Liz Maugans is the Director of YARDS Projects, and Curator of the Dalad Collection at Worthington Yards in Cleveland’s Warehouse District. She is co-founder of Art EverySpace, a women-owned business that supports artists through the purchase and activation of hyper-local art in communities living and working in properties in Northeast Ohio. She co-founded and is the Former Executive Director of Zygote Press, a non-profit printmaking studio located in the great city of Cleveland. She founded the Collective Arts Network, a quarterly journal, online resource and arts consortium that works to promote Northeast Ohio artists and organizations to a greater audience. She is founder of the Artist Trust (The Cleveland Artist Registry), an open access collective arts project and artist registry to better connect Cuyahoga County Artists of all disciplines to each other and the greater community. Maugans was instrumental in bringing the Rooms-to-Let Project to Slavic Village and acts as a consultant and participant of the temporary installations that take place in foreclosed houses. Maugans is on the Board of Trustees of the Collective Arts Network.
For over twenty-five years, she has organized one-person and thematic exhibitions featuring regional, national and internationally known artists. Her curatorial specialization is her devotion to emerging art, social justice and local experimental practices that broaden access through social networks, inclusion and community-building initiatives. An advocate for artists and the visual arts, Maugans has served as a consultant for numerous community development organizations and creative business start-ups. Her passion for cross-disciplinary partnerships includes collaborations with the North Shore Federation of Labor, The AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland, Community Assessment and Treatment Services, Gordon Square Arts District and the Support for Artist Planning Team through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. She teaches printmaking and drawing as an adjunct intermittently at the Cleveland Institute of Art and has served on the Board of several community-based arts organizations.
She received her BFA in printmaking from Kent State University and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1992. Maugans’ work is included in the Progressive Art Collection, The
Cleveland Clinic, the Dalad Collection, BF Goodrich, the Westin Collection and The Riffe Center for Government and the Arts. She received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in 2000 and a 2005 Artist-in-Communities Grant. Maugans was awarded an Ohio Arts Council’s International Residency to Dresden, Germany in 2009. She was honored, along with her Zygote co-founder, Bellamy Printz, the Martha Joseph Prize for Distinguished Service from the Cleveland Arts Prize in 2012. In 2013, she was awarded a $20,000 Creative Workforce Fellowship from Community Partnership for Arts and Culture.
Maugans lives in Bay Village with her husband, John and three kids, Olivia, John and Will. She is represented through HEDGE Gallery at 78th Street Studios.