When Ali Rosa-Salas entered the Zoom room to chat with me on a recent Thursday, she appeared to be walking in place. Her legs were out of the frame, but her torso bobbed with the cadence of a relaxed stroll. “Are you…walking?” I asked, a little confused, and she explained that she was calling in from her walking pad at work, a way to stay active in a job that normally requires a lot of sitting. (She’s training for the Brooklyn Half Marathon in April, leading up to the London Marathon next year.)
This breezy integration of work and workout has emerged from years of managing a busy schedule. Ali, 33, is the Vice President of Visual and Performing Arts at Henry Street Settlement, the Lower East Side social service agency that’s home to Abrons Arts Center. She joined Abrons as artistic director in 2016, and in 2022 she stepped into her current role, overseeing programming for the organization’s galleries and three theaters (among many other responsibilities). Overlapping with this work, she was an associate curator at Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, MA, from 2020 to 2023. A graduate of Barnard College (we are fellow alums), she also holds a masters degree from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.