Diya Vij, a vice president at Powerhouse Arts, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization, has been chosen to lead New York’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Mayor Zohran Mamdani will announce on Saturday.
A veteran of the city’s creative communities, Vij will be the first person of South Asian heritage to hold the position.
The department is the largest municipal funder of culture in the country, supporting 1,000 nonprofit cultural organizations and providing $245 million in funding in the last fiscal year.
Vij, 40, comes with a background in public and socially engaged art, especially in the mayor’s home borough of Queens. She has worked at the Queens Museum, the High Line and Creative Time in addition to Powerhouse Arts, where she began in November as director of curatorial and arts programs.
From 2014 to 2018, Vij worked for Tom Finkelpearl, a former cultural commissioner under Mayor Bill de Blasio. She was also a member of Mamdani’s arts and culture transition committee and will succeed Laurie Cumbo, who was appointed by Mayor Eric Adams in 2022.
In a statement to The New York Times, Mamdani praised Vij as a “visionary and deeply thoughtful leader who understands that art is not ornamental to this city — it is essential to it.”
“Under Diya’s leadership, we will fight to keep New York a city where artists can afford to live and create,” he wrote, “and where every New Yorker, in every borough, can experience the energy and inspiration that makes art possible.”
The appointment is an important one for Mamdani, who has placed the city’s artistic community at the heart of his economic agenda. Under his administration, the Department of Cultural Affairs will be overseen by the city’s first deputy mayor for economic justice, Julie Su.
Vij steps into the job at a particularly fraught time.
The city’s recent preliminary budget proposal projects a $5.4 billion gap over two years. That could mean a $30 million cut to cultural affairs. And after decades of growth, New York’s creative sector is shrinking as artists leave the city because of the increased cost of living and as galleries and small arts organizations shut down.
At the federal level, hundreds of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities were canceled by the Trump administration in 2025. “New York is taking over the role from the federal government of being the most important cultural funder in America,” Finkelpearl said.
Vij said there was a lot at stake because the public infrastructure for arts and culture has been eroded.
“We see how our organizations have to contract because funding is contracting,” she said, “because there’s an uneven Covid recovery, because there’s political intimidation coming from the federal government and the right.
“All this instability creates a landscape of fear that makes it really difficult for organizations to take the risks that they need to take, to address the issues of the day and be spaces for community to come together in joy and imagination and dissent.”
Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the largest private funder of arts and culture in the United States, is equally enthusiastic.
“She’s had an amazing career at the intersection of art and public life,” Alexander said. “She’s got experience with large organizations, with small ones, and with public-private partnerships that are so important in New York City. It’s very unusual to see that combination of different kinds of organizational experience.”
Kemi Ilesanmi, the former director of the Laundromat Project, a Brooklyn-based arts nonprofit, served on the department’s advisory commission under the last three culture czars. She said the selection of Vij “is the most exciting, crazy, brilliant, beautiful news I’ve heard in a long time.” She added that it was also a bit unexpected.
“She isn’t a director of a big museum,” she said. “She’s not on speed dial by bigwigs in the cultural world. It’s an unexpected and bold choice.”
Vij said that while she was interested in bringing more artists into the process of city government, “I’m also focused on finding the everyday efficiencies within the agency — addressing payment delays, figuring out how to streamline application processes for organizations seeking support.”
The Adams administration faced criticism for its slowness in making payments to nonprofits.
Vij was born and raised in Connecticut and attended Bard College, where she studied photography and politics. She joined the Queens Museum, then under the directorship of Finkelpearl, first as a curatorial fellow and later in digital communications, while simultaneously working on a master’s degree in art history at Hunter College. At the time, Vij said, “the Queens Museum was really leading the charge on socially engaged art and how a museum could show up as a neighbor in the community.”
When Finkelpearl moved on to lead the Department of Cultural Affairs, Vij joined him. She inaugurated the Public Artists in Residence program in 2015, in which artists are embedded in agencies across the city, and worked on policy issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion.
She also worked with the department’s monuments commission, which was charged with adding public statues depicting women and people of color. The initiative, largely led by de Blasio’s wife at the time, Chirlane McCray, was controversial, and may have led to Finkelpearl’s sudden departure from the department in 2019.
Vij left in 2018, emerging at the High Line and Creative Time, organizations devoted to public art. At Creative Time, she curated large-scale projects around the city, including, most recently, Chloë Bass’s “takeover” of the MTA’s public address system for a conceptual sound art piece.
Thomas Lax, curator of performance and new media at the Museum of Modern Art, called Vij “a quintessential advocate of artists and arts organization.”
He cited Vij’s work with the Indigenous collective New Red Order on “The World’s Unfair,” a public art installation in Long Island City that called for the return of land to Native Americans. “She was able to do something that few other arts organization would have dared to do because of fear,” he said.
Ilesanmi said she expected that Vij would bring fresh ideas into what she described as a somewhat siloed department.
“I hope that she will center the idea that art is for everyone in this city — centering people of color, centering folks in neighborhoods where art is more local, dispersed and grass-roots, centering the disabled,” Ilesanmi said. “Artists actually get left out of the conversation more than you would think.”
Vij said she believed her appointment “affirms that New York City celebrates — not punishes, not just tolerates — the audacity of artists and cultural organizations to take on the urgent questions of the day.”
She added, “I’m excited to apply my political lens to strengthening the systems that makes open, accessible and sometimes radical cultural activities possible.”
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