Advisory Board

Pauline Brown

Former Chairman of North America for LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton

For the past 30 years Pauline Brown has acquired, built and led global premium brands. Pauline formerly was the Chairman of North America for the world’s leading luxury goods company, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, where she provided regional leadership for 70 brands in 5 sectors, including fashion, jewelry, cosmetics, and wines & spirits. Prior to LVMH, she was a Managing Director at the private equity investment firm, The Carlyle Group, where she specialized in consumer and retail investments. Earlier in her career, she held senior executive roles at beauty companies, including Estee Lauder and Avon, and was a Management Consultant at Bain & Company. Pauline serves on several boards, including the Parsons School of Design and the Wharton Alumni Executive Board. She currently hosts a weekly lifestyle show on SiriusXM, called “Tastemakers,” and is the author of the groundbreaking new business book, Aesthetic Intelligence, which was published by HarperCollins in late 2019. She received a B.A. from Dartmouth College and M.B.A. from the Wharton School, and she is 2008 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Andrei Codrescu

Poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter
 Andrei Codrescu Website

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist and screen writer. He was a senior commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered for 30 years, MacCurdy Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University, founder and  editor of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas (1983-2016) (corpse.org), and  Peabody Award winner for his film Road Scholar. His many books include So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems 1968-2012, long-listed for the National Book Award, and the more recent Posthuman Dada Guide, Whatever Gets You Through the Night: a story of Sheherezade, Messi@, and The Poetry Lesson. 

Susie Ellis

Co-Founder, Chair & CEO Global Wellness Institute and Global Wellness Summit

Susie Ellis is the chair and CEO of the nonprofit Global Wellness Institute, considered the industry’s leading global research and educational resource. She is also co-founder, chair and CEO of the Global Wellness Summit, the foremost gathering of international business, academic and government leaders in the $4.5 trillion global wellness economy. Recognized as a leading authority on wellness trends, Ellis is frequently quoted in major news outlets around the world and is a popular speaker at industry events. She sits on numerous academic and industry boards, including the EHL – Swiss Hospitality Management School in Lausanne and the Aspen Brain Institute, and is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s “Accelerating Health and Well-being Initiative.” In addition, Ellis has been a member of the California Governor’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. She holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sheri Parks

Former Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)

Sheri Parks, Ph.D., is Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), whose projects include community narratives and public art. She is also an emeritus professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, where she was Associate Dean of Research, Interdisciplinary Projects and Programming in the College of Arts and Humanities and Founding Director of the Center for Synergy, with projects with the Brain and Behavior Initiative and across the campus.  Her signature public projects include Baltimore Stories: Narrative in the Life of an American City, named by funder National Endowment for the Humanities to be a national model of deep community conversations; and two editions of Fierce Angels (Random House; Chicago), in which she traces the Sacred Dark Feminine and the Strong Black Woman archetypes from the first creation stories through American life and culture, named an Essence Magazine Editor’s Pick.  Sheri leads the annual Baltimore Thinkathon and has been an award winning fixture on Baltimore public radio for two decades.

Laurie Racine

Laurie Racine is a seasoned strategist and executive. She leads startups and growth stage companies (for and not-for-profit) through periods of ideation, reinvention, branding, fund raising, team building and cultural evolution. As an investor, founder, board member and operator, Laurie has created critical networks across a variety of sectors – media, education, healthcare and philanthropy. Informed by her early life in the performing arts and then healthcare, she interweaves the creative’s mindset with the scientist’s test fast, fail fast approach to problem solving, to create unique value for her collaborators. Laurie is committed to nurturing ideas that drive change – from sitting on boards or advising companies such as Open Road Media, Creative Commons, The Tribeca Film Institute, Road Trip Nation, The Skimm, Little Bits, The Global Wellness Institute, Better for You Wellness, to founding enterprises like Lulu Press, Public Knowledge, Thunkable and Dotsub. She has also founded and managed the non-profit investment funds, Startl and RedHat Center (Center for the Public Domain), and served as the senior executive for Lifequare, WoW Media, Eyespot and the Health Sector Management Program (Fugua School of Business, Duke University).

Gabrielle Starr

President, Pomona College

G. Gabrielle Starr is a national voice on access to college for students of all backgrounds and on the future of higher education. She is working to strengthen the student pipeline from community colleges to four-year private institutions, and to ensure students from the full range of family incomes enroll in college and thrive.

Starr recently served on the California Higher Education Recovery with Equity Taskforce, charged with envisioning a new approach for postsecondary education preparation and workforce readiness as the state recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post and The Financial Times, among other publications. She is an energetic advocate for in-person education and for engaging challenging conversations in an age of digital immersion. Starr is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and author of three books, with her latest, Just in Time: Neuroscience and the Temporality of Aesthetics, forthcoming from MIT Press. She offers a compelling case for reaching across academic disciplines to spark intellectual discovery, having started her academic career as a scholar of English literature and, over time, extending her work into neuroscience and the arts. Her research looks closely at the brain, through the use of fMRI, to help get to the heart of how people respond to art.

Starr took office as the 10th president of Pomona College in 2017 with a track record of promoting greater access to higher education. As dean of New York University’s College of Arts and Science, she had led the development of new cohort and first-year programs and launched a partnership with New York City's largest community college to create a pipeline in STEM.

Today she serves on the board of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE), and on the executive committee of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities (AICCU). Starr grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, and she set off for Emory University as an undergraduate at the age of 15. At Emory, she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in women’s studies before going on to Harvard University to earn her doctorate in English and American literature.

Román Viñoly

Director, Rafael Viñoly Architects

Román’s educational and professional experiences reflect the broad interests of a born generalist. He has a Medieval History degree from Haverford College, an MFA from the film program at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and an MBA from IE University in Madrid. He has worked as a cinematographer, a documentarian, an architectural photographer, a producer, a creative director, a writer, a financial manager, an executive, and a real estate developer. He reads constantly about science and technology.

He has also co-authored a book on the World Trade Center design competition, THINK New York: A Ground Zero Diary, developed a patented camera system for filming piano performance, and founded a new media start-up called Firebrand that was backed by Microsoft, NBC Universal, GE Capital, and Allen & Company before succumbing to the 2008 financial crisis.

In 2014 he founded Integrated Developments, a vertically integrated real estate development company working primarily in Uruguay, which he leads as CEO, in parallel to his many roles at Rafael Viñoly Architects.

Dan Weiss

Former President and CEO, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Daniel Weiss became the fifth President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in July 2015 and was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer in June 2017. With approximately two million objects in its collection representing more than 5,000 years of artistic achievement, seven million visitors annually, and an operating budget of $320 million, The Met is one of the largest and most diverse art museums in the world.

Previously Weiss served as the 14th President of Haverford College, the 16th President of Lafayette College, and the James B. Knapp Dean of the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, where he also served as professor and chair of the History of Art Department. Weiss has written or edited five books and numerous articles on the art of the Middle Ages, higher education, and other topics. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Weiss is Vice Chair of the Board of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, on the Advisory Board of the Yale School of Management, and a trustee of the Wallace Foundation, the Library of America, the American Federation of Arts, and the Posse Foundation.

Daniel Weiss holds an M.A. and Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University, an MBA from the Yale School of Management, and a B.A. from The George Washington University.

Paul Zoidis

Paul ran the Global Telecommunications and Media investment banking business and was co-head of the Mergers and Acquisitions Department at Lehman Brothers. His work focused on the development of wireless communications and the consolidation of cable and telecommunications networks to create broadband networks for the internet. Prior to this career, Paul worked in Public Finance at EF Hutton developing financing products for tax exempt organizations and issuing tax exempt bonds for hospitals and economic development.

After retiring from investment banking in 2001, Paul joined several local not-for-profit boards affiliated with the YMCA, the United Way, The First Tee, and Haverford College. His primary focus on these boards has been strategic planning and financial advice. While on those boards, he created and funded programs to improve the education of underprivileged students, including: a homework skills development program for third and fourth grade students who did not get help at home, a robotics program for fifth to eighth grade girls to encourage the mathematically gifted, a “Path to College” program which mentors students through the college admissions process and provides scholarships, and a fully paid summer internship program for college students to work at Philadelphia organizations which address issues of social justice and inequity.

Paul is a graduate of Haverford College. He and his wife live in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida and Telluride, Colorado. Their son and daughter and their families live in New York City.