Diya Vij Named New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs

Diya Vij, a curator and current vice president of curatorial and arts programs at Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, has been selected by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to serve as New York City's next Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. The appointment, confirmed by the mayor's office on February 28, positions Vij at the head of the Department of Cultural Affairs, the largest municipal arts funder in the United States, which provided $245 million to more than 800 cultural organizations across the five boroughs in the most recent fiscal year.

Vij, 40, is the first person of South Asian descent to hold the commissioner role. She will report to Julie Su, the city's first deputy mayor for economic justice, a structural placement that signals Mamdani's intention to frame arts funding explicitly within an economic equity agenda. The mayor described Vij in a statement as a "visionary and deeply thoughtful leader who understands that art is not ornamental to this city, it is essential to it." The appointment was first reported by the New York Times.

Vij's career spans nearly two decades of public and civic arts programming. She served at the DCA for four and a half years under De Blasio appointee Tom Finkelpearl, where she launched and managed the agency's Public Artists in Residence program and led its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative. She started at the Queens Museum before moving to Creative Time, where as a curator she launched CTHQ, a gathering space for artists working at the intersection of art and politics, established a fellowship for socially engaged artists, relaunched the Creative Time Summit, and helped realize several public art commissions. She was also an associate curator of public programs at the High Line before her appointment to Powerhouse Arts.

Powerhouse Arts, a Brooklyn hub for arts fabrication and community programming, appointed Vij to her current role in November 2025. Her tenure there lasted only months before the DCA announcement. Prior to her appointment, Mamdani had convened a 28-member arts and culture transition committee that included figures including curator and writer Kimberly Drew, Ruba Katrib of MoMA PS1, Legacy Russell of the Kitchen, and Gonzalo Casals, a former DCA commissioner. Vij herself served on that committee, making her appointment a logical if not inevitable outcome of the process.

Vij enters the role at a moment of institutional stress across New York's cultural sector. Gallery closures, rising real estate costs, and federal arts funding cuts under the Trump administration have placed significant pressure on mid-size and smaller organizations. The DCA itself operates under the broader constraints of city budget cycles that have periodically threatened cultural allocations. Vij was direct about the challenges she sees ahead. "We see how our organizations have to contract because funding is contracting," she told the Times, "because there's an uneven Covid recovery, because there's political intimidation coming from the federal government and the right."

Her track record at Creative Time suggests a commissioner inclined toward work that operates at the intersection of civic space and political urgency. One of the notable projects she oversaw was The World's UnFair, a 2023 installation in Long Island City by New Red Order, an indigenous artist collective, that called for the return of public and private lands to Indigenous peoples. Such projects have been precisely the kind of programming that has drawn increased scrutiny and defunding pressure from federal authorities. How Vij navigates that pressure while sustaining the DCA's obligations to over 800 organizations will define her tenure.

The commissioner position carries significant institutional power, including discretion over how DCA allocations are distributed across boroughs and cultural disciplines. Prior commissioners have used the role to reshape programming priorities substantially: Finkelpearl expanded participatory and socially engaged arts funding, while others have prioritized capital projects and building infrastructure. Vij's emphasis on equity and public access suggests a continuation of the former direction, calibrated to a political moment that has made such commitments both more urgent and more contested.

Her formal start date has not been announced. Zygmunt Stepinski, who had served as Stola's deputy at the Polin Museum, will resume his role as deputy in Warsaw; no analogous transition has been detailed for Powerhouse Arts.