our team

SHERI PASQUARELLA
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
For the past 17 years, Sheri owned and led SLP, a Manhattan-based consultancy that provided services across the international arts ecosystem, including an art advisory and business and strategic advisement to artists, galleries, not-for-profits, museums, and design businesses. SLP will close in September 2022. Pasquarella is known for community-building initiatives that include the New Art Dealers Alliance, which she conceived and co-founded in 2002, and the SLP Women’s Group, a national network of female arts leaders and workers that provided mutual support and resources for navigating the pandemic. In 2021, along with the Black Women in Visual Arts, she co-founded The Convening, an annual conference for female arts professionals that was presented in collaboration with ArtTable. In her earlier career, she was a director at Marlborough and Gorney Bravin + Lee galleries and was Adjunct Faculty in the Art Market M.A. program at SUNY FIT. She will continue on as a Board member of Participant, Inc. She is originally from the East End of Long Island, and her first ever job was at Guild Hall in 1996.

SARA COCHRAN
CHIEF CURATOR
Cochran worked most recently with artist Gregory Sale on his year-long project Future IDs on Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. She was previously Director and Chief Curator at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, where she doubled the museum’s annual attendance, increased its earned revenue and vastly expanded its presence on social media. During her tenure there, she curated eight exhibitions, including major projects with Betye Saar (2016) and Postcommodity (2015). She also organized a diverse series of programs including discussions with Founding Guerrilla Girl Kathe Kollwitz, Robert Irwin, Tom Sachs, Henry Rollins, Megan Rapinoe, and Dan Savage among many others, as well as running innovative events such as national film premiers, stand-up comedy, a book club, maker events, an escape room and collaboration with the City of Scottsdale to celebrate diversity.
As Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Phoenix Art Museum, Cochran organized fifteen exhibitions including premiering and traveling Kehinde Wiley’s Memling Series in 2013. Under her leadership, the museum acquired over 200 works of art by artists such as Dan Graham, Sui Jianguo, Glenn Ligon, Maya Lin, Ruben Ochoa, Jennifer Steinkamp, Lawrence Weiner and Kehinde Wiley. Earlier in her career, she held curatorial positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and has a Masters from Université de la Sorbonne, Paris IV. In 2015, she was participated in the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

TALENA MASCALI
PROGRAMMING MANAGER
As The Church’s Programming Manager, Talena Mascali oversees, coordinates, and enhances the many events presented by the organization. She works closely with the Executive Director and the Founders to fill the calendar with diverse programming and creative collaborations.
As a creative individual, Talena has always been interested in the visual arts. She studied film and photography at Hunter College and graduated in 2021. Talena grew up in Sag Harbor and is excited to be a part of an organization that celebrates the arts in her hometown.

SAMUEL HAVENS
WORKSHOP AND RESIDENCY MANAGER
As a local artist, Samuel’s artistic inspiration comes from his experiences and encounters in the world around him, focusing mainly on the connections between space and thought, exploring their underlying relation to one another. He works mainly in the mediums of intaglio printmaking and drawing. Samuel graduated from SUNY Oneonta in the spring of 2021 with a BFA in Studio and Digital Art. His work has been shown publicly and privately across the nation, including being exhibited at the Center for Book Arts in Manhattan.