Yona Backer is a producer, curator, consultant and a founding partner of Third Streaming, LLC. She has had a twenty-year career supporting artists and cultural institutions that fall outside of the mainstream, and is committed to a collaborative approach to arts programming and management. In 2009, Backer co-curated the exhibition “Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary Art from the West Indies” in Hartford, CT. This show featured artists, filmmakers and music video directors from the region, many of whom had never shown in the United States before.
Before founding Third Streaming in 2010, Backer was Senior Program Officer at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York. In addition to evaluating grant proposals and researching potential grantee arts organizations across the country and around the globe, she helped conceive new national programs. One of these was the curatorial Research and Art Writers grants, the latter administered in collaboration with the Creative Capital Foundation; another was a pilot program that made small grants to artist collectives and emerging art groups. Backer also worked to expand existing grant programs, including a national capacity-building initiative designed to strengthen the infrastructures of artist-centered arts organizations and independent art journals. Key components of this initiative were the biannual national conferences that the Foundation sponsored in cities around the country. Backer organized these three-day meetings, which were attended by executive directors, curators, and board chairs of art groups from across the United States. Participants discussed best practices and exchanged information about their organizations through panels, presentations, and informal conversations. Backer also designed the extensive cultural programs that supplemented conference activities; these gave conferees a chance to explore the host city’s art scene through special tours, meetings with local artists and curators, and social events.
Before starting work at the Warhol Foundation, Backer directed the visual arts program at the Americas Society and was director at Throckmorton Fine Art, a gallery specializing in pre-Columbian and contemporary Latin American art and photography. Backer has lived and travelled widely throughout Europe, the Caribbean and the global South. Her journeys have been a major inspiration for her work. She also serves as an advisor for several national and international art and media groups. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, raised in Amsterdam, Backer has been based in New York City since the 1980s. She holds a master’s degree in art history and archaeology from Columbia University and received a bachelor of arts from Hunter College.