President Obama appointed her to this position in 2009. In this capacity, she works closely with the White House, senior government officials, prominent artists, philanthropists and entrepreneurs and the country’s leading cultural institutions to advance and support the arts and humanities in America and abroad. Under her management, the organization more than doubled its budget and programmatic activities, raised over $10M in public-private partnerships to support the arts, and launched several major new initiatives, including a partnership with the US Department of Education and the Ford Foundation to bring arts education to a group of the country’s lowest-performing elementary schools, and a program with the Smithsonian Institution, UNESCO and the U.S. Department of State to rescue and preserve Haitian cultural artifacts in the wake of the 2009 hurricane.