MENLO PARK, Calif. — Jaime Cortez has joined the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as a program officer in the Performing Arts Program. Emiko Ono, the program’s director, announced Jaime’s appointment in an email to the foundation’s staff, grantees and colleagues:
I am writing to share the exciting news that Jaime Cortez will join us next week as a program officer in the Performing Arts Program. Raised in Watsonville, California, Jaime has long experience with the local arts ecosystem and arts philanthropy more broadly. He’s also a writer and an artist, and will bring to our team a valuable perspective on the best ways to sustain artistic expression and encourage public engagement in the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Most recently, Jaime worked at the Barr Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts, as program officer for their Arts & Culture grantmaking, where he helped to manage a $16 million state-wide grantee portfolio. Prior to that, Jaime held positions at the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Arts Commission, where he oversaw a number of different grantmaking programs, supported technical assistance and capacity-building programs for both applicants and grantees, and supported research projects on various aspects of the Bay Area arts ecosystem.
Jaime has worked as a consultant and project team member for regional and statewide arts organizations, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Creative Work Fund, a program of The Walter and Elise Haas Fund. He has written essays and texts for art-related programs, exhibitions, catalogs, and books.
Earlier in his career, Jaime was a program manager at Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, and also held positions as an art instructor at UC Berkeley, a writer and editor for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and as an artist in residence at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Jaime holds a bachelor’s degree in communications from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in fine arts from UC Berkeley.
As an artist, Jaime has mounted solo shows featuring his drawings, sculptures, and photography on topics as diverse as the formation of national identity and the life of Michael Jackson. As a writer, he has published short stories and essays in numerous publications, and also wrote and illustrated a graphic novel, Sexile.
I hope you’ll join me in welcoming Jaime to the Hewlett Foundation. He begins work on June 13.