At the Yard, Island resident Laura D. Roosevelt has been elected president of the board of trustees, and consulting artistic director David R. White will stay through 2014 as artistic and executive director

Ms. Roosevelt will succeed Sarah Jane Hughes on Oct. 1, when the Yard begins a new fiscal year. Ms. Hughes led the board since 2007 and, under Yard governance protocol, she will, as past president, become a vice-president of the board.

Meanwhile the board ratified a long-term contract through 2014 with Mr. White, who was initially hired in February of this year and has since led an institutional turnaround with an expanded board and revitalized staff.

Ms. Roosevelt was a seasonal resident of the Vineyard for most of her life before moving to the Island year-round with her husband, psychiatrist Charles Silberstein, and one year-old daughter, Truda, in the fall of 1995. Her son, Oliver, was born at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital in 1997.

A graduate of the University of Virginia, she spent her first three professional years at the Pan American Development Foundation, where she focused on grant writing and fund-raising. Later, after earning an MBA from Yale University, she spent six years at JP Morgan as its professional philanthropist for the arts, providing funding to nonprofit New York city arts organizations in the fields of dance, theatre, visual arts, opera, music and the written word. Among her grantees at the time was Dance Theater Workshop, headed by Mr. White.

Ms. Roosevelt became a freelance journalist on the Vineyard. She is a published poet and a photographer whose work will have its first gallery showing in September 2011 at the Louisa Gould Gallery in Vineyard Haven.

Ms. Roosevelt has served on the boards of the Vineyard Playhouse, the WPA Theatre, Meredith Monk’s House Foundation for the Arts, the Development Group for Alternative Policies, and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.

Mr. White’s credentials have proved crucial to the revival of the Yard. His aggressive crisis leadership has resulted in the write-down and retirement of 60 per cent of the accumulated debt he confronted. He has moved to have the board quickly expand its membership and its skill-sets to provide even greater oversight and institutional expertise.

He also has laid the foundation to build the Yard into a year-round Island institution. Beginning in October 2011, under the guidance of Jesse Keller, resident manager of Island programs and education, the Yard will direct and expand the dance and related performing arts training (and performances) of the YMCA. Off-season residencies and performances elsewhere on the Island are on the drawing boards.

The 40th anniversary season in 2012 is already coming together with national and Island-related artists.