Staff
Eric Banks - Director
Eric Banks, Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, is a writer and editor based in New York. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor in chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle and was a two-term member of the NBCC board of directors as well as chair of its award committees on Biography and Criticism. He was a judge of the Pulitzer Prize committees in Fiction in 2017 and 2020 and was chair of the judges committee in 2017.
Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, Aperture, Town and Country, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood. Additionally, he has edited numerous catalogs and collections of artists writings and is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné.
Elle Liu - Assistant Program Manager
Elle Liu is the Assistant Program Manager of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Liu was a staff writer for Toronto Star and a copyeditor for Washington Square News. She is interested in character-driven, local stories and has covered music, culture, and the arts. She has also worked as a producer, audio and video editor for the podcast Think About It, a news editor at WNYU Radio, and a distribution intern at Project Syndicate in Prague.
Liu was born on a Monday in (the greater) Toronto (area). She has lived in Guangzhou, China and Bellevue, Washington. She moved to New York City in August 2020. Among many things, she loves coffee, podcasts, ceramic arts, grammar, and hiking. She graduated from New York University with a BA in Journalism and English in May 2024.