Gigi Antoni

​​​Giselle (Gigi) Antoni joined The Wallace Foundation in June 2017. She leads the team responsible for the strategy and implementation of the foundation’s work in areas including social and emotional learning, summer learning and after-school system building.

Before joining Wallace, Antoni served for 21 years as president and CEO of Big Thought, a nonprofit that focuses on closing the opportunity gap for children living in poverty in Dallas. She led the organization to deepen its impact and expand its services, so that today Big Thought serves 130,000 of Dallas’s most marginalized young people year-round, with school and community-based programming during the school day, after school and over the summer. Antoni also led in-depth, city wide research and planning processes that increased the breadth of arts and out-of-school-time programming in Dallas, as well as children’s and teens’ access to these programs.

Antoni is a graduate of the Drama Studio London at Berkeley and studied theater at Stephen F. Austin State University and social work at the University of Texas at Arlington. She is the co-author of Collaboration & Sustainability in Arts Education and has written numerous op-eds, essays and white papers.

In 2011, President Barack Obama named Antoni a Champion of Change for Arts Education.