About Us

Joined Board 2022

Daniel Tobin is co-founder and Creative Director of Urban Art Projects (UAP) and leads the Art Makers initiative, enabling artists to create ambitious new works of art for both permanent and temporary exhibition.

Brothers Daniel and Matthew Tobin established UAP in Brisbane, Australia in 1993. Together they created a studio and workshop that could facilitate projects, work with artists and realize art for the public realm. Their collaborative approach provides artists the space to develop ideas, investigate materiality, deliver projects and extend their practice.

Mr Tobin is an art maker, public art practitioner and city wanderer who works with artists to deliver large-scale sculpture for public and private spaces. His experience in the art, architecture and design fields has prompted major commissions as well as collaboration on significant projects that improve and enhance the creative fabric of cities.

Mr Tobin is a Churchill Fellow and a member of Madison Square Park Conservancy Art Committee. He recently moved to New York after previous postings in Australia, China and the Middle East.

Joined Board Oct 2018

Elected President May 2020

Michael Maher is a New York-based producer, author and documentary filmmaker. His work has appeared on the world’s leading public broadcasters including the BBC, PBS and ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

A foreign correspondent for the past 25 years, Mr Maher has reported from throughout the Asia-Pacific region, Africa, Europe and the Americas. He has served as the ABC’s Diplomatic Correspondent, Indonesia Bureau Chief, Asia Pacific Editor and New York Correspondent.

He was the founding anchor of ABC TV’s current affairs program Asia-Pacific Focus and the Asia Editor of Australia’s oldest weekly news magazine, The Bulletin. Mr Maher’s work has won or been a finalist in a range of awards including the New York Festivals, the United Nations Media Peace Awards and Australia’s premier Logie and Walkley awards.

Mr Maher has an honors degree in Asian and American history from the University of Sydney and has held a number of adjunct lecturer positions in programs run by the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and the City University of New York.

Joined Board May 2021

Elected Treasurer 2022

Catherine Devine is an acknowledged global leader in the field of digital strategy. She has worked with cultural institutions such as museums and libraries, and has consulted to the finance and investment banking industries.

Ms Devine is currently Global Business Strategy Leader – Libraries and Museums at Microsoft, and was previously Chief Digital Officer at the Museum of Natural History in New York.

An Australian expatriate with dual Australian/US citizenship, Ms Devine graduated from the University of Technology Sydney with a Bachelor of Business and earned a Certificate of Advanced Study and a Master of Science and Business Analytics from Syracuse University.

Joined Board 2019

Jill Viola currently works for a former high-ranking official of the Carter Administration, former Comptroller of the Currency, John G Heimann.

Born in Ballarat, Australia, she has worked extensively with not-for profit organizations and government instrumentalities. Her early career was with the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, serving in the Embassies in Paris and Buenos Aires and at the Consulate in New York. In the latter, she worked in an Executive Assistant capacity in the Customs, Trade and Consul General’s office.

Following that, Ms Viola was a member of the personal staff of Laurence Rockefeller, and in Chicago served as Personal Assistant to the British Consul General. Ms. Viola then worked for the Australian Embassy in Lisbon, Portugal and held a volunteer position as Treasurer of the International Women in Portugal.

Upon returning to New York she was, for two years, the Executive Secretary and Administrator of The Australia Society and subsequently joined The Olin Foundation as Administrative Assistant to its President, William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury.

Ms Viola then worked as an Executive Assistant with Societe Generale for over eight years. From 2007-2018 she served part-time as Administrator of AFNGA and from 2013 to 2018 she also served part-time as Administrator and Secretary to the Board of The Chatham House Foundation, a leading think-tank based in London.

Ms Viola is an Executive Producer of the non-profit organization Australian Short Film Today.

Ms Viola graduated with a BA (Magna Cum Laude) from Marymount Manhattan.

Dr Nick Mitzevich was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Australia in July 2018. For the past two decades, Dr Mitzevich has held leadership roles in Australian arts organisations including the Art Gallery of South Australia; the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane and Newcastle Region Art Gallery.

Dr Mitzevich holds a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art and Graduate Diplomas in Education and Fine Art from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales.

In 2021, the French Government awarded Dr Mitzevich with the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres recognising his work in advancing French culture. In July 2022, his alma mater, Newcastle University, awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in recognition of his contribution to the arts and the arts sector more broadly.

Joined Board 2022

Steve Martin is one of the most well-known talents in entertainment. His work has earned him an Academy Award®, five Grammy® awards, an Emmy®, the Mark Twain Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors.

Mr Martin is also an author and an accomplished Grammy Award-winning, boundary-pushing bluegrass banjoist and composer.

Mr Martin has long had a passion for collecting art—he even ranked on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list several times in the 1990s. More recently, he has shifted his collecting focus to works by Indigenous Australian artists.

In 2021, Steve and his wife lent pieces from their Indigenous Australian art collection to an exhibition at the Australian Consul General’s residence in New York.

Joined Board November 2022

David Droga is the Chief Executive Officer of Accenture Song and a member of Accenture’s Global Executive Management Committee.

Prior to joining Accenture, Mr Droga founded Droga5, a creative and strategic agency headquartered in New York with offices in London, Tokyo, São Paulo and Dublin. Founded in 2006, Droga5 has been named Agency of the Year more than 25 times, Adweek Agency of the Decade in 2020 and was also named Agency of the Decade by Ad Age in 2020. Droga5 has been part of Accenture since being acquired in 2019.

Before Droga5, Mr Droga was the first-ever Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of the Publicis Network. He was also Executive Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi London, Regional Creative Director of Saatchi & Saatchi Asia and a partner and Executive Creative Director of OMON Sydney.

To date, he is the most-awarded creative in the history of the Cannes International Festival of Creativity and the youngest person ever inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. He is also a laureate of the Asian Media and Marketing Hall of Fame, the AdNews Hall of Fame, the AWARD Hall of Fame and the American Advertising Federation Hall of Achievement.

In 2017, Adweek named Mr Droga one of the top 100 most influential leaders in marketing, media and technology for the third year in a row. That same year, Mr Droga received the Cannes Lions Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lion of St. Mark. He was the youngest person ever to receive the honor.

Board member of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia

Anna Arabindan-Kesson is an Associate professor of Black Diasporic art with a joint appointment in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She practiced as a Registered Nurse before completing her PhD in African American Studies and Art History at Yale University. Anna focuses on African American, Caribbean, and British Art, with an emphasis on histories of race, empire, medicine, and transatlantic visual culture in the long 19th century. Her first book is called Black Bodies White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021). Other projects include a co-written book with Prof Mia Bagneris on 19th century Black Diaspora artists, and a monograph on the intersection of art and medicine in plantation imagery. She is the 2022 Terra Foundation Rome Prize Fellow, a Senior Research Fellow of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the director of the digital humanities project Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism www.artandcolonialmedicine.com.

Joined Board September 2022

Kenneth Tyler was a progressive force in the world of art. His workshops in Los Angeles – Gemini Ltd. (1965) and Gemini GEL (1966-1973) – and later in New York State with Tyler Workshop (1973) and Tyler Graphics Ltd. (1974-2001) pushed the artistic and technical boundaries of printmaking and paper-making. Rather than limiting an artist’s vision to the constraints of traditional printmaking, his aim was to expand printmaking to match the vision of the artist.

Having begun his printmaking career in 1963 at Tamarind Lithography, an institute whose aim was to revive the dwindling practice of lithography in the United States, Mr Tyler recognized that the art form’s restrictive traditions were at odds with the aims of modern art. He believed that technological innovation and experimentation in printmaking could elevate the field. Over the course of his career, Tyler worked with notable artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and embarked on ambitious career-defining projects with them.

From creating some of the largest and most complex prints in history, to experimenting in the field of paper-making, Tyler initiated collaborative ways of working and created new technologies that expanded the possibilities of printmaking.