Sarah Bellamy, Lori Pourier, and Ryan Wong Elected to the Jerome Foundation Board of Directors

Sarah Bellamy (elected 2018) is a nationally renowned racial equity facilitator and practitioner of racial healing. Her methods are holistic, profound, and foster powerful intimacy and authenticity for clients. She brings a wealth of scholarship, strategic acuity, and deep compassion to consultative and coaching relationships. Her writing focuses on memoir, personal essays, plays, and short stories. She is a stage director and the president of Penumbra, a center for racial healing that houses one of the nation’s oldest and largest African American theatre companies.

Sarah is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. She has taught at Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and served as Visiting Professor of Theatre and Culture at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Her lectures on the power of race and representation have been presented across the country illuminating the ways in which images, narratives, and media influence perception and ultimately shape lives. She is a skilled and dynamic public speaker offering audiences fresh, big-hearted, and courageous perspectives on a wide range of topics. She is especially recognized for her work on racial healing, authenticity, and resiliency. 

Sarah has been awarded the Hubert H. Humphrey Public Leadership Award, a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and served on the Board of Directors for Theatre Communications Group. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Jerome Foundation. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two small children. More at www.sbellamy.com

Photo credit: Simone Lueck

Lori Lea Pourier, (Oglala Lakota) (elected 2018) has served as the President/CEO, First Peoples Fund (FPF) since 1998. Dedicated to a vision of restoring and strengthening cultural assets within tribal communities for nearly 30 years, she focuses her efforts on bringing philanthropic resources to Native artist entrepreneurs and culture bearers. Through its Indigenous Arts Ecology program, FPF partners with Native CDFI's and community-based nonprofits to strengthen the support for arts and culture in tribal communities.

Her early work began at First Nations Development Institute and the executive director of the International Indigenous Women’s Network (IWN). She is a 2017 Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow, a 2013 Women’s World Summit Foundation Prize for Creativity in Rural Life, and a 2013 Louis T. Delgado Distinguished Grantmaker Award. Pourier is an alumnus of the American’s for Indian Opportunities (AIO) American Indian Ambassadors Leadership Program where she stands with more than 350 Indigenous leaders.

She has served two terms on the board of directors of the Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) and Native Americans in Philanthropy and currently serves on the Library of Congress American Folklife Center Board of Trustees. She holds a Master of Science degree from New Hampshire College Graduate School of Business.

Ryan Lee Wong (elected 2018) is a writer and arts organizer based in Brooklyn. His curatorial work connects Asian American activist histories to the present, and includes the exhibition Roots: Asian American Movements in Los Angeles 1968-80s at the Chinese American Museum and Serve the People at Interference Archive. His arts criticism, focused on the intersections between art and politics, has appeared in The Village Voice, T Magazine, and Hyperallergic, as well as catalogues for the New Museum and Social Practice Queens.

Wong has served as a Visiting Scholar at the A/P/A Institute at NYU, Managing Director of Kundiman, a Visiting Critic at RISD, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Chinese in America, and an exhibitions administrator at the Metropolitan Museum. He has presented talks at Brooklyn Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Asia Art Archive, Independent Curators International, and numerous universities.