Diya Vij, a curator and current vice president of curatorial and arts programmes at Powerhouse Arts, has been picked to be New York City’s next Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) commissioner, sources with knowledge of the pick told ARTnews. The New York Times confirmed the news on Saturday.
Considered to be one of the most important jobs in the city’s arts ecosystem, the commissioner is a hotly watched role whenever a new mayor enters office. The DCA is the largest municipal funder of the arts in the US and provides funding to over 800 cultural organizations throughout the city’s five boroughs. Last fiscal year, the DCA provided $245 million in funding. Naturally, the ascension of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose wife, Rama Duwaji, is an artist, has intensified specualtion on who would be picked.
Mamdani described Vij in a statement to the Times 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, and where every New Yorker, in every borough, can experience the energy and inspiration that makes art possible,” the statement reads.
Vij, 40, will report to Julie Su, the city’s first deputy mayor for economic justice. Vij is the first person of South Asian descent to hold the commissioner role.
In November, Mamdani kicked off the speculation when he named the members of his arts and culture transition committees, a 28-member group that included art dealers, curators, journalists, and arts nonprofit administrators. Among those selected were curator and writer Kimberly Drew; Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1; Legacy Russell, executive director and chief curator at the Kitchen; and Gonzalo Casals, a former commissioner of cultural affairs for New York City.
Also on the committee was Vij, who was appointed to her position at Powerhouse, the Brooklyn-bsased hub for arts fabrication and programming, in November. It turns out her tenure at Powerhouse was very short-lived. Prior to Powerhouse, Vij served as a curator at Creative Time where she launched CTHQ, a gathering space for artists working at the intersection of art and politics; established a fellowship for socially engaged artists; relaunched the Creative Time Summit; and helped realize several public art commissions. She previously served as an associate curator of public programs at the High Line.
Vij has previously worked in the DCA for four and a half years, from 2014 to 2019 under De Blasio appointee Tom Finkelpearl, as a digital communications manager. She also launched and managed DCA’s Public Artists in Residence program and led the agency’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative. She started her career at the Queens Museum, at the time also under Finkelpearl’s leadership, first as a curatorial fellow and then in digital communications.
Vij enters the office at a turbulent period for the arts. An unstable economy and rising costs—both in the New York and across the US—has forced many galleries to close and artists to leave New York, while the Trump Administration has cut grants and funding to arts organizations and attempted to punish museums who do not follow his administration’s directives on ideology and eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. As Vij told the Times, another wrinkle is the lingering effects of the pandemic.
“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.”
She continued, “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.”
Throughout her career, Vij has championed art that is both challenging and politically engaged. Among the projects she worked on was The World’s UnFair, a heralded 2023 installation in Long Island City commissioned by Creative Time. That piece, by New Red Order, an indigenous artist collective, called for the return of public and private lands to Indigenous people.
“I’m excited to apply my political lens to strengthening the systems that makes open, accessible and sometimes radical cultural activities possible,” Vij said.
