Mary Anne Carter
Co-Chair
Born in Tennessee to a military family, Carter spent her childhood moving from state to state while learning to appreciate service to country.
Carter is President of MAC Research, a political and public affairs company she founded in 1998. MAC Research has provided consulting services to more than 100 candidates for political office as well as developed and implemented communication plans for numerous successful statewide issue campaigns.
Carter was confirmed as the 12th chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts on August 1, 2019, receiving unanimous consent from the United States Senate. She had served as acting chairman of the Arts Endowment since June 2018, following 17 months as the agency’s senior deputy chairman.
Prior to her appointment, Carter had participated in numerous campaigns as well as having twice worked in the U.S. Senate. As Chief Policy Advisor to Florida Governor Rick Scott, she managed a 150+ staff overseeing the Office of Policy and Budget for the nation’s third largest state.
As Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Carter navigated, with bipartisan praise and increased appropriations every year, an agency that often struggled at times to maintain the confidence of Congress.
During her tenure, she pushed to make the National Endowment for the Arts more accessible to the American people, directing an expansion of Creative Forces (an arts therapy program for U.S. service members and veterans recovering from post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, and other psychological health conditions) and bolstering many of its national initiatives. Alarmed by the rise in opioid addiction, the agency produced its first ever report on how the arts can aid in opioid recovery.
Under Carter’s leadership, the agency also prioritized outreach to typically underserved communities such as HBCUs and Native Americans to make sure these communities had maximum arts opportunities. For the agency’s initiative-taking efforts, the National Endowment for the Arts received the 2019 White House Initiative on HBCUs Public Partnership Award – Federal.
Additionally, Carter is the only Chairman to visit a prison and discuss with inmates how arts programming affects them and to tour the arts installations at Burning Man.