Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

Heather Darcy Bhandari serves as the Program Director at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, is a Co-Founder of CreativeStudy, and is a Co-Author of the book Art/Work. Additionally, she is known for her roles as a curator and collaborator.

Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

Head shot of Heather Bhandari, a blonde white woman smiling with should-length hair and a black shirt with intricate collar. Background is a blurred tree.

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.

Bhandari is also an independent curator; a co-founder of the project-based curatorial team and podcast, The Remix; and an adjunct lecturer at Brown University where she teaches professional practice to visual arts concentrators. The second edition of her book, ART/WORK, was published by Simon and Schuster in October of 2017. Now in its twenty-fifth printing, the text is used by colleges and universities across the country and has translations in Korean and Russian.

Bhandari is on the board of trustees of Art Omi (an artist residency in Ghent, NY) and the School of Visual Arts Alumni Board at Penn State. She was on the board of NURTUREart and the advisory council of Trestle Gallery for nearly a decade.

Image of white neon tubes and rock-like sculptures in a white gallery space with reflective polished gray floor. Artwork by Keith Lemley.

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.

Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

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(Image: Summer Wheat's "Inside The Garden" at Smack Mellon)

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Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

Heather Bhandari - Program Director & Curator

Reading & Listening

Recent Interviews

Select AWL Podcasts & Press

Most Recent AWL Press

Most Recent AWL Press

Select AWL Podcasts & Press

Most Recent AWL Press

Select AWL Podcasts & Press

Select AWL Podcasts & Press

Select AWL Podcasts & Press

Other Podcasts

Select Art/Work References

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Select Art/Work References

Select Art/Work References

Select Art/Work References

Other Things To Read

Select Art/Work References

Other Things To Read

(Image: Summer Wheat's "Inside The Garden" at Smack Mellon)

Contact

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