Cuyahoga Arts and Culture CEO and executive director Karen Gahl-Mills has resigned, effective June 7, according to a press release sent this morning, April 18. In a challenging atmosphere of funding cuts, the leader of one of the nation’s largest public funders of the arts became embattled on several fronts: first in an attempt to address racial inequity in grantmaking to individual artists, and subsequently by choosing to significantly reduce operating support to nonprofit organizations all at once, rather than gradually, in the hope of keeping grant amounts stable for a period of years despite a projected continual decline in cigarette tax revenue.