Mitch Menchaca

Mitch Menchaca was appointed as the executive director for the City of Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture in 2018. An Arizona native, he relocated from Phoenix to Washington, D.C., in 2009 to lead the Local Arts Advancement Department at Americans for the Arts, where he guided a team of professionals serving and advancing the nation’s 5,000 local arts agencies. Before 2009, he served as the senior director of grants and programs at the Arizona Commission on the Arts, where he administered an extensive portfolio of grants from all artistic disciplines, budget sizes, and regions of the state. Mitch has also had leadership and programmatic roles at Arizona Humanities, the Association of California Symphony Orchestras, and Chorus America. He is the past chairman of The Association of American Cultures, served on the board of directors for DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project), was an inaugural board member for Latinos LEAD (Latinos for Leadership Excellence And Diversity) in Los Angeles, and has been a frequent panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Mitch currently serves as the Governor appointed arts and culture chair for the Arizona Mexico Commission, is a member of the Phoenix Bioscience Core Arts Committee, and is on the board of the Arizona Community Foundation. He earned a Bachelor of Liberal Studies and a Masters of Nonprofit Leadership and Management at Arizona State University.