The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools

Business Strategist, Art Collector, and Philanthropist

Victoria M. Rogers, ’08

At an early age alumna Victoria M. Rogers, ’08 was inspired by art. She told Frieze in a March 2021 interview that she dressed up as Pablo Picasso for hero day. After school and during the summer Rogers would go to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago for classes.

“My experience at Lab shaped my commitment to building a more equitable future world,” Rogers says. “At Lab, I learned the value of inclusion, and the importance of fostering 

Rogers started volunteering and teaching art classes in seventh grade at the Sue Duncan Children’s Center in the South Side of Chicago for six years until she went to college at Yale University for art history. 

“I recognized I was given many opportunities as a young person, and I wanted to use my time and resources to be supportive in a community that didn’t have that same level of access,” she told Frieze. 

Rogers is described as a business strategist, avid art collector, and philanthropist. She received her MBA from Stanford University and MFA from Parsons School of Design. She manages the strategy team at Autodesk and is an advisor at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory. 

Rogers is currently on the Executive Committee and co-chairs the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access Committee at the Brooklyn Museum, where she became the youngest board of trustees member in 2017. She serves as the Global Council for the Studio Museum in Harlem, is a board member of the Terra Foundation, and recently stepped down as board member of Creative Time after eight years. 

In 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd, she co-founded and co-chairs the Black Trustee Alliance (BTA) for Art Museums, a collective of over 130 Black trustees representing 78 institutions across North America that “increase the inclusion of Black perspectives in the art world.” 

“I think [art is] an important tool to get people to open up and have difficult dialogues,” Rogers told The Chronicle of Philanthropy in a December 2022 interview.