Isabel Nazario, is currently Associate Vice President for Academic and Public Partnerships in the Arts and Humanities in Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She was appointed to this new office in September 2004, prior to this position she was the founding director of the Center for Latino Arts and Culture, and executive director of the Office for Intercultural Initiatives, in Rutgers.
As Associate Vice President, Nazario is responsible for developing and supporting arts and humanities co-curricular projects, community-service learning programs, and public scholarship programs that lead to innovative partnerships between Rutgers and local, state, national, and international organizations. Her office reports to the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and her leadership is university-wide, with offices in Newark, Camden and New Brunswick. She has leadership oversight of the Citizenship and Service Education Program, Institute for Women and Art, National Women’s Caucus for Art and administers the Transcultural New Jersey Arts and Education Initiative, the Transcultural New Jersey Public Service Artists Program, and the Bildner Faculty Fellows Intercultural Initiative. The Transcultural New Jersey Initiative is the unifying theme for museums, and education institutions to examine the states demographic landscape through a series of year-long visual art exhibitions, and community-based activities that promote the contributions of underrepresented populations. This initiative led to the 2005 Emmy nominated (by the National Academy of Television and Arts and Sciences) documentary The New American Art co-produced by Ms. Nazario with television producer, Susan Wallner, New Jersey Network (PBS Television).
Isabel Nazario has organized and curated numerous exhibitions that received excellent reviews by art critics from the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Home News and Tribune. Selected exhibitions included The Visual Imaginary of Latino Artists in New Jersey, held in 2001in the Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries; co-curated the Cross-Currents of the Mainstream exhibition, held in 2004 in the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.
Before coming to Rutgers in 1992 she held positions at the New York State Council on the Arts, Queens College, and Hunter College. At Queens College, she developed the first courses on Latin American and Caribbean art history for the Art History and Puerto Rican Studies Departments, courses she subsequently taught at Hunter College. At Rutgers, she taught a course on Latin American Art History through the Latin American Studies Program, and has co-created and co-taught a new course in the Visual Arts Department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts entitled, "The Response of the Creative Mind to Gender, Race, Class and Identity," funded through a Rutgers Dialogues grant.
Over the course of her career at Rutgers, Isabel has raised support for exhibitions, public programs, and student scholarships from such sources as the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, JP Morgan Chase, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Merrill Lynch, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Hitachi, America Limited, and Rutgers University Hispanic/Latino Alumni. In 1997, she was one of seven Hispanic women in the nation to be awarded Hispanic Magazine's Women's Health and Science Award for developing an innovative arts and health education program for Black and Latino youth. In 2002, she was recognized as a national leader for advancing the Hispanic arts by El Diario La Prensa, a daily newspaper for Hispanics in the United States. In 2005, Hispanic Magazine named her one of the most influential Latinas in the nation in the arts and humanities. In 2006, the Hispanic Research & Information Center at the Newark Public Library honored Ms. Nazario with the Maria DeCastro Blake Community Service Award in recognition of her commitment to public scholarship.