Laurie Cumbo

Laurie A. Cumbo (born February 4, 1975) is an American politician and Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. A Democrat, she served in the New York City Council for the 35th district from 2014 to 2021, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Prospect Heights, portions of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Vinegar Hill. She is the founder and first executive director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts.

Cumbo was ineligible to run in 2021 due to term limits.

Cumbo was born in Brooklyn, New York to Wilkins and Beverly Cumbo, the latter an opera singer, and raised in East Flatbush at a time when waves of people of Jewish descent were leaving and residents of African descent were arriving. (Her father had moved to the neighborhood in the 1940s.)

After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, she was accepted into and enrolled in Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1997, inspired by the actions of characters on The Cosby Show and A Different World. After receiving a degree in fine arts there, she received a master's degree in visual arts administration from New York University in 1999.

Based on her 1999 NYU graduate work and a trip to Bilbao, Spain, Cumbo founded and served as the executive director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts (MoCADA). She told the New York Times's Local, "prior to [receiving her master's] I would say I was very inspired by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This museum created a whole economy for this particular city after its shipping industry died. It made Bilbao and the museum a must destination when visiting Spain. I know that MoCADA can do that for Brooklyn as well."

Originally based in a building operated by the Bridge Street AME church in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the institution moved to its current location in the borough's gentrified Fort Greene section within the BAM Cultural District with the help of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Local Development Corporation, which included Bruce Ratner, the Barclays Center and Atlantic Yards developer, on its board. In 2012, the museum landed a $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for a two-year program that brought monthly concerts to public spaces in nearby NYCHA Houses like Walt Whitman, Ingersoll, and Farragut in Fort Greene that drew crowds up to 500 or 600. The following year, MoCADA launched another art performance series, Soul of Brooklyn, "a borough-wide celebration of the diverse arts and cultures of Brooklyn's African Diaspora". From 2001 to 2011, Cumbo served as a graduate professor in the Arts and Cultural Management program at Pratt Institute's School of Art & Design.

In December 2013, one month before she was sworn in, a series of attacks took place targeting Jewish residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, totaling at least eight victims including children. The attacks were alleged to be part of a trend of "knockout attacks", and antisemitism was cited by a number of community leaders, politicians and media outlets as a precipitating factor.

Following the attacks, Cumbo publicly expressed that her African American and Afro-Caribbean constituents had expressed fear of being "pushed out of their homes by Jewish landlords", and that resentment towards the Jewish residents of Crown Heights "offer possible insight as to how young African-American/Caribbean teens could conceivably commit a 'hate crime' against a community that they know very little about." She wrote "I admire the Jewish community immensely.... I respect and appreciate the Jewish community's family values and unity that has led to strong political, economic and cultural gains. While I personally regard this level of tenacity, I also recognize that for others, the accomplishments of the Jewish community triggers feelings of resentment, and a sense that Jewish success is not also their success." Her response was covered widely on blogs and in the New York press.