Chairman

Tom Healy (born 1961) is an American writer and poet and chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright program worldwide. He was appointed to the Fulbright board by President Barack Obama in 2011.

Healy teaches at New York University and is currently a visiting professor at the New School. His book, “What the Right Hand Knows” was a finalist for the 2009 L.A. Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award and his poems and essays have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies.

Throughout his career, Healy has played a prominent role in the New York art world. He served as the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and was awarded the 2006 New York City Arts Award by Mayor Michael Bloomberg for leading rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community after 9/11. Earlier, Healy pioneered the Chelsea arts district and opened one of the first art galleries there in 1994, showing numerous young artists who rose to prominence, including Tom Sachs, Janet Cardiff, Kara Walker, and Karen Finley. Before his gallery, Healy owned a consulting company to museums, film festivals, and other prominent cultural institutions around the world, including Film Forum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, PBS, Westminster Abbey, the Vatican Observatory, the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.

Under President Bill Clinton, Healy was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and he has done extensive work internationally in AIDS prevention and microfinance.

Healy grew up on his family’s small dairy farm in Mount Vision, New York. He studied philosophy at Harvard as an undergraduate and received his M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia. His life partner, Fred Hochberg, is the chairman of the United States Export-Import Bank.