Ann Wiens

An artist, writer, and editor, Ann Wiens (she/her) has led marketing, communications, and creative teams in the higher-education and cultural sectors for more than 15 years. She joined CalArts as vice president for marketing and communications in late 2022, coming from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, where she held a similar role. Prior to that, she led marketing and communications for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before moving to California, Ann held leadership roles as creative director and senior director of marketing and communications at the University of Oregon and director of marketing, public relations, and graphics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She began her higher-education career at Columbia College Chicago, where she was the founding editor of DEMO, the college’s award-winning magazine. She has served as co-chair of the BC2 Communications Conference at UC Berkeley, and the CASE Editors Forum. 

Prior to her work in higher education, Ann spent her early career as an artist and art critic, and served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago-based contemporary art magazine New Art Examiner for seven years. Her writing has appeared in Art and Auction, dialog, Art Criticism, Art Papers, the Chicago Reader, and others. She was a contributing editor and art critic at Chicago magazine and New City, a Chicago-based alternative weekly; has contributed essays to a number of exhibition catalogs; and authored a monograph on artist Darrell Morris. As a visual artist, she exhibited widely in the 1990s and 2000s, and her work is included in public, private, and museum collections, including two percent-for-art commissions for the City of Chicago.