Directors & Staff
Savona Bailey-McClain is a Harlem based curator and arts administrator. She is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past 20 years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem. Her public art installations encompass sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media, and have been covered extensively by the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, among many others. She is also the host/ producer of "State of the Arts NYC," a podcast program on Podyssey, Radio Public, Youtube, Mixcloud and other audio platforms. She is a member of ArtTable, Advisory Board member of NYC's Dance in Sacred Places, Governors Island Advisory Council and new Committee member of the African Dream Network.
Receptionist & Gallery Assistant
Daniel De Boulay is an artist born & based in New York City. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Global Studies from Eugene Lang. His work is heavily invested in New York City’s queer community, focusing on Drag Artistry. As the Gallery Assistant and Member Coordinator, Daniel will offer sustaining administrative support to the gallery directors, manage marketing outreach and act as a point person for NYAE membership.
Alaiyo Bradshaw has worked as a fine artist and illustrator for over 30 years and her career teaching art at the college level began in 1995. Teaching art history, painting, digital design, printmaking, and clay building has afforded Bradshaw a wide range of experiences sharing her knowledge. She has taught at Long Island University, Montclair State, Montclair Art Museum, and for over 20 years at Parsons School of Design. She is currently a Professor of Fine Arts and Director of the First Year program of over 300 faculty and 1400 students. Throughout her time at Parsons, she has built a new art and design curriculum. Bradshaw now manages the operations of the First Year and oversees effective curriculum delivery, maintaining and developing academic and pedagogical capacities with faculty throughout the program, building faculty culture, and understanding and meeting evolving student needs and interests. In addition, she is the Vice President of the Brooklyn Watercolor Society, a prestigious body of long-standing signature artists. Her role on the executive board is to oversee our programming for our associate members, help plan our events, and organize guest speakers and gallery exhibitions along with the President, Treasurer, and Secretary.
Executive Director
Michael Gormley assumed the leadership position at NYAE in 2017, bringing to bear over thirty years of art world experience. Limbo Lounge, a pivotal East Village art and performance space he founded in 1980, was his inaugural foray into the New York art scene. Since that time Gormley has held key posts in galleries, professional arts organizations, academic institutions and media enterprises including VP of Education, Institute of Classical Architecture & Art; Associate Director of Fine Art, The National Arts Club; Curator, Portraits, Inc.; Dean, The New York Academy of Art and Editor-in Chief and Content Strategist, Artists Magazine. In addition to his curatorial and administrative work at NYAE, he is a frequent contributor to NYAE’s blog and maintains an fine art studio practice in painting.
Miguel Otero Fuentes is a Puerto Rico-born sculptor and architect skilled in facade system design, 3d modeling and at facilitating collaboration between design and engineering teams. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the T. Gordon Little Fellowship, participated in design-build studios, worked as a teaching assistant abroad and was involved in research in the areas of digital design and fabrication. During his academic career he won three first place prizes including the distinguished Portman Prize. He also holds a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree (with honors) from the University of Puerto Rico.
From 2015 until the start of 2022, Otero Fuentes worked at Front were he was involved as a facade system designer on a range of high profile projects including the Joslyn Art Museum Expansion (by Snohetta), the MIT Metropolitan Building renovation (by Diller Scofidio + Renfro), 262 Fifth Avenue (by Meganom) and Google Campus (by BIG + Heatherwick Studio) amongst many other projects.
Now, Otero Fuentes works as a full time sculptor in his Brooklyn based studio [Otero Fuentes XYZ] where he experiments with material, dimension, number, light, space, form, and meaning.
Matt Rota. A graduate of The Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of Visual Art, Matt is an illustrator, author and instructor. He has spent the past 15 years working with clients in print and online including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Penguin Books, The LA Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Smithsonian, Variety, Buzzfeed, and many others. His illustrations focus primarily on global politics, criminal justice, social inequality, immigration and poverty. Over the past ten years he has taught illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art and The School of Visual Arts. Matt has written two books on drawing, has an extensive exhibition career internationally, and is senior curator at Artreprenuer.com.
Treasurer
Born and raised on the East Coast, Kristin Kunc earned her B.A. at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She continued her educational pursuits at the Water Street Atelier in New York, where she graduated from an intensive four-year study in realistic painting. Thereafter, she developed a scopious artistic practice, teaching painting and drawing throughout New York City and Long Island, curating a wide range of art shows and events in spaces such as the Gowanus Ballroom and the National Arts Club, restoring art (most notably, a piece by Banksy), and, of course, creating her own artwork. Kristin's paintings have been featured in many prominent collections across the U.S. and have received much critical acclaim. Prior to launching her real estate career, Kristin also helped run the family design and build firm Serett Metalworks.
Charlotte Sears is a technical writer and web developer who works with artists and other small businesses to help them use the internet and social media to build communities and broaden their reach. Sears brings to her work a passion for good design and a love for the practice of making. She was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Hunter College in NYC. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Director
Siyan Wong is a New York City based painter and worker rights lawyer. Born in China but raised in New York City, Wong is also a first generation immigrant.
The subjects in her paintings are the working poor, elderly, women, and homeless. Siyan has shown her paintings at theNew York Arts Center, theNational Arts Club, and Equity Gallery. She has given talks about her art and social justice at theAsia Society, universities, and other venues. Her painting projects have received support by grants from the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), the Asian Women Giving Circle (AWGC), and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC).