Dena Beard

Dena Beard is Executive Director of the Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She previously served as Director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College, Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco (2014-2023), and Assistant Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2007-2014). Over the past two decades, she has organized hundreds of projects with artists including Lutz Bacher, Sadie Barnette, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Anna Halprin, Asher Hartman, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee, Silke Otto-Knapp, Brontez Purnell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Her practice is grounded in a sustained commitment to questioning perceptual and organizational systems, and to deeply engaging with new modes of thinking about art.