Florenz’s new function, which took impact in March, will increase to fundraising efforts and donor growth. Stephanie Hemshrot, who has led capital tasks and run operations since 2021, was appointed as Chief Working Officer in April.
The hiring of Manus in September 2023 was large information on the time, meriting a narrative within the New York Instances. She was the highest-profile government to come back to Pioneer Works, and the primary to have the title of CEO. Manus got here to Pioneer Works from the New York State Council on the Arts, the place she spent seven years as government director overseeing $100 million in funding and supporting 3,000 organizations. Earlier than that, she led New York’s prestigious Public Theater and labored on the Ford Basis.
In March, Manus introduced her departure on LinkedIn, writing that her accomplishments included “establishing a strong inside Finance division, rebuilding our Improvement group and implementing a complete CRM system” in addition to deepening engagement with native faculties and group. “All of this presents a pure transition level for management development,” she wrote.
Manus’s exit comes a month after the artwork heart held a gathering of group members and authorities officers, together with NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Laurie Cumbo, to mark the completion of a $12 million renovation to boost accessibility—together with including an elevator for ADA entry—and increase programming. Pioneer Works reportedly will get 50,000 guests yearly and gives 90 % of its programming to the general public free-of-charge.
Pioneer Works, which has a full-time employees of 43 folks and at present has a $9.1 million working finances, launched its $30 million capital marketing campaign in 2019, earlier than the beginning of Covid. The marketing campaign had as its first precedence the acquisition of the group’s 1866 constructing, which then made the nonprofit eligible to obtain about $5.7 million in metropolis and state funding. Over the previous three-plus years, the humanities heart has undergone a multi-stage renovation to carry the constructing as much as code and add facilities. It closed from December 2021 to August 2022 and once more from early 2024 to Sept 2024 to perform these adjustments. The roof was changed, an HVAC system was put in, and loos have been added. What stays to be accomplished is a deliberate rooftop observatory.
Manus is the third individual to be in an government place on the group because it opened in 2012. Yellin and Florenz successfully headed up the establishment till 2016 when Marcia Santoni, who had spent seven years as Deputy Director of housing initiative Pathways Nationwide, was introduced on as managing director and COO. Santoni left in 2019, and Pioneer Works then employed their first government director, Eric Shiner, former director of the Andy Warhol Museum.
Shiner left in spring of 2021, and was changed by Maxine Dalio, a Pioneer Works veteran who’d began there in fall 2017 engaged on development and progress, coming from a three-year stint in growth on the Park Avenue Armory; she rose to exterior affairs, then, in December 2020, to deputy director, earlier than changing Shiner as government director. Dalio left in late 2022, after solely somewhat over a 12 months and a half within the prime place. After interim director Jill Eisenhard, Manus took the reins in October 2023. When she was employed, Manus instructed the Instances she would work intently with Becca Keating, the newly-appointed director of development (Keating stays at Pioneer Works).
When Manus’s appointment was introduced in 2023, Florenz instructed the Instances her rent introduced a way of stability: “I’ve at all times actually thought, how do you make a construction that’s essentially the most orderly potential, so essentially the most dysfunction can occur inside it? Probably the most inventive chaos and vitality — that lovely form of freedom.” With confidence of their new chief government, he stated then, “we will fly now.” As he strikes into his new function alongside Yellin and Levin, Florenz instructed ARTnews, “If you’re constructing an establishment, there’s this elemental query: how do you develop whereas retaining your soul?”
Founder Dustin Yellin instructed ARTnews, “This new management chapter speaks to the DNA of Pioneer Works, responding to a divided world and bringing siloed techniques of data collectively to make artwork and science accessible to everybody.”
On Tuesday evening, Pioneer Works holds its annual Village Fete fundraiser.
