6th Annual Creating Community Symposium

Tom di Maria is the Director of Arts Access for All, a non-profit consulting group that supports the creation and advancement of art and disability projects.  Prior to this, he served as Executive Director of Creative Growth Art Center for 25 years. At Creative Growth he developed international support and recognition for the center’s artists including its presentation at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the historic acquisition and exhibition of disability art by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the creation of the Creating Community national conference. Before this, he served as Assistant Director of the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, at UC Berkeley. He holds a B.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology and a M.F.A. from Maryland Institute, College of Art.

Alex Baker was appointed Director, Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, in June 2012, where he has organized over forty exhibitions including Outsiderism;
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein: Time Produced Non Better; Department of Neighborhood Services: Isaac Tin Wei Lin, Barry McGee, and Dan Murphy, and Mending and Repair in Response: Jesse Harrod and Lisi Raskin. Before that, he
was Senior Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Melbourne, Australia, 2008-2012. Formerly Curator of Contemporary Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and associate curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, he has organized exhibitions at those venues with artists including Robert Ryman, Ellen Harvey, Eamon Ore-Giron, Barry McGee, Steve Powers, Todd James, Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, and Laylah Ali, among others. At the NGV, he curated Ranjani Shettar: Dewdrops and Sunshine (2011),
Harrell Fletcher: The Sound We Make Together (Melbourne) (2010), and Ricky Swallow: The Bricoleur (2009). Baker has a Ph.D. in visual anthropology from
Temple University, Philadelphia.

Matthew Higgs is an artist and the Director and Chief Curator of White Columns, New York. Previously he was the Curator at the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA, and a Director of Exhibitions at London's ICA. For the past fifteen years Higgs has been the Curatorial Advisor to the Independent art fairs, and he is a Contributing Editor at both The Paris Review and Arena Homme+. Over the past 30 years Higgs has organized more than 300 exhibitions and projects with artists. His writings have appeared in more than 50 publications and he was previously a regular contributor to Artforum.

Esther Adler is Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Most recently she organized the final presentation of Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction (2025) in New York, and New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching (2023). Past exhibitions include Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw (2021), Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window (with Christophe Cherix, 2019), Charles White: A Retrospective (2018), Charles White—Leonardo da Vinci. Curated by David Hammons (2017) and Dorothea Rockburne: Drawing Which Makes Itself (2013). Her publications include New Ground: Jacob Samuel and Contemporary Etching (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2024); Romare Bearden: Patchwork Quilt (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2022);  Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw (with Mark Pascale and Édouard Kopp; Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2021); Betye Saar: Black Girl’s Window (with Christophe Cherix; New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019), Charles White: A Retrospective (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2018), Charles White: Black Pope (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2017) and American Modern: Hopper to O’Keeffe (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013).

Ms. Adler joined the museum staff in 2005, and worked as a Research Assistant, Curatorial Assistant, and Assistant Curator in the former Drawings Department. She has also worked at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as a graduate fellow, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has a BA from Brandeis University, and an MA from the University of Maryland.

David Fierman has over twenty years of experience in the contemporary art world and has run his galleries FIERMAN since 2016 and Open Studio, showcasing the work of artists with disabilties, since 2025. He has always had a passon for integrating ‘outsider’ art into the contemporary mainstream, having launched the careers of Uman, Matthew Kirk, and others in this arena. He is the art world liaison for The Living Museum, an art studio attached to Creedmoor Psychiatric Hospital, and founder of The Open Invitational, an art fair promoting art made in a therapeutic context by artists living with mental illness and other disabilities. His exhibitions and projects have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art Forum, The New Yorker, and other publications. He has placed work by his artists in the Whitney Museum of Art; Studio Museum of Harlem; ICA Miami; The Speed Museum, Louisville; and the Hammer Museum, among other institutions. He holds a Bachelors’ Degree in Art History from Columbia University.