Nora Halpern has spent her public and private life advocating for art, artists, and social justice. An art historian, curator, art advisor, and arts policy expert, Halpern began her career in Los Angeles, where she was the Frederick R. Weisman Collections Curator, Founding Director of the Museum at Pepperdine University, and Director of Fine Arts for Sotheby’s, West Coast.

Halpern established her arts advisory service, NRH ARTS LLC, in 1991. She has over 30 years of experience advising artists, collectors, institutions, corporations, and foundations on collection development, management, strategic planning, acquisitions, deaccessioning, programs, convenings, as well as estate planning. She is a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors.

Halpern has curated numerous exhibitions and projects. In 2023, she organized a monumental light-projection installation by artist Jenny Holzer presented on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and was co-curator of, A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time, an exhibition on art and democracy presented at the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. In 2009, Halpern curated a major retrospective exhibition of Yoko Ono held at Palazzo Tito in Venice, Italy. Halpern is co-founder of Street Scenes: Projects for DC, a public art program that places temporary art experiences across the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. 

Parallel to her curatorial and advisory work, Halpern is a long-standing arts and art education policy leader and advocate. She served as a Vice President at Americans for the Arts for more than two decades, focusing on policy issues related to social justice, arts and health, freedom of expression, the environment, education, technology, and the arts as a door to dialogue and change, among many others. In 2023, she was appointed by President Biden to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Halpern has taught and lectured internationally. Among her many publications is Putting the Arts to Work: 15 Years of National Arts Policy Roundtables, 2006-2020. While in Los Angeles, Halpern was a Los Angeles Human Relations Commission member and received the Mayor’s Award of Merit for outstanding volunteer service in advancing human relations. 

Halpern has served on the boards of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, ArtTable, PS Arts, and Scholastic’s Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. Halpern received her BA and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Helena Rubinstein Fellowship, through which she attended their Independent Study Program in Curatorial Studies.