Catherine Levene is the Co-Founder and CEO of Artspace. As a digital media innovator and entrepreneur with more than 15 years experience building successful online media companies, she is responsible for the joint vision of Artspace as well as the overall day-to-day management of the company. Most recently, Catherine held the position of COO and General Manager of DailyCandy, a leading daily e-mail and website targeted to women that focuses on the latest trends in fashion, food and culture.
Growing up in a family of art collectors and supporters, Catherine's passion for art started at a young age. Her grandmother sat on the board of the New York State Council on the Arts for over 14 years, and in 1974, founded SUNY Binghamton's MBA in the Arts program, one of the first of its kind in the country. In her early twenties, Catherine developed a strong desire to start her own art collection, but found it difficult to do so on a tight budget. Eventually she began purchasing limited edition pieces sold to benefit non-profit organizations. While slowly acquiring these and other original works, Catherine began to recognize the importance of making art available to a wider audience and encouraging collecting as a great way to support artists and benefit influential charities and cultural institutions. This was the foundation for her Artspace vision.
Prior to joining DailyCandy, Catherine was part of the executive team at start-up shopping search engine, TheFind.com, where she served as Senior Vice President of Product and General Manager of Content and Distribution. In addition, Catherine spent seven years at New York Times Digital (NYTD), building the online properties of the New York Times Company, including nytimes.com. Catherine currently advises early stage Internet companies in media and commerce, sits on the boards of TheFind.com and RenttheRunway.com and is an advisor to LearnVest.com.
Catherine received a BA in history from the University of Pennsylvania and, concurrently, a BS in economics from the Wharton School of Business in 1992. She earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 1996.
Christopher Vroom, a well-known patron of the arts and an avid contemporary art collector, is the Co-Founder, Chairman and Executive Vice President of Artspace. Credited as the vision behind the business, Chris is responsible for initiating and managing relationships with artists and institutions that sell works on the Artspace platform. Chris grew up in New York City around the block from the prominent National Arts Club in Gramercy Park. He attended public school in the area and went on to receive his BA from The University of Chicago in 1987. After benefiting from a solid liberal arts education, Chris worked for nearly 20 years as a financial analyst specializing in consumer group and e-commerce equity research spaces, where he was a Managing Director and Global Group Head in the CSFB Technology Group.
While working as a research analyst, Chris became convinced of the vital role artists play in the foundation of creative culture; yet at the same time he was surprised to learn that there were few systems designed to help them succeed. In response to the elimination of NEA Artist Fellowships and after a year of research dedicated to identifying the greatest need, Chris founded Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting artists directly through financial awards, public exposure and access to a national network of support. Since 1999, Artadia has provided nearly $3 million in total support to 250 artists living in San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Boston, New York and Atlanta.
Through his non-profit activities, Chris recognized the challenges faced by artists and cultural institutions alike in reaching new audiences. At the same time, as a collector of art himself, he understood the difficulty in finding a broad selection of artworks based on personal preferences. Chris founded Artspace to address these challenges while simultaneously creating a powerful new distribution channel for artists, institutions and non-profits, in addition to offering collectors at all levels a curated selection of artworks from top contemporary artists.
Charles Evers is an expert at building and leading development teams to deliver scalable web architectures that support highly available online properties. He has over 20 years experience building solutions for e-commerce, finance, media and ad supported businesses.
Charles joined Artspace from Thomson Reuters where he was for 5 years, most recently Vice President, Global Solutions Development. In this role he produced the strategic technical roadmap used to support consumer facing global web and mobile properties for the $300+MM media division. Charles was responsible for a forty plus member global development and quality assurance team.
Previously for 4 years, Charles served in technical management roles at Dow Jones and eMeta Corp. He was accountable for re-engineering of the wsj.com e-commerce solution,the launch of the paid Barron’s online site and the Wall Street Journal’s first blog and community site.
Charles began his technology career in the finance industry, building trading systems for major financial institutions for 10 years. Charles holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Clarkson University.
Melanie Pitson is a digital product executive with more than a decade of experience designing and bringing multi-platform solutions to market.
Prior to joining Artspace in September 2011, Melanie served as Director of Product at DailyCandy/Comcast NBCU Digital. In that role she oversaw product design, creation and strategic direction for email, video & emerging media products. She and her team were responsible for the delivery of innovative and user-friendly web and mobile experiences.
Melanie has also held positions at the Disney Interactive Media Group, where she managed all video and mobile products and was responsible for the launch of the first ABC News iPhone application in 2008, and Reuters Media, where she was accountable for both the direct to consumer and B2B syndicated video offerings.
Melanie’s mobile expertise was developed while she worked on the product team at Vindigo, one of the first consumer facing mobile application developers in the U.S. She began her career in ecommerce at Acorn Media Publishing in Silver Spring, Maryland.
A graduate of the Smith School of Business at The University of Maryland, College Park, Melanie holds a B.S. in Business; Marketing & Logistics.
As the Director of Artist and Institutional Development of Artspace, Adam’s role is to seek out and manage all of the great projects and relationships we have with our artists and partners, as well as overseeing the logistics.
Growing up in a family of contemporary art collectors, Adam has been in and around the arts from a young age. After learning to love and appreciate art, Adam noticed an age gap in the art world and became focused on ways that he could engage other young art enthusiasts, who shared his passion and thirst for knowledge but lacked an effective access point. Shortly after graduating college, Adam kick started junior events at various Chicago cultural institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute and School of the Art Institute Chicago.
Prior to Artspace, Adam was the VP, Business Development of Art+Culture, an online portal for artistic knowledge and discovery, where he was instrumental in the development and formation of the site, as well as Art+Culture Editions, the precursor to Artspace.
Adam is also a founding member of the Artadia Junior Council – a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting artists directly through financial awards, public exposure and access to a national network of support – and a strong supporter of all things art and culture related.
Adam grew up in downtown Chicago, attending the Latin School of Chicago, and graduated with a BA in Political Science and International Business from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007.
A native New Yorker who grew up meandering the city's museums, Andrew has written about art for a wide range of publications including New York magazine, Art + Auction, Modern Painters, the New York Observer, the Art Newspaper, and Portfolio. Prior to joining Artspace, Andrew was the executive editor of Artinfo, where over two years he nearly quadrupled the site's traffic, turning it into the most most widely read online art publication. Before that he worked as the managing editor of the educational website ArtWeLove.com and the news editor of Artnews magazine.
Over his decade-long journalism career, Andrew has also covered crime and city politics for the Chicago Tribune's City News Bureau; written a daily online politics, celebrity, and media column for Radar magazine; covered music and pop culture for Rolling Stone, the New York Post, Spin, and Inside.com; reported on soignée cultural events for to the New York Times's Boldface Names column and for New York magazine; and worked on an archeological dig in Morgantina, an ancient Greek colony in Sicily.
Andrew received two B.A. degrees in English and Classics from Wesleyan university in 2002.
Christine Calabro is the design lead at Artspace where her role is to bring creative vision to the site through implementation of visual and strategic design. She brings over nine years of experience leading and designing for large retail e-commerce sites such as: IDEELI, Barnes & Noble, Saks Fifth Avenue, and O Oscar de la Renta & Sag Harbor brands within the Kellwood Company family.
Christine grew up in New Jersey and spent much of her childhood studying and practicing fine art. She spent most weekends traveling to Moore College of Art and summeres at Rhode Island School of Design fine tuning her painting and drawing skills. She is excited to get back to her roots, help be an advocate for the arts and be apart of the great team at artspace.
She hold a BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design and currently lives in New York City where she has resided for over 11 years.
Caroline has worked with Artspace since the site's launch. She manages web production, works on projects with partners and artists, and helps in editorial and marketing. She also serves as the unofficial Keeper of the Keys, which she takes very seriously, and the HR Representative, which she takes a little less seriously. Originally from southern Indiana, Caroline studied art history at Wellesley College and for a year at the University of Paris, and she explored the U.S., living and working in Florida and Seattle, before moving to New York. She now lives in Brooklyn and spends her time outside of work trying new food, dancing whenever possible, and reading great books. Her favorite artists are Modernists like Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, who had the courage to be playful and experimental in their work.
Growing up in a family of American Art collectors in Atlanta, Georgia, Meredith has been passionate about art from a young age. She moved to New York City right after college in 2006, and, after being inspired by a marketing course, she worked in the beauty industry focusing on product marketing and brand strategy for four years. Meredith then moved on to work at a marketing agency, where she ideated, planned and implemented non-traditional marketing programs. In 2011, she enrolled in the Masters in Art Business program at Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York.
Meredith is an active member of the Museum of Modern Art Junior Associates, an affiliate group for the NY museum’s young patrons, which provides members opportunities to participate in and support modern and contemporary art programs, both at the Museum and within the art community. She loves to travel, try the newest New York restaurants, and run outside whenever possible. Meredith has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in Political Science and Art History, as well as a Masters Degree in Art Business from Sotheby's Institute of Art.
Anna joined the Artspace team in February 2012 bringing with her over 10 years of experience dealing with fine art from both an academic and a business perspective. Anna has her BAH and her MA in Art History from Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Although her training is in Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, she has found working with contemporary art refreshing and exciting and has a new-found enthusiasm for the modern and contemporary art scene.
Prior to her employment at Artspace Anna was Project Manager at Novo Arts, where she managed the production and design of interiors in the high-end hospitality, corporate and private sectors. In addition to this, she advised clients in art purchases for investment purposes and managed collections. Anna has taught and organized language courses in Italian and German and has completed a number of translations for international publications.
At Artspace Anna runs the Artspace: Inspace Trade Program which caters to architects, interior designers, art advisors and commercial developers.
After working in the travel industry in Boston for over 5 years, Jennifer relocated to New York to experience all the city has to offer and pursue a career in the arts. An avid blog reader and frequent Facebook user, Jennifer combined her love of social media with her education in Art History to find a perfect fit on the marketing team. Although she misses jet-setting, she is always excited to see what art will come to her - whether it be by way of the NYC gallery scene or the contemporary artists showcased on Artspace.
Sean came to NYC in the late 90s and was involved with the downtown music scene as a dj, live performer and producer for many years. After gaining exposure to technical computing while studying mechanical engineering at CCNY in the early '00s, he got involved with software development and has been writing software as a career and for fun ever since.
Bringing 25 years of curatorial experience to the team, Curatorial Advisor Nessia Pope has organized major survey shows of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Keith Haring, Nan Goldin and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and has written the accompanying catalogue essays. Since 1990, the Brazilian-born New Yorker has produced more than 120 photography editions with an international mix of artists at affordable prices. A former curator and producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival editions, Pope has also organized benefit art exhibitions for Housing Works, AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA) and Don’t Bungle the Jungle!, an event co-founded by Madonna and Kenny Scharf to save the rainforest. Pope recently published a book in Brazil on the New York art world, titled Manhattan: Contemporary Art, and she is a contributing writer for several Brazilian publications, as well as Casa Vogue.
Elise Van Middelem is an Artspace Curatorial Advisor with a deep knowledge of the European art market. Over the past seven years, Elise has been the Europe Events Manager of Louis Vuitton, the premiere luxury goods company, where she’s overseen events in Europe, Russia, India and the Middle East.
Collecting and looking at great art has been a crucial element of her cultural education. Elise’s mother Griet has a contemporary art foundation, De 11 Lijnen, where one to two projects by groundbreaking artists are organized each year.
In 2008, Elise started her own independent art consultant company for luxury design houses and international companies. Her clients include Hotel Le Royal Monceau in Paris; Louis Vuitton in Munich, Dusseldorf, London, Brussels, Beirut and Dubai and Solidere in Beirut.
The search for essence and innovation in the approach to art has played a major role in her daily activities. Throughout her personal life and professional career, Elise has established a large and exclusive network of relationships with artists, curators, museum directors and collectors.
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