Laurie Macfee (she/her) is an art administrator, poet, artist, and educator. She joined the Arts Research Center in 2018, served as Program Director, and was named Associate Director in Jan 2021; she manages all the day-to-day operations of ARC including programs, event management, grants & fellowships, finances, website, and PR, in concert with the center's visionary faculty directors. Over the past eight years, she has been fortunate to work with directors Julia Bryan-Wilson and Beth Piatote, interims Natalia Brizuela and Chiyuma Elliott, and Shannon Jackson in alignment with Berkeley Arts + Design. Macfee has over 20 years of arts administration experience in non-profit community and higher education organizations. Prior to joining UC Berkeley she was Writing Program Director and Grants Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center; Curator of Education and Museum School Director at the Nevada Museum of Art; Director the Contemporary Art Gallery at University of Nevada, Reno; and Co-founder of YouthArtworks, a non-profit art apprenticeship program for at-risk youth. Highlights of her time at ARC include grant co-writer, cohort leader, and facilitator of the Poetry & the Senses program; working with Director Piatote to develop and launch the Arts Development Grant program and the LIFT/LOFT conversation series; and designing/building our new website with the ARC team, including a focus on the research archives: a searchable database directory of all the artists who have worked with ARC over 25 years, plus event, video and blog documentation.
Macfee's poems have appeared in Washington Square Review, Ninth Letter, Forklift, Ohio, Tupelo Quarterly, and Rattle among others; her photos have been shown internationally and in publications which include hyperallergic.com & contemporaryperformance.com; over 200 reside in Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection for Project 929: Mapping the Solar. Macfee earned her M.F.A in Creative Writing/Poetry from Sierra Nevada University. She holds a B.F.A Fine Art/Photography and BA Liberal Studies from San Jose State University, and studied in the M.F.A. Fine Art program at University of South Florida and the MAEd Education/Arts Curriculum Design program at the University of Nevada Reno. She is working on her first poetry MS.