Mara Manus is leaving her function as CEO of Pioneer Works, the Brooklyn arts and science-focused non-profit area based by artist Dustin Yellin. That wraps up a quick tenure that started in 2023 and marked a swift interval of transformation for the establishment.
Gabriel Florenz, who has served as a founding creative director because it opened in 2012, will transfer into an expanded function as govt director.
In an interview with ARTnews, Florenz mentioned that Manus met the group’s fundraising aims a number of months sooner than their authentic two-year objective and set the founders as much as proceed on their artist-academic-led mission. Underneath Manus’s course, the group finalized the third section of a $30 million capital marketing campaign, which was accomplished in early 2025.
“The plan was for Mara to return in construct the infrastructure and end the marketing campaign,” Florenz mentioned. “We don’t need to be a single level establishment, we like collectivity, we need to be an artist-scientist-led group. She helped us get via plenty of intense institutional frameworks that we inbuilt a brief period of time.”
Florenz’s new function, which took impact in March, will broaden to fundraising efforts and donor growth. Stephanie Hemshrot, who has led capital tasks and run operations since 2021, was appointed as Chief Working Officer in April. Janna Levin, the founding director of sciences, will proceed in her function.
The hiring of Manus in September 2023 was massive information on the time, meriting a narrative within the New York Times. She was the highest-profile skilled to return to Pioneer Works, and the primary to have the title of CEO. Manus got here to Pioneer Works from the New York State Council on the Arts, the place she spent seven years as govt director overseeing $100 million in funding and supporting 3,000 organizations. Earlier than that, she led New York’s prestigious Public Theater and labored on the Ford Basis.
In March, Manus introduced her departure on LinkedIn, writing that her accomplishments included “establishing a sturdy inside Finance division, rebuilding our Improvement staff and implementing a complete CRM system” in addition to deepening engagement with native faculties and neighborhood. “All of this presents a pure transition level for management development,” she wrote.
Manus’s exit comes a month after the artwork heart held a gathering of neighborhood members and authorities officers, together with NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner Laurie Cumbo, to mark the completion of a $12 million renovation to reinforce accessibility—together with including an elevator for ADA entry—and broaden programming. Pioneer Works reportedly will get 50,000 guests yearly and gives 90 p.c of its programming to the general public free-of-charge.
Pioneer Works, which has a full-time employees of 43 folks and at present has a $9.1 million working finances for 2025, launched its first capital marketing campaign in 2019 earlier than the beginning of Covid. The $30 million marketing campaign had as its first precedence the acquisition of its 1866 constructing, which then made the nonprofit eligible to obtain about $5.7 million in metropolis and state funding. Over the previous three-plus years, the humanities heart has undergone a multi-stage renovation to deliver its 1866 constructing as much as code and add facilities. It closed from December 2021 to August 2022 and once more from early 2024 to Sept 2024 to perform these adjustments. The roof was changed, an HVAC system was put in, and bogs have been added. What stays to be accomplished is a deliberate rooftop observatory.
Manus is the third particular person to be in an govt place on the group because it opened in 2012. All through the last decade that Pioneer Works has been open, the title has modified quite a lot of instances.
Yellin and Florenz successfully headed up the establishment till 2016 when She was changed by an govt with extra expertise within the nonprofit world, Marcia Santoni, who had spent seven years as Deputy Director of Pathways Nationwide, a housing initiative. Santoni’s title was managing director and COO. Santoni left in 2019, and was changed Eric Shiner, former director of the Andy Warhol Museum, who turned Pioneer Works’ first-ever govt director.
Shiner left in spring of 2021, and was changed by Maxine Dalio. Not like all the administrators since Cooper, Dalio was a Pioneer Works veteran. She’d began at Pioneer Works in fall 2017 engaged on development and development, coming there after a three-year stint in growth on the Park Avenue Armory; she rose to exterior affairs, then, in December 2020, to deputy director, earlier than changing Shiner as govt director. Dalio left in late 2022, after solely a bit of over a yr and a half within the prime place. After a quick stint below interim director Jill Eisenhard, Manus took the reins in October 2023.
When Manus was employed, she advised the Instances she would work carefully with Becca Keating, the newly-appointed director of development (Keating stays at Pioneer Works.) Manus got here in at a time of restoration; the group hadn’t but seen its annual income, together with revenue created from grants and exhibitions and different packages, bounce again to its pre-Covid degree of the $14.3 million it reported in 2019. In 2023, it reported income of $13.4 million.
Gabriel Florenz, who’s Yellin’s second cousin as been creative director since Pioneer Works opened and now takes the reins from Manus. When Manus’s appointment was introduced in 2023, Florenz advised the Instances her rent introduced a way of stability: “I’ve at all times actually thought, how do you make a construction that’s essentially the most orderly potential, so essentially the most dysfunction can occur inside it? Probably the most artistic chaos and power — that stunning sort of freedom.” With confidence of their new chief govt, he mentioned, “we are able to fly now.”
