Heather Bhandari (she/her) is the Program Director at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a grantmaker created and sustained by artists to benefit artists. She is also the Co-Founder of CreativeStudy: a subscription-based, online education platform to help those in the creative sector thrive by making intelligent business and financial decisions. It grew from a business and financial health conference for visual artists, named Art World Conference (AWC), which debuted in NYC in April of 2019, Los Angeles in February of 2020, and online in October of 2020 and the summer of 2021. CreativeStudy is a fiscally sponsored project of NYFA.
From 2000 to 2016 she was a director of Mixed Greens, a commercial gallery in Chelsea where she curated well over one hundred exhibitions while managing a roster of nearly two-dozen emerging to mid-career artists. Most recently, she was the Director of Exhibitions at Smack Mellon, a nonprofit in Brooklyn.
Recent curatorial projects include a solo exhibition of Keith Lemley’s work at Urban Glass in Brooklyn (pictured left) and the group exhibition, Fertile Ground (pictured above), at the David Winton Bell Gallery in Providence, RI, that included work by Maria Berrio, Zoë Charlton, and Joiri Minaya.
She and her AWC co-organizer, Dexter Wimberly, were listed in the Observer's "Arts Power 50: Changemakers Shaping the Art World in 2019."
Bhandari received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Pennsylvania State University where she recently received their College of Arts and Architecture Distinguished Alumni Award. Her career began at contemporary galleries Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin, both in New York City.
