About Ed Cardoni

A native of Boston, Edmund Cardoni graduated from the MA program in Creative Writing of CU Boulder in 1981, moved to Buffalo to attend UB, and joined the staff of Hallwalls as part-time Fiction Diction programmer in 1984. In fall of 1988 he became Hallwalls’ artistic program director—supervising a staff of five fellow curators in visual arts, video, film, performance art, and music.  Retaining the duties of program director, as well as continuing to curate literature, he was named Executive Director of Hallwalls in spring of 1991. That summer he administered a WNY residency project for the San Diego-based Border Art Workshop with a major grant he had secured from The Ford Foundation. 

In 1999, he accepted the Governor’s Arts Award on behalf of Hallwalls from then Governor George Pataki, presented by Cindy Sherman. He organized Eileen Myles’ HARP (Hallwalls Artists-in-Residence Project) residency in fall 2001, Homer Jackson’s in 2003, and Pat Oleszko’s in 2007. In May 2006 he served as a panelist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council. He has served as a panelist for the Literature program of the New York State Council on the Arts (1987–1990), the Artist Fellowship program of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) (1992), the Capital Aid program of NYSCA (2000–2003), and NYSCA’s statewide panel for Regional Economic Development Council (REDC) grants to arts organizations (2015–2017). 

In fall 2011 he taught a graduate seminar to entering MA candidates in the UB Arts Management Program. He was also named Best Arts Administrator of 2011 by Buffalo Spree magazine, primarily for his leadership of ultimately successful advocacy for the restoration of lost Erie County Arts & Cultural Funding, out of which he and his allies co-founded the Greater Buffalo Cultural Alliance (GBCA), on whose steering committee he still serves. In September 2012, a major retrospective exhibition he guest-curated and for which he wrote the catalog essay opened at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Spain: Rock, Roll, Rumbles, Rebels, & Revolutions. In 2024 he curated the exhibition 5 X 10: 50 Years of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 1975–2025, on view at the Buffalo History Museum September 20, 2024–June 22, 2025. He has written and published many articles and catalog essays on the visual arts.