Santa Fe Art Institute Appoints Jessica Gaynelle Moss as Artist Relations Director

The Santa Fe Art Institute has appointed Jessica Gaynelle Moss as its new Artist Relations Director, adding an artist, curator, and residency leader to the organization’s leadership team as it enters what it describes as a new period of growth.

Moss joins SFAI under executive director Toccarra Thomas and will oversee the institute’s artist engagement strategy, including its fellowship and residency programs, alumni relations, collaborative partnerships, and professional development initiatives. The appointment signals where the organization wants to place its energy: closer to artists, closer to community, and more intentionally around support structures that shape creative life beyond the studio.

Founded in 1985, the Santa Fe Art Institute has built its identity around artist-driven programming at the intersection of contemporary art and public life. The institute has engaged more than 5,000 artists and creative practitioners and served more than 30,000 community members over the past four decades.

A Leader Built for Artist-Centered Infrastructure

Moss arrives with a background that fits that mission closely. Her work spans residency development, nonprofit leadership, public art, and community engagement, with experience connected to institutions including The City of Pittsburgh, The Heinz Endowment, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Art + Culture.

She has also spent years building artist support systems directly. Since 2013, Moss has founded, led, and supported artist residency programs across the country. She is the founding director of The Roll Up CLT, a neighborhood-based artist residency launched in 2016, and serves as managing director and curator of Sibyls Shrine, a national network and residency program founded by artist Alisha B. Wormsley. Sibyls Shrine supports more than 150 Black artists with mothering practices across 19 states, offering financial support, professional development, exhibition opportunities, and childcare.

Moss holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, a master’s degree in Arts Administration, Policy and Management from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is also a 2018 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Moss and the Future of SFAI

In a statement, Moss said she was honored to join an organization with a history of challenging traditional gatekeeping and centering artists as “partners, thinkers and leaders.” That language offers a clue to how this role may develop. The title is Artist Relations Director, though the scope outlined by SFAI suggests something broader: helping shape how the institution defines artist support at a moment when residency models, nonprofit arts organizations, and funding structures are all under pressure to become more equitable and sustainable.

Artist support is often discussed in broad terms, though the actual conditions that allow artists to keep working tend to be far more practical: money, time, care infrastructure, institutional access, and sustained professional relationships. Moss’s work has been shaped by those realities, particularly in spaces focused on Black artists, caregiving, and community-rooted practice.

Her appointment arrives at a moment when more arts organizations are being pushed to clarify what artist-centered practice actually means in operational terms. At SFAI, that question now sits partly in Moss’s hands.