KATIE WINOKUR ’14
Get to know Katie Winokur, Co-Founder of Deaclink.
Search and Assessment
Russell Reynolds and Associates
WFU Class of 2014
Major: Communication and Art History
Minor: Entrepreneurship and Social Enterprise
Q: Why did you start DeacLink?
A: DeacLink is an extension of Kelsey Zalimeni and my love for the Wake Forest Art Department and our desire to help students succeed following graduation. The two of us were incredibly lucky in that we were able to take advantage of all of the opportunities that the university presented us in the arts, and yet both felt that we didn’t have the support we needed to succeed in the art world after graduation. As a result, we had to hustle our senior year of college to make things work. During the year, we made many fantastic connections with Wake Alums across the the country and truly began to realize how robust the alumni network was. Two years following graduation, we couldn’t stop thinking about how there needed to be a resource to connect those fantastic alums with curious students, and thus DeacLink was born.
Q: What has been your coolest art world experience?
A: This is a hard question, but I have to say visiting the Venice Biennale in 2013 as part of the Lynn Johnson Travel Award was pretty fantastic. Never have I experienced so much contemporary art in such a condensed timeframe.
Q: Can you name your favorite off the radar museum?
A: Hands down this is the Baltimore Museum of Art – it’s an absolute jewel of a collection. It has one of the finest Impressionist collections in the country which was a gift of the Cone Sisters. The works they have by Matisse are stunning. The admission is free, and the building is located right next to the Johns Hopkins campus.
Q: Most awesome exhibit or show you’ve seen?
A: I think the coolest of all was spending spending several hours watching The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson at Luhring Augustine in 2013 while on the Art Buying trip. It was one of the most mesmerizing experiences. A close second was the James Turrell retrospective at the Guggenheim.
Q: How did you and Kelsey become friends?
A: Kelsey and I initially bonded over an immense love of food (and food trucks to be exact). From there, we quickly discovered a mutual interest in everything from soccer to art, and from there it was hard to keep us apart.
Q: What’s your favorite city for art?
A: I would have to say London (and I am quite jealous Kelsey gets to call this home). London has an amazing mix of contemporary and traditional arts. Their museums and galleries are best in class, and many of them are free (which in my opinion gives the city a leg up over New York).
Q: Why do Wake Arts matter to you?
A: Wake Arts matter to me for many reasons. First, I feel like the faculty and staff in the art department could not have been more supportive of me as a student and a person, and I didn’t experience that kind of connection anywhere else on campus. Also, I think that the arts are so instrumental in terms of having a holistic worldview. Studying art challenges you to think about things in a broad and multifaceted way, and when writing about the subject, it forces you to engage in a respectful yet antagonistic discourse in order to defend your opinion. Those kinds of communication skills often prevent people from being narrow-minded, and given today’s political and social climate, I think our country could use a bit more of this style of thinking.