Sarah Weingast

Background

About Sarah Weingast

Sarah Weingast serves as an Associate General Counsel at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Kennedy Center), the nation’s cultural center and living memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy. In that capacity, Sarah handles transactional affairs for the Kennedy Center, as well as its affiliate, the Washington National Opera. In addition, she provides in-house counsel to senior leadership on a variety of legal issues including development and donor relations, federal grant management, and educational programming. Over the course of her career, Sarah has served as a legal advisor, leader, and strategist to nonprofit and educational institutions, a federal agency, and private corporations. Prior to joining the Kennedy Center, Sarah was Deputy General Counsel (Acting General Counsel) at the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal agency which is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide. In that capacity, Sarah served as inhouse counsel, providing legal guidance in a wide variety of legal issue areas including federal grantmaking, appropriations and administrative law. She advised on legal and policy issues relating to the Agency’s national initiatives, including structuring public-private partnerships, intellectual property permissions and music licensing, logo usage, and social media and public relations. Prior to the NEA, Sarah served as Assistant General Counsel to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and its affiliated college, the Corcoran College of Art + Design, in Washington, DC. Early in her career, Sarah was in private law practice with law firms in DC, Philadelphia, and Virginia, with a practice focused on transactional and international law. She also served as sole in-house counsel to a professional fundraising company for nonprofits in Virginia. Sarah received her Juris Doctorate from Tulane Law School in New Orleans, Louisiana, and her Bachelor of Arts from McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec.