Amy Whitaker

Amy Whitaker is a faculty member at NYU Steinhardt. She works as the intersection of art, economics, and politics. The author of four books and numerous articles, she has received the Penrose Award for equitable economic proposals for artists and the Krouse and Hutchins Prizes for humane work in political science. Her book Museum Legs received the Sarah Verdone Award, and her book Art Thinking was a Silver Medalist in the Axiom Awards. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Guardian, Harpers, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, and others. She holds an MBA and an MFA as well as a BA from Williams College in art and political science and a PhD in political economy.

An artist herself and someone who has worked for many years to believe in and invent ideas that are sometimes ahead of their time, she has served as an early advisor to others including TED fellows, Joan Mitchell Grantees, and founders of The OpEd Project, Bitmark, Pollinator, and Zero Art Fair. She worked previously for the artist Jenny Holzer and the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Tate, as well as for early-stage internet law research, economics of the FDA,  the economic mapping company Locus and the investment fund D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P. She is at work on a book about democracy as a design project. 

Please see below Strategy Cases in the Arts, authored by VAA graduate students. They are intended to broaden the available teaching resources internationally and institutionally, with timely cases. They can be downloaded below under Creative Commons license.