Dr. Hilary Whitham Sánchez is Director of Development, managing VLA’s dedicated community of supporters. An art historian and curator, she has more than fifteen years of experience in fundraising and strategic planning for organizations including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Amos Eno Gallery. In 2015, she co-founded Philadelphia’s nationally recognized Incubation Series curatorial training program, whose alumnae include artists in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. VLA’s mission to provide legal protections for those without the means to do so themselves aligns with her own professional commitments as a first generation Cuban American and the first person in her family to pursue a career in the arts industry.
Whitham Sanchez holds a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, and her work has been supported by the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Mellon foundation, among others. Her first book project analyzes the role of African objects in the exhibitions and performances of artists across six decades of the 20th century, integrating archival research with the work of anthropologists and heritage-bearers. She and her husband, a filmmaker, live in Queens.