Mykal Urbina, Executive Director

Mykal Urbina most recently served as the Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Orange County, CA. In her position, Mykal developed, solicited, and executed partnerships with local businesses, national and family foundations, and Fortune 100 companies seeking to support artistic programming, arts education, and community engagement through arts and culture. Under her leadership, the Center secured its first six-figure corporate partnership to support Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion arts education programming in public schools, signed its first-ever multi-year Official Healthcare Partner, and successfully applied for and received a $10million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prior to coming to Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Mykal served as the Director of Corporate Sponsorships for the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center where she oversaw all corporate partnerships for artistic programming, community outreach, and the Philharmonic’s 2017 Europe and 2018 Asia Tours.

Mykal spent the first five years of her career as a Partnerships Manager for DonorsChoose, a national crowd-funding platform advocating for equity and access to resources for public school students and teachers. While at DonorsChoose, Mykal was selected for and completed the Fellowship for Emerging Leaders in Public Service through NYU Wagner’s Research Center for Leadership in Action.

Mykal holds a B.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Ithaca College. 

RICHARD BUSHMAN, Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors

For a number of years now, I and others have been working on the creation of a Center for Latter-day Saint Arts in New York City.  The Center’s goal is to create a nurturing metropolitan home for Latter-day Saint artists and to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of their work.

The idea grows out of the belief that arts (visual arts, drama, film, music, dance, fiction, poetry and so on) are a powerful way to tell the story of the Latter-day Saints.    

The Center provides a site where Latter-day Saint art can be viewed, heard, criticized, and appreciated in the context of the broader art world.  In New York, we see more clearly just what our artists have to say.

We have been greatly encouraged by the response to the Center.  Everywhere, we have met people who grasp the potential of a Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.  They have given of their time, resources, and talent to bring the Center into existence and give us a glimpse of its promising future.

We hope that others will find merit in this promising new venture and join us in bringing it to pass.

 Richard Bushman

GLEN NELSON, Co-Founder, Director of Special Projects

Hello. Let me tell you a story.
 
A young concert pianist studying at Juilliard approached me one Sunday morning. She was programming her master’s degree recital and wanted to perform at least one work by a Latter-day Saint composer as a way to express her own belief. “Where can I go,” she asked, “to find the Church’s archive of classical music?” The short answer is: nowhere, it doesn’t exist.

Regretfully, I would have a similar response to queries about a digital archive of our culture’s paintings, biographies of composers, monographs on architects, designers, poets, filmmakers, or choreographers, and academic scholarship using Latter-day Saint arts to illustrate concepts about the larger entity of culture—all of the traditional hallmarks of cultural scholarship. Unfortunately, those things are rare with us. And there are consequences for it.
 
Every year, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, young BYU grads come to New York to begin advanced degrees in the arts. I like to take them to lunch, and as something of a parlor game, I ask them what Latter-day Saint artists they admire. I regret to report that their answer, without exception, is the same: that they know none other than their immediate peers and their professors. How can that be? Furthermore, they ask whether it is possible to be an active member and an artist, as if there were no precedent for it.
 
It is unthinkable to imagine a student from Howard University unfamiliar with great African-American artists; one could not imagine a student from Bryn Mawr ignorant of great women artists—further, those artists would speak to their identity and give them voice—but our students (and the membership, generally) are largely unaware of our most accomplished artists from 1830 to the present. Maybe the time is here to address the problem. The first step is to engage tastemakers and scholars regarding Latter-day Saint arts itself. I hope you’ll join us in the conversation.
 
Glen Nelson