President Clinton greets Mr. Cancel at a White House reception for arts leaders.

Opening reception of The Latin American Spirit exhibition for community and cultural leaders, The Bronx Museum, 1988.

Esperanto Internet Services
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Harvard University - Master of Arts in Public Administration, 1990
New York University - Master of Arts in Art Administration, 1987
Pratt Institute - Bachelor of Fine Arts, 1975

Luis R. Cancel - artist, arts administrator, and distinguished public servant has a distinguished 20-year career as the head of various not-for-profit and public agencies.

Formerly, Mr. Cancel was Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA). Appointed by Mayor David N. Dinkins in December 1991, Mr. Cancel became the first Latino ever to hold that position as the fifth Commissioner in the agency's history. During his tenure (l991-1994), he worked closely with Mayor Dinkins to raise the level of city support for the arts and sciences, increasing the agency's budget from $69 million to $89 million, making it the nation's third largest public agency supporting arts and culture. As Commissioner, Mr. Cancel worked with leaders from all of the arts disciplines to document the economic contributions of the arts to New York City's economy.

In 1978 he was named Executive Director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts. He was the youngest Museum Director and the only Latino in the country to direct a county museum. During his tenure (1978-1991), he was responsible for the Bronx Museum becoming one of the most respected and innovative cultural institutions in New York City. He guided the Museum's expansion from the Bronx County Courthouse to a 42,000 square feet (3,901.9 square meters) permanent building and successfully oversaw a $6.5 million capital campaign and renovation project. Under Mr. Cancel's direction, the Bronx Museum subsequently developed a master plan for a second physical plant expansion of $22 million and secured municipal capital support of $18.75 million.

While Directing the Bronx Museum, Mr. Cancel received a Museum Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to research Latin American art. He traveled extensively throughout Latin America and established important contacts for the Museum with major collectors, galleries and museums. He also curated several major exhibitions including: the First, Second and Third Emerging Expressions Biennials: The Artists and the Computer; Devastation/Resurrection: The South Bronx; Krishna Reddy, a Retrospective; and the highly acclaimed Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970.

The Bronx Museum received extensive national and local media coverage for its exhibitions and public programs. Mr. Cancel has conducted numerous print and broadcast interviews on a wide variety of topics and has been featured as the cover story for the Sunday Arts and Leisure Section of The New York Times (September 25, 1988).

He was President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Council for the Arts (ACA is now known as the Americans for the Arts), having been appointed to that post in April of 1994. ACA was a national membership organization, founded in 1960, whose mission then and now is to promote public policies that advance and document the contributions of the arts and artists to American life. During his tenure, Mr. Cancel helped ACA to focus its activities and become an arts information provider. In 1994 he conceived and established ACA's pioneering Internet Web site, ArtsUSA (http://www.artsusa.org/).

Mr. Cancel established Esperanto Internet Services, LLC in the summer of 1995 in order to provide the growing Internet community with tools that will help facilitate communications across language barriers. EIS assists clients with the design and development of their World Wide Web sites.

As a member of the Smithsonian Council (1990-1997), he headed up a review of the Smithsonian Institution's publishing and electronic projects. As a consultant, he conducted a feasibility study for the establishment of a Museum of the Americas for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC. More recently, he was a consultant to The Rockefeller Foundation, assigned by the Foundation to provide technical assistance to Latin American arts groups.

Mr. Cancel has been a guest lecturer at several prestigious national and international museums and universities including Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Central University of Caracas, and has served as a consultant to many philanthropic and cultural organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, The Smithsonian Institution, Fundación Eugenio Mendoza (Caracas), The Rockefeller Foundation, The Quipus Cultural Foundation (La Paz), and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He has maintained an active interest in both the arts and sciences and has encouraged cultural institutions to utilize electronic and broadcast media to further their organizational missions. He has been at the forefront of urging cultural organizations to utilize the Internet to reach new audiences.

When he decided to pursue a career in the visual arts, Mr. Cancel entered the Pratt Institute in 1970, where he studied painting and printmaking with a minor in Psychology and Anthropology.

After earning his B.F.A. in painting from Pratt in 1975, Mr. Cancel received a study fellowship from the American Friends Service Committee to research 20th Century Puerto Rican Art. When this research ended, he became the Gallery Director of the Caymán Gallery, a Latin American art gallery in SoHo, New York. During his 1975-1977 tenure, Mr. Cancel began his continuing affiliation with most of the major Hispanic cultural institutions in New York, including Taller Boricua, El Museo del Barrio and the Association of Hispanic Arts.

In 1987 he received a Master of Arts degree in Museum Management/Arts Administration from New York University. During the 1989-1990 academic year, he went on an academic sabbatical from the Bronx Museum, and in 1990, received his second Master of Arts degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Mr. Cancel also studied educational software design and interactive CD-ROM production at the Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.