Our Board & Staff
Serving the Fund as a board member is a labor of love. Most board members are writers or artists, and in some cases also feminist scholars. Every year they organize judging panels that review submissions and make the final award decisions. Money for Women also relies on carefully chosen writers and visual artists, many of whom are former grant recipients, who volunteer their time to be judges. Board members attend business meetings twice yearly to direct the fund, oversee fundraising, and provide ideas for further development.
Former board members include: Elvia R. Arriola, Darla Bjork, Maureen Brady (longtime president of the board), Michaela Pilar Brown, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Julie Enszer, Nancy Fried, Cheryl Grau, Martha Hughes, Karla Jay, Yvonne Klein, Roz Kuehn, Ginger Legato, Morgana MacVicar, Carol Moldaw, Lisa C. Moore, Anita Page, Susan Sherman, Sarah Sutro, Sarah Van Arsdale, Lise Weil, and Crystal Williams. Former staff include: Pam McAllister and Susan Pliner, who each served and directed for many years.
Karen St Pierre, our Grants Administrator, has been with us since 2016, succeeding Tara Shea Burke.
Current board members and staff are featured below:
Board Members 
Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes the Sun (Norton/Liveright, 2016), a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award winner. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Soraya McDonald describes Nicole Dennis-Benn's debut as reminiscent of the work of Toni Morrison. Her bestselling sophomore novel, Patsy (Norton/Liveright, 2019), is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award winner, a New York Times Editors' Choice, a Financial Times Critics Choice, a Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book, and a Today Show Read With Jenna Book Club selection.
Daisy Hernández is the author of The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease, which won the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and was selected as an inaugural title for the National Book Foundation’s Science + Literature Program. She is also the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for the New York Times, National Geographic, The Atlantic, and Slate, and she is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University.
Kay Kenny’s fine art photography and mixed media have won numerous awards, including four New Jersey State Fellowships, the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award, and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recent solo exhibits include The Griffin Museum of Photography, Hunterdon Art Museum, and Casa Columbo Museum, as well as international solo exhibits in Taipei, Taiwan, and Medellin, Colombia. In addition to writing for art magazines, her work appears in several photography books including Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde by Lyle Rexer, and Light & Lens, Photography in the Digital Age, and Photographic Possibilities by Robert Hirsch. Her fine art is also held in several notable corporate, museum, and private collections. She has taught photography for over 25 years at New York University and International Center of Photography. She received a BFA from Syracuse University, MA from Rutgers University, and MFA from Syracuse University.
Lori Ostlund's novel, After the Parade, was a Barnes & Noble Discover pick and a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Ferro-Grumley Award. Her story collection, The Bigness of the World, won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and was a Lambda Finalist and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Lori’s work has appeared in the Best American Short Stories and the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories as well as in ZYZZYVA, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and other journals. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the 2017 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has been a teacher for over twenty-five years in New Mexico, Spain, Malaysia, and North Carolina and is currently on the Mile-High MFA faculty. Since 2022, she has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She lives in San Francisco, where she is at work on her fourth book, a novel entitled The Proprietresses, based on the years that she and her wife owned a furniture store in Albuquerque. Her third book, a story collection entitled Are You Happy?, will be published by Zando Projects in April 2025.
Sa’dia Rehman (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Rehman explores how contemporary and historical images communicate, consolidate, and contest ideas about race, empire, and labor. Their work explores structures of the family, the nation, the border. Rehman questions how we live within these systems and how they impact who we are, the desire to rearrange, and take them apart. They center familial history to expand on harm and survival.
In 2023, Rehman premiered their three-year project on grief, memory and displacement at the Wexner Center for the Arts in their solo show The river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air*. Rehman collaborated with the Global Imagination of Racial Justice at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a commission linking narratives of the California Mission Dams and Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam. In 2021 Rehman was selected by the Ohio Arts Council as an Artist to Watch. Rehman has exhibited work at venues including the Fabric Workshop & Museum, Queens Museum, Kentler International Drawing Space, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, among others. Rehman received the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. Rehman was awarded residencies at the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NARS Foundation. Their work was featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, Breakthru Radio, and HyperAllergic.
Ruthann Robson is a Professor of Law and University Distinguished Professor at City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, where she has taught since 1990, in the fields of Constitutional Law and Sexuality and Law. Her legal books include The Casebook, First Amendment: Cases, Controversies, and Contexts (E-Langdell 2016); Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality & Democracy (Cambridge University Press 2013); Sappho Goes to Law School (Columbia University Press 1999); and Lesbian (Out)Law (Firebrand Books 1992); as well as editing the three-volume set Sexuality and Law (Ashgate Publishing Ltd./Routledge 2011). She is the author of creative works including the widely anthologized essay “Notes from a Difficult Case,” the novel a/k/a and short fiction collection The Struggle for Happiness (both from St. Martin’s Press) and Cecile and Eye of a Hurricane (both from the lesbian-feminist press Firebrand Books), and the poetry collection Masks.
Alice Templeton's poetry and short stories have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Calyx, Nimrod, North American Review, Poetry, and other publications. Her poetry collection The Infinite Field was recently published by Sixteen Rivers Press (2024), and her chapbook Archaeology won the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry from Finishing Line Press (2008). She is also the author of a critical book on Adrienne Rich’s poetics, titled The Dream and the Dialogue, and scholarly articles on contemporary poetics and literary theory. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, le Moulin á Nef (Auvillar, France), Blue Mountain Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony. A former Deming Fund grantee, she joined the board in 2016 and assumed the role of board president in 2018.
Staff
Karen St Pierre has served as grants administrator since 2016 and finds great fulfillment facilitating Barbara Deming’s vision of supporting women artists and writers. Karen’s wide-ranging professional background includes programming and event management for major cultural organizations including the Juilliard School, the Rubin Museum of Art, Barnard College, and the Paley Center for Media. She has served as senior project manager for the Grammy Awards and executive director of the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. Karen holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University and an MA in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Studio Art at the Burren College of Art, University of Galway, National University of Ireland.
