Amira Dhanoa

Los Angeles · New York · Mexico City

Index of Work · 2021 — 2026

Part cultural programmer, part community builder, part producer.

I create reasons for people to gather, then build the programs and relationships that carry forward across places, projects, and time. Eleven projects across three parts.

Part I

Cultural Programming

A program with its own logic keeps running in the months when nothing launches. I build recurring calendars out of local partners, each arriving with an audience of their own, and design formats that produce something at the end of the day.

A weekly calendar and an annual residency for a 200 acre mixed use district, assembled from local arts institutions, restaurants, farmers markets, artist troupes, and universities. Each partner arrives with an audience of their own. Delivered alongside a $4.3M commissioned art portfolio installed inside live construction.

Sea Breeze Properties · San Marcos, California Plan approved, staged for rollout

A salon dinner, one of the weekly recurring formats in the plan.

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Scope

Lead cultural strategist on the programming plan, against a ~$5M planning budget
Designed a weekly recurring calendar of foraging, salon dinners, herbal dyeing, wellness, artist talks, and mending and craft clinics, plus an annual artist residency
Convened institutional, culinary, agricultural, and university partners across the district
Directed the $4.3M art portfolio: five artists, separate fabrication chains and freight routes, 50+ elements sequenced around 500+ site personnel

Part II

Community & Platform

An audience is people who watch. A community is people who make something and come back. The work here is turning one into the other: the voice, the membership, and the open calls that hand the platform to the people it was built for.

Part III

Retail & Production

Programming only counts if the room holds. This is the delivery side. Stores that carry three uses without a rebuild, pop-ups that sell through, and campaign builds that go up and come down inside a single day that cannot move.

Brand Experience Lead · Los Angeles

Why this role

I grew up in Los Angeles and spent the last decade in New York. I moved back last year, and what I’ve been building since is close to what this role describes.

Right now I’m producing Earth School, a one-day immersive nature school for 120 people at TreePeople this October, built with local herbalists, dyers, mycologists, and musicians for Leah Thomas’s Green Girl Crafts. Herbalism, visible mending, natural dye, a native plant walk, lunch under the trees. The part I’d want to talk to you about is the structure: what gets made, said, and eaten that day becomes the first issue of the zine. The gathering produces its own artifact. I’m producing the day and editing what comes out of it.

That’s the model I’d bring to the flagship. Most experiential work decorates a launch. I’d rather the store run a cultural program with its own logic and its own audience, one that keeps going in the months when nothing drops, and let product moments land inside it. It’s your own line: a place where culture happens, not just where it’s reflected.

The other half of that is a mechanic I already run. For Retail Pharmacy in New York I bring Mexico City designers onto their floor, making the introduction, then handling the shipping and the contract so the route actually holds. I’m building the exchange now that takes a Mexico City retailer into New York and sends Retail Pharmacy back the other way, with a speed haircut performance staged inside the pop-up by local artists and hairstylists. It’s the same instinct as Earth School, and as Seed Sewa, which curated forty artists out of an open call rather than a rolodex and sent $6,500 back to the organizations the work was about. Find people already making something, and build the structure that carries their work into a room it couldn’t otherwise reach.

Two things I’d start on. The Institute for Art and Olfaction is a few miles from the store and treats scent as art rather than product. I know the founder, and a commissioned scent series with them is the most Glossier thing in Los Angeles that Glossier isn’t already doing. And Dopamine Books, whose founder I program with and who is connected to Semiotext(e), could build a reading out of eleven years of Glossier campaigns, timed to the LA Art Book Fair. Your archive is cultural material. It should be treated like it.

On execution: I project managed the build of Tumbao, a 1,500 sq ft concept store in Lower Manhattan, from finished plans to an operating space in ten weeks. One spatial identity carrying retail, exhibition, and events without a rebuild between them. I’ve also produced against dates that don’t move: a Cartier campaign set that went up and came down inside a single Met Gala Monday.

What I haven’t done is run a rolling commercial calendar where something drops every month and the metric is sell-through. I’d want sixty days inside yours, learning the beat, before I proposed anything against it.

My network runs Los Angeles, New York, and Mexico City, and the artists in it travel. I’d like to put it to work here.

Amira Dhanoa · hello@chandnidhanoa.com