Deputy Director, General Counsel and Assistant Secretary, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Sarah G. Austrian joined the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in September of 2006 as General Counsel. She is responsible for advising the Board of Trustees and the Foundation Director and staff on all legal issues involving the Foundation. She is also responsible for planning meetings of the Board, participating in the formulation of Board and Foundation policies and strategic plans and providing counsel to the Board on matters of governance.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Austrian had extensive experience relating to tax aspects of joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions, dispositions, contractual arrangements, international transactions and operational issues, real estate transactions, corporate sponsorship and philanthropy, financings, and the development of corporate policies. From 2002 to 2006, Sarah was Vice President of Domestic Tax at PepsiCo, where she provided leadership in the area of U.S. federal and state tax planning, with a focus on mergers and acquisitions and operations. As a Senior Attorney at AT&T Corp., she focused on federal income taxation and played a significant role in AT&T’s divestitures of NCR, Liberty Media, and AT&T Wireless, and AT&T Broadband’s merger with Comcast. Austrian also practiced for seven years in the tax department of the law firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler.

Austrian is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University and received her JD from the Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as an editor of the Georgetown Law Journal.