Community Forum on Art, Culture, & Placemaking

Featuring an in-person presentation by Jason Schupbach
Director of Design Programs & Visual Arts Division Team Leader National Endowment for the Arts

6:30 p.m.: Reception in 1st-floor lobby, outside Hallwalls Gallery, which will be open.
7:00 p.m.: Presentation in Asbury Hall.

Free and open to the public.

Hallwalls is pleased to serve as the site for this special community forum organized by Partners for a Livable Western New York and supported with funds from Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo. Our distinguished visiting speaker, Jason Schupbach, became director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in May 2010. In this position, he manages the NEA's grantmaking for design and the NEA's design initiatives, such as the Mayors' Institute on City Design as well Our Town, which provides funding in recognition of the role that the arts can play in economic revitalization and in creating livable, sustainable communities.

Prior to coming to the NEA, Schupbach held the first-in-the-nation position of creative economy industry director for the Massachusetts Office of Business Development where his accomplishments included coordinating the growth of new industry cluster groups— such as the Design Industry Group of Massachusetts (DIGMA)—and launching a Design Excellence initiative, an effort to improve procurement processes in Massachusetts in order to build more sustainable and longer-lasting buildings and communities, and increase the number of designers being offered contracts.

From 2004 to 2008, Schupbach was director of ArtistLink, where among other duties he managed a statewide artist space development technical assistance initiative that resulted in the creation of more than 60 projects in 20 communities for a total of 350 units of live/work spaces and more than 500,000 square feet of artist space. In addition, he managed the first ever artist housing predevelopment grant program, giving out $50,000 in awards.

Schupbach's experience also includes serving as National Artist Space Initiative Consultant for Leveraging Investments in Creativity from 2003 to 2007, where he was the key editor for two reports from the Urban Institute on developing artist space. From 2003 to 2004, Schupbach worked as capital projects manager and staff urban planner/designer for NYC's Department of Cultural Affairs. In this position, his accomplishments included managing more than $100 million in capital projects for cultural institutions in coordination with other NYC agencies and assisting in the development of guidelines to involve artists in streetscape design and planning processes in NYC.

Schupbach received his BS in public health from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Master's in city planning with an urban design certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.