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In 2005, Cheryl joined the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She currently serves as SAIC’s Vice President for Institutional Advancement. In 2011, Cheryl formalized the SAIC Office for Institutional Advancement bringing together the functions of Development, Alumni Affairs, and Communications & Marketing. In 2014, under the direction of the SAIC President and members of the Board of Governors, she led SAIC to embark upon the school’s first formal comprehensive fundraising campaign with a $50 million goal to support students and faculty. Prior to her role with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cheryl held positions with Museum Campus Chicago; The Field Museum of Natural History working on special projects with Sue the Dinosaur and Project Millennium; Corporate and Foundation Development with the University of Chicago’s Biological Sciences Division; and has supported various organizations as a consultant for events and development initiatives.  In addition to these positions in Chicago, Cheryl established the first fine arts community festival in her hometown of Lake Zurich, Illinois (Ela Festival of Arts), established a cooperative gallery & studio space with a team of artists in Algonquin, Illinois, and has taught art (preschool – 8th grade) at St. Joseph’s School in Libertyville, Illinois; St. Catherine’s of Siena in Dundee, Illinois; and at Kaleidoscope, a private art school in Barrington, Illinois.  Cheryl is a current School Advisory Board Member for St. Mary’s School in Riverside, Illinois and a former board member for the 16th Street Theater in Berwyn, Illinois. She received her graduate degree in Arts Administration (MA) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and her undergraduate degree (BFA) from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio in 1995.

Abigail Satinsky is an arts organizer, curator and writer on socially-engaged art: she is Curator for Exhibitions and Programs at Tufts University Art Galleries.

From 2010 – 2015, she worked at Threewalls, where she edited PHONEBOOK (a national directory of artist-run spaces and projects), co-founded the Hand-in-Glove conference and co-initiated Common Field, amongst other exhibitions and programs. She was a co-founder of the artist group InCUBATE, which started the international micro-granting network Sunday Soup, and editor of the book, Support Networks, which chronicles socially-engaged art in Chicago over the last 100 years. She was a Fellow at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University.

She has been a regular contributor to Bad at Sports podcast and blog and has written for Proximity Magazine, AREA Chicago, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, The Artist-Run Chicago Digest, and Temporary Services’ Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor and Economics.

Abigail received her MA in Arts Administration & Policy in 2009.

Laura Kirar (BFA 1993 Concentration in Interior Architecture and Sculpture)

SAIC Chancellor Walter Massey reflects on the funding of the first Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). In October, LIGO recorded gravitational waves formed by two colliding black holes and won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.