Ellen Golden, President
Ellen Golden is an artist with a studio in Brunswick. Her work is in private collections in the U.S., Europe and Asia. A long-time advocate for social and economic justice, she worked for many years at Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a Brunswick-based nonprofit community development corporation, where she oversaw program and policy work focused on women’s economic development, microenterprise development for immigrant communities and impact investing. She has served on a variety of boards and commissions and is currently on the boards of the Anonimo and Surf Point Foundations. She is an inductee of the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame and a past recipient of the Small Business Administration’s Women in Business Advocate, Minority Advocate, and Financial Services Advocate awards for Maine. A graduate of Barnard College and the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine, she lives in Woolwich.
Ryan Adams, Vice President
Ryan Adams is a Portland Maine artist, born and raised, where he lives with his artist and designer wife and their two daughters. His background in traditional graffiti led him to creating large-scale mural work as well as hand lettered design and signage. His signature ‘gem’ style of work is a geometric breakdown of letterforms with shadows and highlights included in order to create depth and movement throughout the pieces. His pieces tend to be bold, colorful and clever; often including statements within. Currently, Ryan co-owns and operates a hand painted signage business, designs for a brewery, paints murals all around the northeast and exhibits his work as often as possible.
Wren Manly, Board Member
Wren Manly currently works at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, ME as the Development Manager. She studied art history at Connecticut College and earned her master’s degree in museum studies from Georgetown University. While earning her master’s, she interned in the development office for the National Building Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Shortly after, she became the Membership and Special Events Assistant for the Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. Her primary role was to manage the Silk Road Society, the museum’s young professional membership program. She then joined the advancement team at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture as an Advancement Associate. Prior to her current role, Wren worked as the Director of External Affairs for Indigo Arts Alliance, an artist in residency program located in Portland, ME. Wren is committed to supporting artists and is always eager for critical conversations about the arts nonprofit sector, philanthropy, and equity.
Michael Mansfield, Board Member
Michael Mansfield is President and CEO of Maine Media Workshops + College, an accredited, multidisciplinary school of art located in Rockport, Maine. He is an innovative and entrepreneurial arts administrator, curator and scholar of electronic media, photography, film and the moving image in contemporary art. Mansfield has held curatorial and leadership posts at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Narodni Muzeum Fotografie in Jindrichuv Hradec, CZ. As a co-founder of the Smithsonian Institution’s Time Based Media Art Conservation Initiative – a pan-institutional collaboration – Mansfield established preservation strategies for time-based media & digital art. He has published numerous catalogues and produced research essays on film, fine art, AI and computer born media with publishers Thames and Hudson and the Neuberger Museum of Art at SUNY Purchase. Mansfield regularly speaks at museums, universities and institutions and has been a guest contributor to several programs on history, technology and fine art subjects at the Library of Congress, Stanford University and Tate Modern, among others.
Cig Harvey, Board Member
Cig Harvey (b.1973) is a British-born artist and writer living in Maine, USA, and working in large-format color photography and poetry. Rich in implied narrative, saturated in color, and deeply rooted in the natural world, her work is devoted to the topic of what it is to feel.
Cig has published four sold-out books: Blue Violet (Monacelli/Phaidon, 2021); You an Orchestra You a Bomb (Schilt Publishing, 2017); Gardening at Night (Schilt Publishing, 2015); and You Look at Me Like an Emergency (Schilt Publishing, 2012).
Cig’s photographs and books are in the permanent collections of museums across the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, New York); The Library of Congress (NewYork, New York): Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut); Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, Texas); the Farnsworth Art Museum (Rockland, Maine); and the International Museum of Photography and Film at the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York). She is represented by galleries worldwide and has exhibited at Paris Photo, Art Miami, and at AIPAD (New York) for the past fifteen years. She had her first solo museum show at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo, Norway (2012), and more recently at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Maine (2019).
Cig was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate (2018) and the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award (2021). She has been a nominee for the John Gutmann Fellowship, the Santa Fe Prize, and the Prix Pictet, and a finalist for the BMW Prize, the Estee Lauder Collection, the Karl Lagerfeld Collection at Paris Photo, the Clarence John Laughlin Award, and the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. Most recently in 2022, Eat Flowers won the Fine Press Book Association’s Award for Best Book in Show at the Manhattan Fine Press Book Fair,
Cig lives in a farmhouse in Maine with her husband Doug and daughter Scout. The slow passing of time and the natural surroundings of her rural home has made her alert to the magic in the mundane
Elise McCave, Board Member
Elise is the Executive Director of the Points North Institute, a nonprofit arts organization that champions nonfiction storytelling by supporting filmmakers, convening critical conversations, and hosting the annual Camden International Film Festival. She has 15 years of leadership and field-building at the intersection of independent film and social impact. Previously, she was at the global fundraising platform, Kickstarter, where she served as the Head of Film. Prior to that, she was Deputy Director of Doc Society, one of the UK’s most innovative social impact funders. Over eight years she worked on pioneering models for community engagement through documentary film, notably via the international Good Pitch program and the free-to-access Impact Field Guide & Toolkit. Elise is from Cambridge in the UK, and has a BSc in Anthropology from the University of London. She’s lived in the US since 2015, and now divides her time between New York and Midcoast Maine.
Donna McNeil, Executive Director
Donna McNeil is the Founding Executive Director of the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. She is the former Director of the Maine Arts Commission and has spent her lifetime as an arts advocate in the for-profit, non-profit and government fields. She holds an undergraduate degree in painting from Syracuse University and a masters degree in art history from Harvard University as well as an honorary PhD from Maine College of Art where she was commencement speaker. She has curated numerous exhibitions, written two artists books, one which received the Excellence in Publishing Award from MWPA and served as juror and nominator on many panels including the NEA and MacArthur Awards.
Jo Silver, Media Specialist
Jo Silver is a photographer and multimedia producer. She gained her undergraduate degree in photography and communications at Universidad del Sagrado Corazon in her native Puerto Rico and subsequently, a master’s in film direction at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya in Barcelona. She currently resides in Owls Head, ME and works as a freelance videographer and editor for local and international productions. In her free time, Jo can be found gathering and distilling plants.
Amanda Kushner, Archivist
Amanda Kushner currently resides in Maine and Florida. She met artists David Ellis and Joan Beauregard as an infant, grew up visiting them in their homes in Round Pond and Rockland, Maine, traveled with them in Europe, and later served as an executive assistant for David. She worked with him in Germany, Chile, and Maine, developing a deep knowledge of both the artists and their work. She initiated and continues the task of documenting and archiving David’s and Joan’s extensive collection of drawings, paintings, and personal effects. She is married and a mother of a young daughter.