SFPC Becomes Non-profit, Announces New Leadership Structure

July 11, 2024

Todd Anderson, Neta Bomani, and Celine Wong Katzman will lead SFPC into a new era as a Non-Profit Organization

School for Poetic Computation is excited to share a new milestone: the organization has become a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and implemented a new staffing and governance structure with Todd Anderson, Neta Bomani, and Celine Wong Katzman leading the school as Co-Directors as of April 2024. This transition to a full-time, salaried staff model will build capacity and stability, enabling SFPC to move closer to its vision of becoming a school where no one faces a financial barrier to study art, code, hardware, and critical theory.

From April 2021 to April 2024, SFPC was cooperatively directed by Zainab Aliyu, American Artist, Todd Anderson, Neta Bomani, Melanie Hoff, Galen Macdonald, and Celine Wong Katzman. During that time, SFPC ran 44 classes, reaching over one thousand students, in subject matter ranging from science fiction, botany, and computer viruses to art history, mathematics, zines and more. Each class modeled a new approach for interweaving humanities and STEM education. SFPC also produced more than 35 public programs, including several in partnership with The Kitchen, RECESS, Pioneer Works, and Creative Time, reaching new audiences in New York and beyond. SFPC developed a new, innovative pay-what-you-can scholarship and wealth redistribution model resulting in 46 percent of students (613 total) receiving financial assistance to study at SFPC—over $556,000 in scholarships distributed between the Summer 2021 and Summer 2024 class seasons.

In this new leadership structure, Todd Anderson, Neta Bomani and Celine Wong Katzman will share decision-making, furthering SFPC’s commitments to experimental pedagogy, wealth redistribution, and uplifting marginalized voices in art, technology, and education. The three Co-Directors will expand SFPC’s programmatic offerings and scholarship distribution, creating new opportunities for community involvement and connection for SFPC’s increasingly global audience.

Each Co-Director will have an area of focus informed by their professional and personal experiences with art, technology, education, and community organizing. Todd, who has been involved at SFPC since 2014, has worked in the computational arts for over a decade teaching experimental code classes at SFPC and The New School, building crowdfunding software for artists, and curating the monthly language+technology talk series WordHack. As Co-Director, he will oversee SFPC's operations, managing SFPC's technology and finances. Neta contributes experience from radical Black feminist traditions and her work with archives such as the Barnard Zine Library and Met Library. As Co-Director, Neta will focus on sharpening SFPC’s curricula and public programs, building upon her experience organizing programs and teaching about radical publishing history, zinemaking, and their relationships to computation at SFPC since 2019. Celine, a curator specializing in new media art, contributes experience from leading arts institutions including Rhizome, NEW INC, and the Queens Museum. As Co-Director, Celine will further develop SFPC’s income model and strengthen relationships with arts, cultural, and educational institutions, building upon her work teaching and organizing at SFPC since 2018.

SFPC's transformation into a scholarship-granting non-profit would not have been possible without the collective efforts of our community and Zai, American, Melanie, and Galen, who have forever shaped SFPC:

• Zainab Aliyu co-led significant partnerships with The Kitchen and Pioneer Works, produced several publications including the popular In Poetic Coalition, and laid the foundation for SFPC’s archives, designing the inventive sfpc.study website highlighting community definitions of “poetic computation.”
• American Artist led SFPC’s commitment to teach critical theories of technology, teaching imaginative classes focusing on racialized histories of surveillance and Blackness as computational foundation, as well as securing first-time grants from the Ford Foundation and Art for Justice Fund.
• Melanie Hoff significantly shaped the specialized pedagogical approach and horizontal learning environment at SFPC, teaching the revered, transformative classes Digital Love Languages and Sex Ed, as well as developing SFPC’s voice and visual style.
• Galen Macdonald played a fundamental role in laying the groundwork for financial sustainability and project management at SFPC, stewarding gifts from our growing community, and leading SFPC’s transition to a non-profit model.

Zai, American, Melanie, and Galen remain involved at SFPC in a multitude of ways from teaching to advising, and will steer a Cooperative Governance Committee to advise Todd, Neta, and Celine during the transition period.

In addition, SFPC would not be taking this momentous step without the support of Co-Founders Taeyoon Choi, Zach Lieberman, Jen Lowe, and Amit Pitaru. SFPC is grateful for the administrative groundwork for our non-profit application laid by Lauren Gardener, and the support of our fiscal sponsors, Gray Area and PWRPLNT. SFPC staff Es Leso, Tyler Yin, and Sara Martinez have also provided essential support. SFPC was advised by interim board members Salome Asega, Tega Brain, Taylor Levy, and Che-Wei Wang. SFPC is supported by Art for Justice Fund, Ford Foundation, Jeffrey Alan Scudder and Maya Man.

Contact

press@sfpc.study

About SFPC

School for Poetic Computation is an experimental school in New York and online founded in 2013. SFPC facilitates the study of art, code, hardware, and critical theory through lenses of decolonization and transformative justice. SFPC offers programs grounded in solidarity across social differences and empowerment through a deeper technical and political understanding of tools towards building just communities.