Rachel Perera Weingeist is Founding Director of Perera & Co, a cultural strategy firm that specializes in building partnerships, developing funding sources, launching new and optimizing existing programs. With over two decades of arts and administration Rachel has developed innovative programs that span cultures, genres and disciplines focusing on projects and exhibitions where she has featured art from sacred and isolated places. She is a curator, collections advisor and program director with a focus on contemporary Cuban, Indian and Tibetan art. Rachel has been advisor to museums, foundations, collectors, artists and estates on strategic issues relating to fundraising, technology, programming, acquisitions, management and deaccessioning of private and public art collections.
For more than eight years she served as Deputy Director and Senior Advisor at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation and a Director of the Rubin Family Office where she established, staffed and inspired office culture. Rachel was the Founding Director and Curator of The 8th Floor in Manhattan, a non-commercial space for emerging artists and movements in New York City. She has curated over 35 Cuban, Indian and Tibetan art exhibitions, in addition to establishing the first contemporary Cuban art video archive, and building one of the largest private Cuban art collections to date of over 1,000 works of art. Rachel conceived of and curated Anonymous, Kora and Tradition Trans- formed, the first major museum exhibitions of contemporary Tibetan art.
Rachel was Co-Founder of both Summer in the City and www.VirtualCulture.NYC, free programs launched to enrich the lives of New York City public school students during the pandemic. She is a member of the Harvard Cuban Studies Advisory Board, Founding Chair of the Board of the Hip-Hop Education Center, Digital & Strategic Advisor to The Hip Hop Museum and is a Founding Board member of The Fields Sculpture Park at Omi, where she also serves on the Board of Architecture Omi. Rachel’s work has been featured and reviewed in The Art Newspaper, New York Times, The London Financial Times, WNYC as well as supported by the Pinkerton Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, JM Kaplan Fund and more.