Program Highlights | 2019 Fellows Complete January Session of the CCL Fellowship

This January, the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) welcomed its twelfth class of Fellows to New York City for the beginning of their five-month Fellowship. Over the two-week intensive, they received instruction from Columbia Business School professors and met with leaders in the field, delving into different approaches to leadership in the cultural sector.

Fellows joined the cohort from a wide range of institutions, including university art museums, contemporary art spaces, regional art centers, and both culturally-specific and encyclopedic institutions. The diversity of institutional type informed and enriched conversations over the two weeks on a range of issues, including the social responsibility of institutions, collection building, and inclusive audience engagement. Fellows foregrounded the range of issues in discussions with museum directors, heads of foundations, fellow curators, collectors, and trustees, their varying institutional contexts providing a range of approaches to understanding leadership in addressing issues facing the field. The Columbia Business School curriculum, developed each year in concert with CCL to be responsive to current topics in the field, provided instruction in responsible leadership and moral governance, leading change, managerial accounting, negotiations, and organizational alignment, among other topics. Self-knowledge and reflection is an important theme in the January portion of the Fellowship, and coursework allowed the Fellows to better understand their own modes of leadership. 

Following the conclusion of the CCL Fellowship January intensive, Fellows returned to their home institutions where they continue work on their Diversity Mentoring Initiatives and Organizational Impact Plans, and will complete week-long residencies with museum directors around the country. The Fellows will reconvene in May for the concluding week of the CCL Fellowship program to share their progress and build upon the conversations that began in January.