Nora Halpern is the Executive Director of LA28’s Cultural Olympiad, responsible for the arts and culture program which will accompany the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles, California.

Halpern has spent her public and private life advocating for art, artists, and access to the arts for all. A museum professional, art historian, curator, art advisor, and arts policy leader, Halpern began her career in Los Angeles, where, as the Curator for the Frederick R. Weisman Collections she helped establish the core mission and program of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, which is to provide access to contemporary artworks, for free, worldwide. Halpern was also the Founding Director of the museum at Pepperdine University before moving to England, where she was the DPhil advisor in contemporary art at Lincoln College, University of Oxford.

Halpern established her arts advisory service, NRH ARTS LLC, in 1991. It advises artists, collectors, institutions, corporations, and foundations on strategic planning, collection development, exhibitions, programs, convenings, acquisitions, deaccessions, as well as estate planning. Halpern is a member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors.

Halpern has curated numerous exhibitions and projects. In 2023, she organized a monumental light-projection installation by artist Jenny Holzer presented on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and was co-curator of, A More Perfect Union: American Artists and the Currents of Our Time, an exhibition on art and democracy presented at the Acropolis Museum in Athens and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. In 2009, Halpern curated a major retrospective exhibition of Yoko Ono held at Palazzo Tito in Venice, Italy. Halpern is co-founder of Street Scenes: Projects for DC, a public art program that places temporary art experiences across the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. 

Parallel to her curatorial and advisory work, Halpern is a long-standing arts and art education policy leader and advocate. She served as a Vice President at Americans for the Arts for more than two decades, focusing on policy positions related to arts and health, freedom of expression, the environment, education, technology, the arts as a door to dialogue and change, among many other issues. In 2023, she was appointed by President Biden to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a position she held through January 2025. Halpern has taught and lectured internationally. Among her many publications is Putting the Arts to Work: 15 Years of National Arts Policy Roundtables, 2006-2020. While in Los Angeles, Halpern was a Los Angeles Human Relations Commission member and received the Mayor’s Award of Merit for outstanding volunteer service in advancing human relations. 

Halpern is a member of the Meridian Center for Culture and Sports Diplomacy at Meridian International Center and has served on the boards of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art (now Institute of Contemporary Art, LA), ArtTable, PS Arts, and Scholastic’s Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. Halpern received her BA and MA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Helena Rubinstein Fellowship, through which she completed their Independent Study Program in Curatorial Studies.