Executive Director
Daniel Gallant is a development and communications strategist for arts and cultural entities, as well as a writer, lecturer and event producer. NPR’s Planet Money called him “a genius at raising money for artists.” Daniel is a board member of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where he served as Executive Director for 13 years and raised tens of millions of dollars to fund programs, operations and a significant capital renovation. According to the Wall Street Journal, Daniel grew the Cafe “from a small, volunteer-led venue best known for weekly poetry events to a thriving arts center.”
He used an ambitious metrics-based marketing and development strategy to more than quadruple the Cafe’s revenues and vastly expand its donor base, audiences and visibility. His efforts on behalf of the Cafe garnered press attention from the New York Times, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Tonight Show, CNN, PBS, NBC, MTV and other outlets. During his tenure, the Wall Street Journal described the Cafe as “an antidote to gentrification”; NPR called the Cafe a “wildly diverse venue with socially conscious programming” that “speaks to the marginalized”; and Time Out described how the Cafe “used the [COVID] shutdown to amplify more voices” and “found that moving online offered even more intersectionality than ever before”.
At the 92nd Street Y, Daniel served as Director of Talk and Theater Programming for the Makor and Tribeca Centers. The Makor Theater program, which Daniel founded, featured readings, performances and lectures by Oscar-, Tony-, Pulitzer- and Emmy- award-winning artists. He also helped design the Y’s popular Tribeca performance space and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe’s new multi-arts facility.
Daniel has lectured and consulted about marketing, fundraising and communications for organizations including the Kennedy Center, PEN America, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chase, Banff Arts Centre, the Japan-US Friendship Commission, Google, the 92nd Street Y, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Opera America, Fourth Arts Block, The Field, Foursquare, Columbia University, Harlem Writers Guild, Griffith University, and many more.
He has also supervised festivals, event series and educational initiatives for WNYC, Summerstage, MoMA, the Tenement Museum, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Museum, DR2, Columbia University, Amherst College, the Metropolitan Museum and other venues.
Daniel recently completed a Fulbright Specialist fellowship in Portugal; he has also received an Eisenhower Fellowship (for projects in Spain and Japan), as well as fellowships from National Arts Strategies and the Devos Institute. He has written about management, fundraising and communications for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Theater Communications Group and Americans for the Arts; and his insights about nonprofit management have been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Adweek, Crains, Time Out, Voice of America and NPR.
His writing has also appeared in Time Out New York, the Huffington Post and in seven anthologies from Vintage Books, Applause Books and TCG; and he has appeared on MTV, PBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, NY1 and other networks. He has lectured and consulted for universities and cultural organizations in Canada, Spain, Japan, Portugal and Australia. And he has served on grant and fellowship panels for organizations including the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Field and the Bronx Council on the Arts.