Staff

Eleanor Savage has been with Jerome Foundation since 2007. She is active in the philanthropic and arts communities as an agitator for equitable practice. Eleanor is the Vice Chair on the Board of Directors for Grantmakers in the Arts. She is a media artist, an activist and has instigated, curated and produced many community-focused/artist-centered events in the Twin Cities: Naked Stages; Forbidden Fruit Radio; Vulva Riot; and Dyke Night at the Walker Art Center. She was previously the Associate Director of Event and Media Production at the Walker Art Center for sixteen years.

Eleanor's life-long commitment is promoting human rights as a guiding force and working actively as a white, gender-queer butch against racism and all the other intersecting oppressions.

Born in Saigon and rooted in Minneapolis, Truc Anh (TA, pronouns she/hers) is a queer, Southeast Asian artist/maker, and racial justice grantmaker. She is passionate about creating the conditions for transformative change that centers racial, gender, and disability justice, especially at the intersections of LGBTQIA+ and Southeast Asian communities. In her previous role at Borealis Philanthropy, TA supported the Racial Equity to Accelerate Change (REACH) Fund which supported racial equity practitioners/capacity builders in the nonprofit sector.

As a 1.5 generation immigrant by way of war, Truc Anh is powered by stories of resistance and resilience. She practices art for healing and for joy. In her spare time, TA can be found outside in her garden, exploring the North Shore, cooking with her friends, or reading. Truc Anh graduated from Carleton College with a degree in Sociology and Anthropology with a minor in Women & Gender Studies. 

Melissa Levin is a values-driven arts administrator, artist-centered curator, and steadfast advocate for just and equitable practices in the arts. For more than 12 years, Melissa worked at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) where she was the Vice President of Cultural Programs. Her role encompassed wide-ranging institutional and artistic leadership, overseeing LMCC’s major artist-centered and public-facing initiatives including the River To River Festival, the Arts Center at Governors Island, and LMCC’s artist residency programs. She next led a newly formed Artists, Estates, and Foundations division at Art Agency, Partners in its inaugural three years. Starting in 2016, with collaborator Alex Fialho, Melissa has stewarded the legacy of and curated critically acclaimed exhibitions dedicated to the late artist Michael Richards, including Michael Richards: Winged (LMCC, 2016; Stanford University, 2019) and Richards’ first museum retrospective, Michael Richards: Are You Down? (The Bronx Museum, 2023–24; North Carolina Museum of Art, 2023; MOCA North Miami, 2021).

Melissa additionally serves on the boards of the Artist Communities Alliance and Danspace Project. She holds a B.A. with honors in Visual Art and Art History from Barnard College.

Andrea Brown joined the Jerome Foundation in 2016. She came to the Jerome Foundation after five years at the Walker Art Center, where she was Associate Director of Strategic Marketing, and prior to that Associate Director of Digital Marketing and Marketing Manager. She worked in the New York office of the American Academy in Berlin before taking a 7-year detour into software at Marketing Bridge/Gage Marketing where she was Lead Account Supervisor.

Andrea has a B.A. in American Studies from Smith College.

Nell Augustin is a queer Haitian-American artist development executive and independent producer advocating for creative freedom, risk, and redefining investment.

Granting over $1.5MM in four years as Director of Original Voices Documentary Films at NBCUniversal, she has proudly supported award-winning nonfiction and hybrid films such as I Didn’t See You There (SFF22), Mija (SFF22), Hummingbirds (BERLINALE23), Bad Press (SFF23), Unseen (HOT DOCS 23), Union (SFF24), Homegrown (VENICE24), Ghetto Children (NOFF24) and Love Birds (forthcoming 2025). Nell was named a 2021 DOC NYC Documentary New Leader and selected for the 2022 Rockwood Documentary Leaders Fellowship supported by the Ford Foundation. Born in New York City to parents from Minnesota and Haiti, she splits her time between Brooklyn and St. Paul with her fiancé and dog.

Nell has film programmed for indie documentary film festivals including True/False, CIFF, and Big Sky, led filmmaker labs and seminars for BlackStar Projects, Firelight Media, and UnionDocs, and served on festival juries and funding panels for BAVC, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, Brooklyn Arts Council, Chicago Media Project, Chicken & Egg Pictures, Creative Capital, Define American, Doc Society, Duke University’s DocX Development Lab, Film Independent, The Gotham, IDA, Indie Memphis, LEF Foundation’s Moving Image Fund, Mezcla Media, NEA, New Orleans Film Festival, NYU Production Lab, Open City, Palm Springs ShortFest, POV, SFFILM, and Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and New Frontier Story Labs.  Nell is a proud member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Summa Cum Laude from Fordham University with a degree in Anthropology and Africana Studies.