About Natalia Ivanova, Founder of Art Agency Reframed
Natalia Ivanova is a Bulgarian-American curator, cultural strategist, and writer whose practice interrogates the porous boundaries between art, law, and economy. Based in New York City, she is the founder and director of Art Agency Reframed, an artist-centered ecosystem that reimagines the architectures through which cultural work is produced, circulated, and sustained.
Ivanova’s curatorial methodology is grounded in research-driven inquiry and long-term collaboration. Her projects examine authorship, property, and the commons, situating artistic labor within broader sociopolitical, legal, and infrastructural conditions. Her work spans visual art, performance, time-based media, and collective production models, with a focus on building durable, adaptive, artist-led structures that operate beyond conventional market logics.
As Executive Director of Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland, Ivanova transformed one of the Bay Area’s oldest avant-garde institutions into a living commons - a decentralized, cooperative cultural organism rooted in shared governance and collective authorship. During the pandemic, she mobilized millions in support of artists and launched three major platforms: the Pro Arts Music & Production Studio, the Social Impact Projects Incubator, and the Teaching Institute for Art & Law, each positioning artistic labor as a driver of cultural equity and economic self-determination.
Earlier, as Executive Director of Redhouse Arts Center in Syracuse, she conceived and launched the region’s first arts-focused internet radio station, a project recognized with the Kaufman Entrepreneurship Award. She also secured funding for a state-of-the-art recording studio serving youth in one of the nation’s poorest ZIP codes, expanding access to creative tools, mentorship, and cultural agency for historically underserved communities.
A pioneer in early digital culture, Ivanova founded Flux Digital Art Space in 2001, working across Harlem, the Bronx, and the Children’s Aid Society to confront the digital divide and what she identified as its inevitable counterpart: the creative divide. She developed some of New York City’s earliest afterschool digital-arts programs, pairing young people with working artists and presenting their work in community centers, cultural institutions, and citywide exhibitions.
Her curatorial projects include The New Situationists, the first major survey of disruptive cultural practices in the Bay Area; the Post-Capitalism Festival; and numerous exhibitions, public forums, and collaborative experiments with organizers, activists, protest artists, and independent cultural workers. She founded both the 15th Street Commons and the Pro Arts Music & Production Studio, initiatives dedicated to amplifying underrepresented voices and supporting emergent creators throughout Oakland’s cultural ecosystems.
As a writer, Ivanova produces essays, critical texts, and long-form research that examine the mutual constitution of artistic and legal systems. Her work articulates the often-unseen mechanisms that structure cultural value—mapping alternative economies, analyzing modes of artistic governance, and foregrounding practices that resist extractive institutional models. Her writing functions as both conceptual infrastructure and speculative architecture for the new cultural systems she builds. She is the author of Reframing the Value of Art and Fair Labor in the Context of a Sharing Economy and co-author, with Marc Herbst, of The Commons: Of Friends and Lovers. Her texts circulate widely within movements for cultural justice, platform cooperativism, and artist self-determination.
Ivanova’s international practice includes a 2023–2024 curatorial fellowship in Berlin, where she engaged deeply with the city’s experimental and political art communities. The residency catalyzed ongoing collaborations bridging Berlin and U.S. cultural ecosystems through exhibitions, research initiatives, and public programs, expanding the possibilities of artist-led institutional models across continents.
She is a founding member of the Dadais Americanus collective, formed during the pandemic and the George Floyd uprisings. With the collective, she co-authored and filed the Performing Pro Arts Commons License—a radical intervention in copyright that later evolved into the Teaching Institute for Art & Law—and co-authored the influential essay Reframing the Value of Art, a foundational text proposing new strategies for artistic sovereignty, shared intellectual space, and collective cultural stewardship.
Through Art Agency Reframed, Ivanova continues to develop experimental frameworks that expand the agency of artists and reconfigure the conditions under which cultural production can flourish.