Patricia E. Harris is the First Deputy Mayor of City of New York, the City’s highest appointed position, and is the first woman in New York City’s history to serve in this role. As First Deputy Mayor, Harris manages the operations of City Hall, including policy and personnel decisions, and oversees a number of agencies and departments, including Cultural Affairs, Parks & Recreation, Consumer Affairs, Design and Construction, Landmarks Preservation, NYC Service, Special Events, and City Hall’s philanthropic arm, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.

As First Deputy Mayor, Harris has helped ensure that New York’s cultural community remains a key priority for city government. Through her leadership, the Bloomberg Administration supports more than 1,200 cultural organizations in all five boroughs. She was instrumental in reforming the City’s funding process for cultural organizations, which has provided more resources to more groups faster than ever before, and helped lead the creation of the City’s Design and Construction Excellence initiative. She also continues to help bring world-class public art exhibitions to all five boroughs. Most notably, Harris spearheaded such groundbreaking projects as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates in Central Park, and Olafur Eliasson’s The New York City Waterfalls along the East River. 

Harris represented Mayor Bloomberg on the 9/11 Memorial Jury, the committee charged with selecting the final design of the 9/11 Memorial. The 13-member Memorial Jury, which included world-renowned artists and architects and prominent arts and cultural professionals, reviewed more than 5,200 submissions to what would prove to be the largest open design competition in U.S. history.

Harris is also the Chief Executive Officer of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which is dedicated to the advancement of the arts, education, environmental protection, government innovation, and public health.

Harris serves on several City-affiliated boards, including the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, World Trade Center Performing Arts Center, Friends of the Highline, Governors Island Trust, Gracie Mansion Conservancy, NYC & Company, and New York City Global Partners, Inc. She also currently serves on the Boards of Cornell University and Franklin and Marshall College.

Harris began her career in public service with Mayor Edward I. Koch, serving first as Assistant to the Mayor and then as Executive Director of the City’s Art Commission (now the Public Design Commission). She went on to work at Serino Coyne Advertising before moving to Bloomberg L.P., where she managed philanthropy, public relations, and governmental affairs. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Government from Franklin and Marshall College.

Cecilia Alemani is the Donald R. Mullen, Jr. Curator and Director of High Line Art, the program of public art that takes place on and around the High Line in New York. She also collaborates with the Frieze Art Fair, where she is an advisor of Frame, the section of the fair devoted to solo presentations of emerging artists, and is in charge of the Projects and Talk Programs in New York.

Prior to that, Alemani has collaborated with many museums, institutions and foundations, while also pursuing more unconventional projects with non-profits and informal organizations. In 2011 Alemani worked as guest curator for Performa. She is the co-founder of No Soul For Sale, a festival of independent spaces, non-profit organizations and artists collectives which took place at X Initiative in June 2009 and at Tate Modern – Turbine Hall in May 2010 as the main event for the museum’s tenth anniversary. From January 2009 to February 2010, she served as Curatorial Director of X Initiative, New York, a year-long experimental non-profit space in Chelsea, where she has curated numerous exhibitions including solo shows by Keren Cytter, Luke Fowler, Hans Haacke, Christian Holstad, Derek Jarman, Mika Tajima, Tris Vonna-Michell and Artur Zmijewski. At X Initiative she conceived and organized more than 50 events including performances, panel discussions, symposia, lectures, concerts and screenings.

Alemani also served as an advisor to the Film Festival in Venice, for the category Orizzonti, devoted to new tendencies in filmmaking, and she oversaw the organization of the Future Generation Art Prize, a new prize for emerging artists established by the Viktor Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev. From 2007 to 2008, she served as Curator of Special Projects for Artissima, Turin, Italy.

As an independent curator she organized numerous exhibitions in museums, non for profits spaces and galleries, including Glee (Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, July 2011), The Comfort of Strangers (MoMA/PS1, New York, July 2010), Solaris (Gió Marconi Gallery, Milan, June 2009), ONLY CONNECT (Bloomberg Headquarters with Art in General, New York, 2008), boundLES (several venues in the Lower East Side, New York), and Things Fall Apart All Over Again (Artists Space, New York, May 2005).