Amy Whitaker

Amy Whitaker is a writer, artist, and researcher working at the intersections of business, politics, and art. She is an assistant professor at NYU in visual arts administration and the author of two books, Art Thinking and Museum Legs. Amy's research on fractional equity for artists has been featured in Artsy, The Art Newspaper, and Artforum. Her general work has been featured in the Financial Times, Boston Globe, Atlantic, Harpers, Inside HigherEd, and many other outlets. 

She has spoken widely including at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Minnesota Duluth, Google, the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Fast Company Innovation Festival, the Barnes Foundation, the Conference Malmo (Sweden), The Next Web (Amsterdam), and TEDx. Amy has taught the business to artists and art to business people for more than fifteen years--since she was studying for her MFA in painting after already having an MBA. 

She has taught in the original Trade School and at Trade School at the Whitney and Museum of Arts and Design. She taught Stock Market Basics outdoors at the original Occupy Wall Street. She taught studio art and design classes, in business, at RISD, the School of Visual Arts, Williams College, and California College of the Arts. She also used to lead the Principles of Business course at the Sotheby's Institute. Amy is trained as a painter. 

Collector Charles Saatchi commended her large-scale group portraits by professional affiliation, and a curator of a large London museum collected her print Museum Director Action Heroes. She also wrote "Amy Whitaker Invites Six Investment Bankers," in which she invited lawyers and economists to make artwork for a group show. Starting with Art Thinking, she has illustrated her own books with line drawings.

Amy began her career in art museums, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Tate. She has also worked for the artist Jenny Holzer and for the finance companies Locus Analytics and D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P., one of the largest investment firms in the world. She is named on Locus patents for economic classification systems and also holds a Series 7 license.