Eric Pryor

President & CEO, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Eric Pryor became the President of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in January 2022.

Pryor previously served as President of the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA) from 2015-2022.

Other roles include Executive Director of the Center for Arts Administration in New York, Executive Director of the New Jersey State Museum (NJSM) and President of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (VAC) in Summit, New Jersey. He began his arts career as Executive Director of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation’s Center for Arts and Culture (CAC) in Brooklyn, New York, the country’s first and largest community development organization to use arts programming as a community-development tool.

Currently, he is a member of the Board of Directors of New Yorkers for Culture and Arts and City College of New York President’s Advisory Board. Formerly, Pryor served as a board member of Art Pride New Jersey and Paper Mill Playhouse and as an advisor for public arts projects for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Pryor graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in 1992 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from Wayne State University in 1990. He completed Columbia University’s Executive Leadership Program for Nonprofits in 1997.