Scaffold founder and director Claire Huschle has over two decades of arts management experience. She served as Director of George Mason University’s Arts Management program, where she has been teaching since 2007. She was awarded a fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, where she worked with the Center’s senior leadership and co-produced a study on regional trends in audience engagement. She served as Executive Director of the Arlington Arts Center (now the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington). In that role, she significantly increased the operating budget, built operational reserves, negotiated a 25-year lease, and brought together a talented staff, raising the organization’s profile both regionally and nationally.
Previously, Huschle was the Director of Target Gallery in the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, VA, and simultaneously served as the center’s Community Liaison, coordinating a national conference on starting community-based art centers and liaising with arts groups and advocacy organizations. She has served on numerous grant review panels around the Washington, DC region and for the National Endowment for the Arts. As a curator, her exhibitions have been reviewed in the Washington Post and ArtPapers. She worked with artist Margaret Boozer and soil scientist Dr. Richard Shaw to produce a chapter in Field to Palette: Dialogues in Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (Taylor & Francis, 2019). She is a founding co-director of the Art Extension Service of the Urban Soils Institute in New York City and a resident member of Red Dirt Studio in Mt. Rainier, MD. She is also a senior consultant to Good Insight, an executive search firm and governance consultancy serving the social sector.
Huschle received her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA degree in Art History from the University of Michigan, with high honors. She and her wife live in Washington, DC, where they enjoy both arts and sports events in equal measure.
Image: Heidi Wagner Photography