VLA Residency Faculty
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento, Esq.
Program Director and Faculty
Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento is a visual artist and art lawyer interested in the intersection of art and law. He is currently the Associate Director for Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in New York City, where he advises and represents visual and performing artists and arts organizations. He received his BA in Art from The University of Texas at El Paso, and an MFA in Art from The California Institute of the Arts. In 1997 he was a Van Lier Fellow at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in Studio Art, and received his J.D. from Cornell Law School. He is an Adjunct Professor of art law at Fordham Law School, and is also the Program Director and faculty of VLA's Art & Law Residency Program.
His legal experience includes advising artists, galleries, and arts organizations on matters involving copyright, trademarks, moral rights, free speech, and artist-gallery disputes. He has recently worked on an important appeal under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 on behalf of the Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel in the artist’s highly-publicized dispute with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He has also co-written amicus briefs for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and the United States Supreme Court regarding another high-profile moral rights
case, Chapman Kelley vs. Chicago Park District, in support of artist Chapman Kelley.
He has taught critical theory, art law, and studio art at a number of universities and art schools, including NYU, Harvard University, the University of Southern California, University of California-Irvine, Occidental College, CalArts, Hofstra University, and Brooklyn Law School. He has presented talks and participated in panels and symposiums at a number of institutions, including The Drawing Center, The New York State Bar Association, NYU School of Law, McGill Faculty of Law, Dia:Beacon, Fordham Law School, The International Center of Photography, Pratt Institute, SUNY-New Paltz, The Bronx Museum, The Yale School of Management, The School of Visual Arts, The Vera List Center for Arts and Politics at The New School, Creative Capital, Columbia University School of the Arts, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Parsons The New School for Design, the El Paso Museum of Art, The El Paso Bar Association and Federal Bar, Columbia Law School, Cornell Law School, Harvard University, and the Centre Sociologie de l’Innovation, Ecole des Mines de Paris. He was a mentor with the Kennedy Center’s Arts in Crisis program in 2009-2010.
His art projects have been shown in international exhibitions, including Mexico, Germany, and Spain, and nationally in Dallas, New York City, and Los Angeles. He has published essays and projects in Five Continents and One City Exhibition (catalogue essay, Mexico), Capital Art: On the Culture of Punishment (catalogue essay, US), Cabinet Magazine (US), Law Text Culture (Australia), and Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left.
Sarmiento currently serves as a New York State Council on the Arts panelist for state and local partnerships. He is also a member of the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association, and serves on the advisory board for two nonprofits, The Nietzsche Circle and The Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance.
For more information on select institutions and journals where papers, projects, and talks on art and law have been presented, please view Clancco’s Bibliography page.
Elena M. Paul, Esq.
Advisor and Program Faculty
Elena M. Paul is an arts and entertainment attorney and the Executive Director of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts. In her legal practice, Paul represents artists and arts organizations specializing in corporate, transactional and intellectual property law. Paul has presented at institutions on a national basis, including College Art Association, Columbia University, Dance/NYC, the French Culinary Institute, Harvard Law School, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the School of Visual Arts, New York University, Sundance Film Festival and SXSW. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the New York Film Academy and the Brooklyn Law School. Paul received her Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Davidson College, phi beta kappa, and her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. Paul was a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow at Harvard Law School and is a mentor for The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in its Arts in Crisis Program.
Caryn Coleman
Curator and Faculty
Caryn Coleman is an independent curator and writer living in Brooklyn whose curatorial practice explores the intersection of film and visual art with an obsessive focus on horror cinema’s influence on contemporary artists. This is the basis for her online writing project The Girl Who Knew Too Much and upcoming exhibition programming Contagious Allegories: horror cinema and contemporary art at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles (2013) and The Art of Fear artist film screening at Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn. She is currently the Curator for the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts ‘Art & Law’ Residency program and previously owned the gallery sixspace in Los Angeles (2002-2008) and Chicago (1998-2000). She has written for LUX, Rue Morgue, The Modernist, Art Review online, Beautiful Decay, L.A. Weekly, and art.blogging.la. Coleman received her MFA in Curating with distinction from Goldsmiths College in London.
More about Caryn Coleman:
Curatorial projects: caryncoleman.com
Research on contemporary art and horror cinema: thegirlwhoknewtoomuch.com/
The Art & Law Residency is an educational program of
Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts
