In the constantly shifting world of contemporary art, New York’s collectors remain a driving force—quietly shaping tastes, elevating artists, and anchoring the city’s global cultural influence. From storied Upper East Side apartments to converted lofts in Tribeca, a new generation of collectors is emerging with fresh perspectives and a willingness to challenge convention. Whether driven by passion, patronage, or a sharp eye for the future, these individuals are not only acquiring art—they’re helping define its trajectory. This profile delves into the lives and spaces of some of New York’s youngest collectors, exploring what they buy, why they collect, and how their choices reverberate far beyond their private walls.
Federico Debernardi
Investor
Courtesy of Federico Debernardi.
Federico Debernardi is an investor with a long standing family background in agriculture and cattle genetics. He focuses on technology and consumer products companies mainly in the United States, spanning from startup to growth-stage. He divides his time between New York, London, and Buenos Aires. He is a long time supporter of the arts having started collecting at the age of 21. He has discovered and championed young artists early in their career who today are the leading voices of their generation.
His collection is a dialogue across generations in every medium: painting, sculpture, photography, video and installations and always collected with an eye to give back. He has supported and donated artworks from artists in the collection to major institutions around the world such as TATE, Guggenheim, Venice Biennale, LACMA, Denver Art Museum, MFA Boston, Hirshhorn Museum, Ludwig Museum, Consortium Dijon, ICA Boston, among many others. In 2022 he made a significant gift of artworks to the MFA Boston to commemorate his 15th year since enrolling at Harvard University.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
FEDERICO DEBERNARDI: Jem Perruchini. He is Ethiopian/Italian and his paintings have plenty of historical references from Ancient Greece to the Renaissance. They show how enriching cultural dialogues can be at a time when the world has a huge identity crisis and migration crisis.
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
FD: Find the most important artists of your generation—or the generation you want to connect with. Support them early and build your collection around their work. Trust your eye, but also look deeper: seek meaning. Great collections are not just about aesthetics or value, but about the ideas they preserve and the voices they elevate.
“Trust your eye, but also look deeper: seek meaning,”
Federico Debernardi
Look for artworks that engage with history, identity, and the social issues of their time. It will take time, but that time will be deeply rewarding—and ultimately, it’s how a collection becomes your legacy.
Pari Ehsan
Creative Director and Curator of Pari Dust
Courtesy of Pari Ehsan.
Pari Ehsan is the creative director and curator behind Pari Dust, a digital platform that explores new ways to combine the elements of our visual world, offering windows into contemporary art, fashion, and the built environment through an intersectional lens. She earned a CFDA nomination for her distinct approach to inhabiting and documenting art spaces with the vision to compel a wider audience to engage with art. Pari’s curatorial practice is focused on the reframing of modern history in an effort to counter narrative omissions and essentialist binaries. Her work seeks to reimagine approaches to the transcultural dynamics that continue to shape our contemporary moment.
A former architect and furniture designer, her embodied mode of cross-pollinating mediums and identities has led to interdisciplinary collaborations with artists, brands, fairs, galleries and museums. She has worked with MoMA, The New Museum, Tate Modern as well as artists such as Shirin Neshat, Mariko Mori, Wangechi Mutu and brands including Chanel, Cartier, Loewe amongst others. She has contributed her parallel poetries of visuals alongside narrative to Paper Magazine, W, Cultured and more. She received an M.Arch from UCLA and a B.Arch from the University of Southern California.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
PARI EHSAN: I consider the pieces of art I’ve acquired as lucky talismans. I’ve been a bit nomadic lately and have been traveling with a work by New York-based artist and filmmaker, Alicia Mersy. She is a real-life earth angel who recently presented a work of video art on the High Line commissioned by High Line Originals. As a creature who is deeply affected by my immediate environment, wherever I am in the world, I take out Wings of Encouragement (Green), an affirmation device on engraved plexi, and enshrine it in my surroundings. In the presence of this visionary wisdom, I feel a sense of home and my quest to maintain the integrity of my true self is renewed.
“I consider the pieces of art I’ve acquired as lucky talismans,”
Pari Ehsan
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
PE: My advice for those at the outset of their collecting journey would be to harness technology as a generative entry point and tool for discovery. Still, nothing replaces the offline art experience where you can feel the work’s presence. Engaging with art in person is essential—seek out studio visits, gallery openings, fairs. Speak with artists, advisors, and gallerists, let your relationships be part of your education. Young collectors groups at the Guggenheim and Met for instance offer opportunities to engage with fellow art enthusiasts as well as give access to curators with decades of experience.
Timo Weiland
Creative Director, Entrepreneur, and DJ
Courtesy of Timo Weiland.
Timo Weiland is an award-winning Creative Director, serial entrepreneur and DJ based in New York City. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised between Northeast Florida and New York City. After graduating from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee he worked for several years as an investment banking analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc. covering Media & Technology before launching his first startup. Since 2009, Timo has successfully built a namesake lifestyle brand, as well as businesses across food beverage, design, media, B2B intelligence, real estate, technology, and venture capital.
The Timo Weiland brand, co-founded in 2010 with Alan Eckstein and Donna Kang, won the prestigious Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation award, Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Design, as well as the Council of Fashion Designers of America x Cadillac Retail Innovation grant. Since 2021, Timo has been building a web3 data marketplace & SaaS platform called MySt . Additional recent projects include co-founding The Lead, consumer investments including BelliWelli and Plant People, creative direction for GAP’s Banana Republic, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG Worldwide), and one of the world’s largest direct-to-consumer optical brands, Zenni. He works between his creative offices in Brooklyn, retail operation with Groupe on the Bowery, recording studio in Flatiron, and venture capital offices in Lower Manhattan. Timo has been recently profiled in The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Vogue, WWD, Forbes, TechCrunch and Fast Company.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
TIMO WEILAND: I recently acquired 2 incredible works of art that I am very excited about. One of the works is a striking metal star sculptural painting by my close friend, artist Shantell Martin. Additionally, I am obsessed with 2 exquisite paintings by the artist Serge Miquel called Cruciform Harlequin and Distraction. Since they are both massive works, it will be an adventure to frame & place the art.
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
TW: Collect works from your talented friends. Support them by buying the works & proudly displaying them in your homes, offices, and other prominent spaces.
“Collect works from your talented friends,”
Timo Weiland
Allow yourself to get excited by artworks that you are drawn to—that you love. Since you will most likely be surrounded by the art IRL in your daily life, make sure it’s something that inspires you in as many ways as possible.
Storm Ascher
Curator, Writer, and Founder of Superposition Gallery and The Hamptons Black Arts Council
Courtesy of Storm Ascher.
Storm Ascher is an independent curator, writer, and founder of Superposition Gallery and The Hamptons Black Arts Council. She has a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts (2018), an MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute and Claremont Graduate University (2020) and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree for Art & Style 2022.
Storm founded Superposition Gallery in August 2018. She started her curatorial projects with a mission to subvert gentrification tactics used in urban development through art galleries. She refers to her gallery as “a socially conscious approach to contemporary art with a focus on borrowed space”. Superposition Gallery has drawn in exhibition participation from over 100 artists of different cultural backgrounds and multidisciplinary practices, such as Layo Bright, MR. WASH, Derrick Adams, Ludovic Nkoth, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Tariku Shiferaw, Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Nate Lewis, Marcus Leslie Singleton, Helina Metaferia, and Muna Malik. By starting a nomadic gallery model without a brick and mortar address, the gallery has continued to grow their community outreach through site specific iterations of borrowed space in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and internationally. Storm has fostered partnerships with various institutions and brands who look to the Superposition program for partnership activations— launching spaces around the world.
In 2023, Storm founded the Hamptons Black Arts Council—a 501(c)3 non profit charitable organization based in New York State — which is dedicated to upholding the legacy of Black art institutions on the East End of Long Island. Storm’s development of the Hamptons Black Arts Council focuses on Advocacy, Acquisition Development, and Infrastructure and Operations. Storm’s curatorial work and community involvement through HBAC has increased awareness of Black art organizations through public programming, education, and networking; grown the contemporary collections of artwork by artists of diverse backgrounds through exhibitions and fundraising; and maintained their museum galleries and staff retention through fundraising. Recent exhibitions through The Hamptons Black Arts Council mission include Tariku Shiferaw’s first museum solo show “Making Space: One of These Black Boys” at the Southampton African American Museum, as well as “Spectrum of Echoes,” an exhibition in partnership with UBS which included works by Sanford Biggers, Tomashi Jackson, Che Lovelace and more.
Storm worked at various galleries and institutions prior to starting her own curatorial program and organizations, such as LAXART under Hamza Walker, David Lewis Gallery, Marciano Foundation, and Spruth Magers. She has curated for the Eastville Museum in Sag Harbor, Phillips New York, Phillips Los Angeles, Southampton African American Museum, UBS Global Art, and OOLITE Arts in Miami.
She is on the Advisory Board of Inversion Art, which invests in and stewards visual artists who are at an inflection point in their careers. She is also on the board of Rose House Residency, an artist incubator program in a Victorian home in Cobleskill, NY, and the Core Committee of The Circuit, a Black arts coalition. She is on the steering committee of the Art Basel Women’s Wealth Summit with Unlocked Foundation and UBS Women’s Wealth Segment, which has a mission to close the gender pay-gap across industries.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
STORM ASCHER: Lauren Halsey edition from the Serpentine in London, Kenturah Davis from Los Angeles supporting the Altadena fire relief.
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
SA: Be patient and selective, save up for the ones that make you the happiest and the artists who are making an impact in their community.
“Be patient and selective,”
Storm Ascher
Natasha Roberts
Curator, Publicist, and Advisor
Courtesy of Natasha Roberts.
Natasha Roberts is a seasoned art curator, publicist, and advisor with extensive experience in cultivating landmark exhibitions, cultural communications and strategic partnerships. In recent years, she has curated exhibitions at Bergdorf Goodman, the penthouse at Central Park Tower, as seen on Bravo‘s “Million Dollar Listing” and Netflix‘s “Owning Manhattan,” Ki Smith Gallery, A plus A Gallery and more. As the Founder of The KNOW, Natasha advises clients on collecting, curatorial projects, and artist business development. She has also held positions at Artsy and Public Art Fund, and serves as an active member of several arts leadership organizations. In addition to a Bachelor’s in Sociology from the American University, Natasha holds post-graduate and professional certificates in curatorial practice from The School for Curatorial Studies Venice, contemporary art from Christie’s, and perfumery from Pratt Institute.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
NATASHA ROBERTS: I recently acquired a framed edition of Bianca Abdi-Boragi‘s “Hourglass,” a striking artwork that plays with symmetry and duality, depicting mirrored portraits within hourglass forms, rendered in fluid washes of blue and red. The work touches on themes I’m deeply drawn to—the passage of time, identity, and surrealism—and I have it installed at home in conversation with Jared leClaire‘s Heartbeat in the Brain, which features two metronomes on a carved wood stand.
Bianca’s interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, video, installation, and painting. Often responding to the politics of migration, and gender, she brings a poetic intensity to everything she makes, layering collective memory with personal narrative. I had the pleasure of curating her work for the penthouse at Central Park Tower, and collecting her work is part of my ongoing commitment to support the artists I collaborate with. For me, investing in their careers isn’t just professional, it’s personal.
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
NR: There’s so much more to experiencing “the art world” than Thursday night gallery openings. Explore broadly: visit art fairs both large and small, attend MFA exhibitions, and don’t overlook special editions when thinking about ways to bring accessible art into the home. I even have Nina Chanel Abney UNO cards, and the MoMA Salvador Dali and Baccarat Be@rbricks! Follow artists whose work you enjoy on Instagram to witness the evolution of their practice and stay engaged with how they’re sharing and selling their work, and don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for a studio visit because many artists welcome that kind of direct connection.
“Explore broadly: visit art fairs both large and small, attend MFA exhibitions, and don’t overlook special editions,”
Natasha Roberts
Buy what you love, but also take the time to learn about the market if you’re curious about art as an investment. If you’re looking to build a thoughtful collection, consider working with an independent art advisor who can help you shape a strategy and provide a framework for future acquisitions. Collecting is not just about possession—it’s about learning, supporting, and engaging.
Dana Prussian Haney
Art Finance and Advisory
Courtesy of Dana Prussian Haney.
Dana Prussian Haney is a New York-based art collector and art finance and advisory professional. At Bank of America, Dana leads the Art Services strategy for the Bank’s east coast clients, helping them through all stages of a collecting lifecycle, from building and selling collections to lending against their art. Dana holds a BA from Barnard College at Columbia University in Art History and Political Science.
Dana serves on the Advisory Board of RXArt, a nonprofit that places site-specific installations by leading contemporary artists into pediatric hospitals. She has also served on the Board of Directors of ArtTable and on several collector councils at the Parrish Art Museum.
Dana and her husband collect together. Their collection began with a focus on abstraction through the decades, and features post-war artists such as Lynne Drexler, Helen Frankenthaler, and Friedel Dzubas in dialogue with contemporary artists such as Kennedy Yanko and Carmen Neely. They have since expanded their collection more broadly.
WHITEWALL: Can you share a recent acquisition you’re excited about?
DANA PRUSSIAN HANEY: One of our most recent acquisitions I am excited about is a Louise Nevelson Sky Gate wall relief from 1973. Her Sky Gate series breaks apart the NYC skyline into a body of windows, shadows, and architectural forms. Living with a piece from this series feels like an ode to New York. It also has amazing provenance having been placed by the owner of Pace in one collector’s home for over 50 years. I love works that have become so embedded in a family’s history.
WW: What is your advice for aspiring collectors, just getting started?
DPH: Knowledge breeds confidence. Go deep into an artist’s history, practice, and market before committing to an acquisition. It certainly staves off any impulse purchases, and perhaps more importantly, helps you know when you’ve found the one!
“Go deep into an artist’s history, practice, and market before committing to an acquisition,”
Dana Prussian Haney
