Women At The Helm 2011

November 9, 2011 Kat Long

Rachel Tiven: Executive Director, Immigration Equality “Every day, Immigration Equality hears from couples and individuals who, because of our work, literally have a new lease on life,” Rachel Tiven proudly reports. As the Executive Director of Immigration Equality and Immigration Equality Action Fund, the national organization fighting for equality under U.S. immigration law for LGBT and HIV-positive individuals, Tiven (pictured with New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler) has helped to win asylum for more than 100 LGBT people who escaped persecution and violence in their homelands. Immigration Equality was founded with three goals: end the HIV travel and immigration ban, provide LGBT people with full access to asylum in the United States, and allow lesbian and gay Americans to sponsor their partners for citizenship. “In a little more than a decade, we have already accomplished our first two goals,” Tiven says. “Today, Immigration Equality is working to win its final victory, too. That work is based on a simple but profound belief: American citizens should not be told whom they can, and cannot, share their lives and their homes with, and no one should be forced to choose between the person they love and the country they call home.” Prior to her work with the group, Tiven was a reporter and television producer for Bloomberg Business News and an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York.

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Ann Philbin: Director, Hammer Museum Ann Philbin jumped headlong into LGBT activism and culture as a student at the University of New Hampshire, where she and a cadre of friends staged a successful campaign for the right to form a Gay Students Organization on campus. They took their case all the way to U.S. Court of Appeals and won, a landmark achievement that is still considered one of the major legal victories of the LGBT rights movement. That was back in 1974, but “that time set the tone for my consciousness about the world. The biggest lesson for me coming out of UNH was to question authority,” Philbin told the school’s alumni magazine this year. Philbin used her anti-Establishment spirit to forge an impressive career in arts administration at The Drawing Center in New York while protesting against AIDS with ACT UP. When she took on the role of director of Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum of Art in 1999, she was primed for another challenge: Philbin relocated to the West Coast and turned a small, underwhelming institution into L.A.’s most cutting-edge center for arts and culture. Philbin spearheaded the Hammer Museum’s Contemporary Collection of more than 2,000 artworks and built an international reputation for thematic contemporary exhibitions, scholarly historical exhibitions and contemporary artists’ projects. After three decades, Philbin remains on the vanguard of culture and activism.