NEW YORK, NY.- Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, and Karen Wong, Deputy Director of the New Museum, announced today that Salome Asega will become director of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator they co-founded in 2013. In September 2021, NEW INC will welcome members to its eighth yearlong cycle. Asega will oversee one hundred creative entrepreneurs, a community of six hundred alumni, and a distinguished group of mentors, steering plans for future growth.

Asega joins from the Ford Foundation, where she has served as the inaugural New Media Art Research Fellow for Creativity and Free Expression (CFE) for the past four years. The CFE program supports arts and culture, journalism and media, and documentary film through grants, convenings, networking, and advising. In her role at Ford, she supported research to define hybrid approaches in the art and technology ecosystem. Commissioned reports include the National Endowment for the Arts’ Art and Technology Landscape Study (2021) and MIT Open Doc Lab’s Collective Wisdom, Co-creating Media within Communities, Across Disciplines, and with Algorithms (2019). In 2018, she co-curated a two-day conference for the presidents of five major US foundations on Art and AI. She currently teaches speculative and critical design classes in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.

Asega also has an extensive history with the New Museum, first assisting with a project in the Museum’s Education department in 2014, then as a member of the NEW INC community in 2016-2017, and also serving as an IdeasCity Fellow in 2017. While at NEW INC, she incubated POWRPLNT, a digital arts education non-profit based in Bushwick co-founded with a small group of artists.

Asega will start at NEW INC on July 26. She succeeds Stephanie Pereira, who concluded a three-year stint in May 2021 in which she fostered a diverse membership community and led a robust virtual program throughout the pandemic.

“Salome is the next generation of leadership and a role model for the interdisciplinary nature of the future of work,” said Lisa Phillips. “She is a creative technologist, a thoughtful strategist, and an empathetic community builder who will shape the next chapter of growth for NEW INC.”

As the first museum-led cultural incubator, NEW INC is a not-for-profit platform for furthering the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and inclusive space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses. To date, NEW INC members have created 600+ jobs and generated more than $32M in revenue.