Victoria Reis is the Co-Founder, Executive & Artistic Director of Transformer, founded in 2002 in Washington, DC. Reis began her career in contemporary visual arts at the National Association of Artists’ Organizations/NAAO (1992-97), developing programs and field-wide initiatives in support of artist centered and artist-run organizations and the artists they serve. In addition to organizing several national conferences of NAAO’s 300+ organizational members, she organized A Dozen Dialogues, a series of town hall meetings across the country designed to stimulate discussion on issues addressing artists and the organizations that support them. As a direct result of these dialogues, The CoGenerate Project was conceived. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, this initiative was the first to respond to the field’s growing desire for input by artists and arts organizers in their early 30’s and younger on the current state and future of support for contemporary art.
A curator and arts organizer who has lived and worked in Washington, DC since 1991, following her time at NAAO and prior to founding Transformer, Reis launched several independent temporal arts programs in DC (Mott's Market Art and Stack It Up Productions, among others; 1997-2001), providing vital opportunities for emerging artists to present their work, develop audiences, and establish networks for future support. Reis curated the 1999 and 2001 Options exhibition for the Washington Project for the Arts, at the time the only regional exhibition highlighting the work of emerging artists.
Reis was the Director of Programs for the International Sculpture Center (1998-1999), organizing the 17th International Sculpture Conference in Chicago, IL, and was a curatorial consultant to the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities’ Public Art Program (2002- 2004), building the current DC Convention Center’s Art Collection a well as the Wilson Building’s art collection. Reis has been a member of ArtTable since 2000, and recently became a Founding Member of Common Field (commonfield.org) a new national network of art spaces and artist-led initiatives.
