Shawna Vesco Ahern, founder and Director of Wall Box Gallery, is a writer, curator, and cultural strategist currently serving as the County Galleries Curator for San Mateo County. She previously held arts marketing roles at The Tenderloin Museum, Jenkins Johnson Gallery at Minnesota Street Project, The Magnes Museum, and UC Berkeley. 

A creative leader with expertise in community engagement, she is known for building inclusive public arts and humanities programming for national and international corporate, non-profit, museum and government entities such as The Guggenheim, CineCrowd (Netherlands), and apexart (NYC). She has authored civic policy related to public art, and her projects have been featured in The New York Times, SF Chronicle, Artsy, TimeOut, The San Mateo Daily Journal, Pacifica Tribune and other publications. She has published pieces with Bloomsbury, Duke University Press, Interim Magazine, Thresholds, and the ACLA. Shawna has delivered lectures and participated in panel discussions at Utrecht University (NL), The Humanities Centre (Leiden, NL), Kaifeng University (China), Modern Language Association (NYC), and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute.