Adele Chatfield-Taylor, the longtime president and CEO of the American Academy in Rome, will step down at the end of 2013.
Chatfield-Taylor, 67, whose name is virtually synonymous with the institution, has led it since 1988. Next year will mark her 25th year as the Academy's president. She began her affiliation with the organization nearly 30 years ago, as a Rome Prize Fellow, in 1983. During her tenure as president, she oversaw the transformation of the Academy, including the restoration of the McKim, Mead, and White building that houses it, as well as the Academy's adjacent Villa Aurelia. According to a statement sent to friends and colleagues, her administration saw a five-fold increase in the Academy's endowment while it also endowed new and enduring programs, including its fellowships and residencies, the Rome Prize competition, the Arts Directorship, and the Rome Sustainable Food Project.
"Our programs enhance not only our own artists and scholars, but also the intellectual community in the city of Rome. And while we will always have an American community at our core, we are on our way to becoming truly international," her email reads.
Before her work with the Academy, Chatfield-Taylor worked with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission and the National Academy of the Arts. She was named the winner of the Vincent Scully Prize in 2010.
In her message, Chatfield-Taylor says that her upcoming 25th anniversary as the institution's leader marked a natural moment for her transition. The Academy's board of trustees posted a statement saying that they have accepted her resignation "reluctantly," and enlisted the firm Isaacson Miller to help with the search for her replacement.
"Adele has brought a kind of magic to the Academy," says Academy chair William Hart, in a statement. "She has known what to save, what to refurbish and what to add."
The Academy was launched in 1894 as a home for American architects studying classical architecture in Rome. Since then it has grown into an arts and research organization with a global outlook.
"If in the nineteenth century we were an outpost in a foreign land, today we are a crossroads in a global world," Chatfield-Taylor says.
