Our Story

CHAIR

Arts and Community Advocate and Volunteer, Former Director of Arizona Commission on the Arts, Phoenix

Shelley Cohn retired in October 2005 as the Executive Director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, having served in that capacity since 1984.  She was involved in seeing the appropriation of the Arts Commission grow from 14 cents per capita to 80 cents per capita and in developing special funding initiatives including the Arizona Arts Trust Fund and Arizona ArtShare, the Arizona arts endowment fund.  She oversaw the creation of programs that supported artists and arts organizations to connect with their communities in effective and meaningful ways.

After retirement she served one year as the interim CEO of the Scottsdale Cultural Council overseeing the work of the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Scottsdale Public Art.

She has provided consulting work for The Flinn Foundation, several state and local arts agencies and has taught classes in arts entrepreneurship and arts and public policy for ASU.

She has explored new adventures outside of state government, including desert landscaping school at the Desert Botanical Garden, the Melton Program for continuing Jewish education, teaching, consulting work, yoga and desert gardening. 

Ms. Cohn has served as chair and board member of the Arizona Community Foundation, council member of the LGBTQ Center for Philanthropy at the Arizona Community Foundation, chair and board member of Childsplay, chair and board member of the Desert Botanical Garden where she just rejoined the board.   She recently rejoined the advisory board of ASU Hillel.

She holds a masters degree in Humanities from Arizona State University and an undergraduate degree in English from Washington University.

VICE CHAIR

Arts and Community Advocate and Volunteer, Phoenix

Jane Jozoff has a strong background in arts advocacy, serving as Chair of the Arizona State Arts Commission and the Phoenix Arts and Culture Commission for six years each. She served on the Heard Museum Board of Trustees for seven years then joined as Trustee of the Phoenix Art Museum for three terms, contributing to excellence of Arizona’s top museums.

Jane has been instrumental in installing art at the Banner Health Wound Care Center, Barrow Neurological Institute, and the Lowell Observatory.

One of her strong passions is the Desert Botanical Garden, which features rotating art exhibits of national significance.

A dedicated advocate for the arts, she has supported Arizona’s cultural landscape ever since moving here over 28 years ago.

Jane holds a BFA degree with honors from Ohio University.

TREASURER

Arts History Professor Arizona State University and American Curator Phoenix Art Museum, Tempe

Betsy Fahlman is an art historian who has taught at Arizona State University for 36 years. A specialist in American art history, she has worked extensively on women artists, the relationship between American art and industrial themes, and the art history of Arizona. For many years she was part of Arizona Speaks for which she travelled extensively throughout the state giving lectures on the art history of Arizona.

Fahlman is a founding board member of Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. In this role she brought three important collections to the institution. The Fran and Ed Elliott Southwest Women Artists Collection features nearly 300 works by historic women artists working in the first half of the twentieth century. This collection is one of the most significant and extensive donations of art works ever donated to an American institution. Brian and Karen Mariscal gave a gift of about 175 works by Marjorie Thomas, Scottsdale’s first resident artist. The last gift came from the descendants of Jessie Benton Evans who donated her archive. Evans was a wealthy woman who built her house on the property that is now the Phoenician. These donations took Western Spirit from having no women artists in their collection to having a lot of women artists!

As a leading authority on the art history of Arizona, I have published extensively on the subject, including two books: New Deal Art in Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2009) and The Cowboy’s Dream: The Mythic Life and Art of Lon Megargee (Wickenburg, AZ: Desert Caballeros Western Museum, 2002). For the Arizona Centennial, I published two extended essays on the subject: “Making the Cultural Desert Bloom: Arizona’s Early Women Artists,” in Betsy Fahlman andLonnie Pierson Dunbier, Arizona’s Pioneering Women Artists: Impressions of the Grand Canyon State (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona, 2012): 1-20; and “New Women, Southwest Culture: Arizona’s Early Art Community,” in Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton: Artist and Advocate in Early Arizona(Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona, 2012): 26-36.

SECRETARY

CEO Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff

Mary Kershaw is the Executive Director & CEO of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, having moved from Santa Fe, NM where she served as Executive Director of the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Prior to moving to the Southwest, Mary worked in museums across the UK including as Director of Collections at York Museums Trust, and Head of Museums & Arts in Harrogate Borough Council. International experience includes cultural projects with the UK, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and Germany.

One of the driving passions in her career is to bring the power of art and the work of artists, past and present, to as wide an audience as possible through exhibitions, programming, publications, and partnerships.

Mary serves on the Community Editorial Advisory Board for Southwest Contemporary and is a Board Member of NALA (Northern Arizona Leadership Alliance).

AT LARGE

CEO Sedona Arts Center, Sedona

Julie Richard is the CEO of the Sedona Arts Center. She most recently held the position of Executive Director of the Maine Arts Commission which is a government agency that supports and promotes the arts. Prior to her work in Maine, she held the position of President & CEO of the West Valley Arts Council which operates in the West Valley of Greater Phoenix, Arizona and Executive Director of the Metropolitan Arts Council in Greenville, South Carolina. Julie earned BS degrees in Psychology and Music and a MA in Business from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Previous positions include Managing Director of Tulsa Opera in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Managing Director of Syracuse Opera in Syracuse, New York; and Executive Director of theCayuga Community College Foundation in Auburn, New York. She has held positions on numerous boards and has presented at many national conferences on topics such as board governance, strategic and cultural planning, fundraising, arts education programming, marketing the arts and more.ulie Richard