MA Top 30 Professional: Aryo Wicaksono

Senior Manager of Membership, National Engagement & Outreach
PEN America

PEN America is most known for challenging book bans and other First Amendment violations. But in recent months, the organization has made significant strides extending its philosophy to the performing arts.

Credit goes to Aryo Wicaksono, whose work for PEN fuses his experience as a longtime arts administrator, internationally touring concert pianist, journalist, and translator. Leveraging his deep connections in the performing arts, he’s developed institutional partnerships between PEN and entities like Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Public Theater, the Theatre Development Fund (TDF), Austin Film Festival, Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and others.

“It’s a combination of literary, cultural, and performing arts, and also human rights advocacy,” Wicaksono says of his current role. “It’s never a siloed thing. All of it’s related.”

As a boy in Indonesia, Wicaksono committed himself to piano early on but picked up freelance writing assignments to finance CD purchases and interview musicians
he admired. His dual musical and literary interests would follow him into adulthood. After moving to New York, he continued to write and translate in both corporate and journalistic settings, all while teaching piano and working as a rehearsal pianist for institutions like the Mark Morris Dance Center, Dance Theater Harlem, and NYU’s Tisch dance program. (He acknowledges a special fondness for dance—his late husband was a dancer.)

Wicaksono juggled some of those gigs while working full-time for Chamber Music America as its membership manager from 2013 to 2018. The experience was an outgrowth of work organizing chamber music programs as early as his student days at the University of Arizona. Prior to arriving at PEN, Wicaksono even worked in bankruptcy law for six years.

Quite understandably, Wicaksono doesn’t have much time to concertize anymore. He does, however, still remotely teach students as far flung as Indonesia, Singapore, and the West Coast. Giving back
through teaching, he says, “is what separates a Martha Argerich, a Daniil Trifonov, a Yuja Wang, a Horowitz.”