After twenty-eight years leading grantmaking efforts at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Paula Marincola has built a remarkable legacy. At the heart of her work is the conviction that the arts hold an intrinsic value in society and have the power to create meaningful experiences that transform people's lives. 

“I’ve always been committed in my professional work to supporting the creative energies of the contemporary moment. I can’t think of anything better,” she says.

Paula’s career in cultural philanthropy began in the 1990s, when she was asked to design the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative for The Pew Charitable Trusts. In 2008, she became the Center’s first executive director, charged with leading the organization’s strategies in both grantmaking and knowledge-sharing. Under her leadership, the Center has become a vital resource not only for the Philadelphia region’s cultural community, but also for a wider field of artists, cultural practitioners, and arts leaders.

Her impact has been recognized with several accolades. In 2018, Drexel University awarded her an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She has also been named one of the region's “revolutionary bosses” for championing bold new ways of thinking and doing business and one of the city’s “most influential people” by Philadelphia Magazine.

As she prepares to step away from her role at the Center, Paula sat down with Megan Dutch, our chief communications officer, to reflect on how the Center has evolved over the years, the importance of staying responsive to the needs of artists and cultural organizations, what it means to lead with values, and the benefits of “thinking otherwise.”

Megan Dutch
First, congratulations on embarking on this new professional chapter after twenty-eight years at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The Center has been significantly shaped by your vision, leadership, and dedicated service to Philadelphia’s cultural community, including 17 years as our executive director. What first drew you to philanthropic work?

Paula Marincola
I am an accidental arts grantmaker. I was directing the art gallery at what is now Arcadia University, (then Beaver College), when Marian Godfrey, the former head of Culture at Pew, asked me to design a granting program that would support visual arts exhibitions. This was in the late 90s. Pew wanted to launch a visual arts initiative that would complement the other discipline-specific initiatives that had already been established, which included the Pew Fellowships in the Arts and funding programs for music, dance, and theater. Marian asked me to design what would come to be the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI), and then she kindly asked me if I would like to direct it. I wanted to see the initiative come to fruition, so I was very gratified to say yes to her offer—never thinking that, twenty-eight years later, here I'd still be.

MD
What has kept you in this role for so many years, having sort of stumbled into grantmaking?

PM
I've always believed in the intrinsic value of the arts in society, and I’ve always been committed in my professional work to supporting the creative energies of the contemporary moment. I can’t think of anything better. The opportunity with Pew, first as a program director and then as executive director of the Center—to be entrusted with these substantial resources and to steward them conscientiously to elevate a community of practice that touches so many different audiences in our region and beyond—that privilege and responsibility have kept me going. I have never felt that this work was anything less than urgent and absolutely critical.

MD
When you were still developing the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative and starting to run it, what was top of mind for you then?

PM
I tried to create as open a framework as possible for the realization of ambitious exhibitions, and to ensure that the resources accompanying a grant were sufficient to realize those shows as they were envisioned. So, I asked that an individual grant request be up to $200,000, which at that time, I believe, was the largest offering for a single grant of all Pew’s arts funding initiatives at that time. 

Because I had been a curator, I knew something about the complexities of creating an exhibition, and I was aware that to inspire the community to go “beyond business as usual” in conceiving projects, there should be adequate resources to meet that mark. My thought was: wouldn't it be great to have this initiative that would reward you with substantial dollars for letting your imagination soar, for doing serious scholarship, and for bringing important artists and artwork to our community? That was the ideal.  And we’ve been fortunate to increase that maximum request to $400,000 since that time.

MD
That leads us to the next question, which is about your own background as a curator.  In fact, most of us at the Center come from some sort of artistic practice background ourselves. What do you think that experience brings to our work as grantmakers?

PM
I think it's critical. At the Center we support cultural practice; that’s the essence of what we do. We fund makers, producers, and many other kinds of creative practitioners. As grantmakers, it’s easy to lose touch with what's happening on the ground, with what the field needs and believes to be important to its health and productivity. So, I’ve felt that our staff being close to practice, having worked in the field themselves, would allow the Center to be sensitive to those needs, and would allow for greater empathy and understanding with our applicants, and allow us to offer them more useful feedback and guidance in our processes. 

MD
Right, and it informs strategy as well because you can make better decisions, knowing what it takes to make these projects happen.

PM
That’s right. I’ve always emphasized that we need to be respectful of and knowledgeable about what it takes to produce cultural programs for the public. We're a hands-on grantmaker, in part because we operate in a prescribed region, and we see and get to know many of the same organizations year after year. We’ve developed deep and rich relationships with them over time. Understanding what practice entails helps us to be better thought partners for them and better grantmakers overall.

MD
Another important focus during your time as executive director has been positioning the Center as a place for significant discourse and knowledge-sharing for the arts sector, both regionally and nationally. You’ve convened a wide range of cultural practitioners for talks at the Center and served as editor of several print and digital publications. What was the motivation for this work?

PM
I’ve seen our thought leadership work as a means to further build artistic and programmatic capacity within our community, and as another way of making a contribution to the fields that we serve that go beyond the grant dollars.

So, as I’ve gone forward throughout my time at the Center, I’ve continued to think about how to do this kind of thought leadership work effectively. We’re all part of a field-wide context and network that’s much larger than our region; none of us does our work in a vacuum; we’re all nourished by thinking and practice that is world-wide. How do we take advantage of that to build capacity here, to make our own work better and more meaningful? 

So, at the Center, it’s been about convening and connecting people, and exploring ideas and issues that grow out of our grantmaking but are likewise germane to the field. We’ve presented numerous lectures, workshops, and symposia, arranged thought partnerships, and sponsored international travel for our grantees and applicants, among our other non-grantmaking activities. The Center has brought an amazing cast of cultural leaders here to be in dialogue with our community, and we’ve sent our own community of practitioners around the world to experience art and connect to their colleagues internationally. It’s been about connecting Philadelphia to the world and the world back to Philadelphia. 

In addition, we’ve supported the production of well over one-hundred grantee art and heritage publications produced in conjunction with our funded projects. And the Center itself has also commissioned new scholarship and produced several online and print publications. These include some that I’ve edited myself: Site Read: Seven Curators on Their Landmark Exhibitions and What Makes a Great Exhibition?—and others that my colleagues realized: notably, Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World and The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory, edited by Bill Adair and Bill Bissell respectively. I like to think this work has added substantial value to our grantmaking.

MD
I think that approach to knowledge-sharing distinguishes the Center from other grantmakers.

PM
Yes, I do believe that approach and those accomplishments have made the Center unique. The fact that a number of the publications we produced here have had multiple printings and are used as texts in graduate and other curatorial studies programs and continue to have demonstrable impact is an important part of the Center's legacy. 

MD
The cultural sector has been through a turbulent time, particularly since the pandemic, with changing audience behaviors, rising costs, the evolving role of technology in our culture, and now the loss of government funding for many organizations. How has the Center stayed responsive to emerging issues in the sector?

PM
When the pandemic hit, we were able to pivot to recovery grants relatively quickly, thanks to the Pew board’s flexibility. That’s certainly one immediate example of our ability to respond, in the moment, to an eventuality that none of us could have imagined. More recently, our Evolving Futures platform grew out of a recognition that many of the issues you mentioned had been facing the sector before COVID and had only been amplified and exacerbated by the pandemic. It became increasingly clear that the business models we’ve been relying on are quite fragile and not working optimally to sustain the sector. 

So, in 2024 I recommended that we allocate some risk capital to grants that would encourage cultural organizations to reconsider their business models for greater future viability. Thankfully again, our board saw the opportunity here and agreed to it. So far, we've made nine implementation grants in Evolving Futures for things like strategic alliances or leveraging capital assets for greater earned revenue. We’ve also added planning grants for Evolving Futures in 2025 to support organizations in doing some feasibility work toward establishing greater readiness to address structural evolution and adaptation. The program itself has been received as particularly valuable at this moment.

MD
What do you think the field of arts philanthropy should be thinking about most right now? What do you see as the field’s biggest challenges and opportunities? 

PM
The ground has certainly kept shifting over the years, as has the larger social context we operate in, and as a natural consequence, cultural practice has shifted along with those changes. I think the biggest issue for arts philanthropy now and always is to make itself aware of those shifts and to consider strategically and purposefully how it might make its investments and what it wants the impact of those investments to be. Perhaps that’s self-evident, but it’s still worth saying.

Most importantly, I think every arts philanthropy’s core values have to be rock solid, certainly now more than ever. You need to believe unequivocally that it matters to support the arts, artists, and the cultural community, to stand without question in support of artistic expression, and to know that the arts themselves are intrinsically valuable in our lives and in our society. The arts can be instrumentalized for many other social purposes: their educational value, for example, or their ability to foster social change. Those purposes are valid, to be sure. But the belief that, in and of themselves, the arts are as important a field of human endeavor as any other should, in my opinion, form the bedrock of arts philanthropy. And I think if it is the bedrock, then there will be a concomitant ability to iterate focus and strategy when change is necessary to ensure the survival and the vitality of the sector. 

MD
After the Center was established to bring various funding programs together under one organization, you were named its first executive director in June 2008. What have you learned from your time as a leader of an organization that reaches so many elements of the arts and culture community here in Philadelphia, and what do you think makes someone an effective leader?

PM
I go back to the first principles: What are you grounded in? What is your vision for the work? And what have you been asked to do? I was tasked by Pew to enhance the cultural life of the community by supporting artists and arts and heritage projects of exceptional merit. So that was our guiding star and the priority over my tenure. My job was to align the Center’s work around that priority, and in my experience, when there is clarity around priorities, then policies, strategies, and processes will readily follow from there and reflect those priorities.

Ultimately, effective grantmaking is in the doing—and the doing has to be undergirded by a set of values and goals. And then you strive to ensure that the outcomes of the work express and enact those values.

I will say that I've always been somebody who likes to think otherwise. My family used to say, mostly with affection, that I was reflexively oppositional. I’ve tried to transform that into a positive quality in my work. As a leader, I've tried to encourage others to also think differently, to think otherwise, to ask themselves: What else might be possible? What else might happen? What have we thought we couldn't do, but would really love to do? Why don't we try to do it?  I've always found the notion of thinking otherwise, of pushing beyond what feels comfortable or knowable to be a path toward greater creativity and innovation.

MD
I think another element of your leadership legacy is how many accomplished staff members have come through the Center and gone on to have other impactful roles in the field. It's an impressive track record.

PM
I'm very proud of the Center’s staff, present and past, and I’ve been fortunate indeed to work with them. The care and commitment of everyone who's worked here has always touched and inspired me. It's made me want to bring my A-game every day. When I first became ED, another executive said to me: Your job is to make the highest and best use of your staff's talents. And that has stuck with me. I’ve thought a lot about how I could create an environment in which staff could do their best work on behalf of the cultural community here. And then go on to continue to contribute significantly to the sector after their time here.

MD
There's a reason people stay here as long as they do. It really is privileged work that we get to do.

PM
It's amazing and meaningful work. You know, in taking my leave, I've had the opportunity to look back over the projects and the artists and the publications and public events that we've supported over more than two decades, and it’s an extraordinary record. I’m constantly urging others to spend time with our website to get a sense of the scope and breadth of this history; it tells an important story about the cultural life of Philadelphia.

MD
As you wrap up your tenure at the Center, what have you been thinking about?

PM
Gratitude. Gratitude to the Pew board for their sustained generosity to the arts in our community. Gratitude to our staff for their efforts and talents. Gratitude to the community for their engagement with us, and for challenging us to always do better. It really is the privilege of my professional life to have done this work on Pew’s behalf. 

And then I think about the difference the Center has made here. You know, there’s always been great work happening in Philly, and I think the Center has had an enormous influence in helping it rise even higher and to another level. I believe we’ve had a strong hand in elevating the value and the importance of the arts in this region and, consequently, have raised Philadelphia's visibility as a place for remarkable cultural experiences where amazing artists live and work. That’s quite gratifying.

And, as I’m looking towards another chapter for myself, I'm also genuinely excited for the Center’s next chapter and for the next ED and new leadership to evolve the Center and amplify its mission and reach. 

Finally, I’ve been thinking about all the many, many people that have been touched by the work we’ve supported. You and our staff have heard me say often that we want the work the Center funds to be about something and for somebody. Or many different somebodies, to be more accurate. Being the Center’s ED has made ever clearer to me the importance of those somebodies, of knowing who they are, and how they can be reached and well-served. We’ve endeavored to make sure that Center-funded projects connect and are meaningful to the public, that they resonate in people's lives, uplift and transform them, in the ways that only art has the power to do. In the end, that’s really what it's all been about.