Trails Advisory Committee Member
Lisa Conn is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of the workplace connection platform, Gatheround. Gatheround helps companies like Disney, Gusto, and GE build an inclusive, supportive culture, no matter where or how their employees choose to work.
Lisa has previously held leadership roles at Facebook, the MIT Media Lab, FWD.us, and President Obama’s campaign. At Facebook, Lisa led the company’s efforts to build products that reduce polarization and build empathy on the platform. At the MIT Media Lab, Lisa managed the Electome which tracked the public response on Twitter to the 2016 U.S Presidential election and produced the first visualizations of the electorate’s ideological polarization, described by Vice Magazine as “a treasure trove on how Americans discussed one of the most contentious presidential races in history.”
Lisa’s roots are in community organizing: she led large-scale community organizing programs as the National Organizing Director of FWD.us, and served as a field director in the battleground state of Florida for President Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign.
Lisa received her B.A. from NYU, and MBA from MIT. Formerly named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Vice News, and more. She sits on the Board of Directors for Facing History and Ourselves, a global education non-profit organization that challenges teachers and students to use lessons of history to stand up to bigotry and hate.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Joe is a member of O’Melveny’s Litigation and White Collar Defense & Corporate Investigations practices. Joe has a broad practice at O’Melveny, involving corporate investigations, litigation, arbitration, and counseling on regulatory matters. Joe has conducted trials in state court, federal court, and before arbitrators, argued cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and represented clients in state and local administrative proceedings. Joe has also represented undocumented clients in immigration proceedings, a prominent Mexican American artist in a legal dispute over ownership of his artwork, and a class of plaintiffs seeking significant reform of Nevada’s system of indigent defense.
Prior to joining O’Melveny, Joe served as a law clerk at the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. While in law school, Joe externed in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and in the Executive Office of then-California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris. Prior to law school, Joe worked in the Antitrust Division and the Office of Legislative Affairs of the United States Department of Justice.
Joe is a Board Member of Central City Neighborhood Partners, a Trustee of the Mexican American Bar Association, and serves as the head of O’Melveny’s Latinx Attorneys employee network.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Frank Escher, trained at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH, Zürich, Switzerland), is a principal with the Los Angeles firm Escher GuneWardena Architecture, whose work ranges from small, conceptually rigorous projects to ecologically and socially innovative urban design proposals. Frank Escher and partner Ravi GuneWardena’s interest in contemporary art has led to collaborations with artists, such as Sharon Lockhart, Mike Kelley, Olafur Eliasson, and Stephen Prina, and the installation design of dozens of exhibitions in American and European museums. Escher GuneWardena’s work on historic structures includes the restoration of John Lautner’s Chemosphere, Phase 1 restoration work of the Eames House (in collaboration with the Getty Conservation Institute), as well as houses by A.Q. Jones, Richard Neutra, Paul Williams, and Gregory Ain.
Escher is the editor of the monograph “John Lautner, Architect”, was the administrator for the John Lautner Archive (1995-2007), and serves on the boards of the John Lautner Foundation, the Julius Shulman Institute, and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Escher has taught at the University of Southern California, he and GuneWardena have been visiting professors at Cal Poly Pomona, at the University of Oregon, and at the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland) for the 2016-2017 academic year, where they taught as part of the school’s Technique et Sauvegarde de l’Architecture Moderne (TSAM) program. In June of 2017, Clocks and Clouds, a monograph on Escher GuneWardena was released by Birkhäuser.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Tracy Lew was a partner at the iconic James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles, California. For over 25 years, she collaborated with artists, private individuals, foundations, corporations, estates and others to assemble some of the world’s more important collections of contemporary art, with a particular emphasis on post-war Southern California artists such as H.C. Westermann, James Turrell, Ed Ruscha and Ken Price. A significant aspect of her work also involves working with curators, museums and galleries on special commission projects, exhibitions, research, and catalogues. She is a Member of Contemporary@LACMA acquisitions committee, Los Angeles and the Chinati Contemporary Council in Marfa, Texas.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Jonathon Aubry is a media and entertainment executive with 20+ years of experience across digital media, film, music, television, branded entertainment and publishing. He has held senior positions in marketing, sales, publicity and business development in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors.
Presently,
Jonathon serves runs his own strategic consulting firm, AUBRY & CO. which
helps brands, media companies, digital platforms and non-profit organizations
build and grow their brand partnership, digital/luxury/influencer marketing and
branded content strategies. AUBRY & CO.’s current clients include The
Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, MRC Media which includes The
Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Dick Clark Productions, Delta Air Lines,
XPrize, Fort LA, Sony Music Latin and Water’s End Productions.
Previously,
Jonathon served as Vice President, Brand Partnerships at The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, where he helped relaunch
The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard brands Before he joined THR and BB,
Jonathon served as Vice President, & Publisher, The Advocate Group at Here Media Inc.
where he was responsible for advertising sales and strategic partnerships
across the entire Advocate brand, including its print, digital, branded
entertainment and mobile platforms. Prior to Here Media, Jonathon served
as VP, Marketing and Distribution for Regent Releasing. While at Regent, he
oversaw theatrical and home entertainment marketing and publicity for all of
Regent Releasing’s independent theatrical releases. During Jonathon’s
tenure, Regent released over 35 films and garnered its first Oscar nomination
and win for Best Foreign Language film for DEPARTURES in 2009.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
John
F. Szabo is the City Librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, which serves
over four million people—the largest population of any public library in the
United States. He oversees the Central
Library, 72 branches and the Library’s $194 million budget. In 2015, the Library received the nation’s
highest honor for library service, the National Medal for Museum and Library
Service, for its success in meeting the needs of Angelenos and providing a
level of social, educational and cultural services unmatched by any other
public institution in the city.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Carolyn Ramo is the executive director of the non-profit arts organization Artadia. Since assuming the role in 2012, Ramo has helped the organization provide curator-driven grants and other impactful programs to visual artists in cities across the United States and outside of market centers. Before joining Artadia, Ramo was a partner at Taxter & Sepngemann, a contemporary art gallery that focused on emerging artist. Prior to that, she worked at David Zwirner and Nicole Klagsbrun and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Thao
Nguyen is an art/architecture/design agent and cultural strategist at leading
talent and sports agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
CAA
represents many of the most successful professionals working in film, TV,
music, sports, theatre, video games, design, art, digital, and provides a range
of strategic offerings from marketing and consulting services, to venture
financing.
She
represents many of the world’s leading cultural innovators, including Bjarke
Ingels, Rem Koolhaas, Kahlil Joseph, Visionaire, Rob Pruitt, and Refik
Anadol. She has worked with brands such
as Burberry, Stella Artois, Samsung, Cadillac, and Absolut Vodka in creating
and amplifying their art and culture strategies.
Thao
also curates CAA’s contemporary art collection focused on Southern California
artists, is on the Board of UCLA School of Art & Architecture, and is a
founding member of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Fund for Exhibitions.
Elle Magazine named Thao on its Women in Hollywood Power List and profiled in VOGUE’s “Women of CAA.” Thao graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Physiology and Art History.
Trails Advisory Committee Member
Jaison Morgan is the CEO of Common Pool. He has been recognized by the BBC as “the world’s expert” in designing prizes to drive innovative breakthroughs. He helped establish a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study how targeted rewards can be used to induce new solutions to engineering challenges. He has served as an Advisor to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of the First Minister of Scotland, and the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, the European Commission, and other public and private partners to counsel their use of competitions for solving large-scale problems.
Today, he leads the Common Pool team, an agency that focuses exclusively on creatively engineering incentive-based programs. Those programs include a competition to assist the NASA Mars Landing Mission, to open-source the development of new technologies to expand extra-terrestrial in situ resources aboard planetary facilities. Most recently, Common Pool has been responsible for the MacArthur Foundation’s 100&Change, offering a single $100 million grant (USD) that is the largest open-competition program ever launched. Jaison completed graduate studies at the University of Chicago. He is a frequent lecturer on the subject of incentive engineering and challenge competitions, and he is a serial entrepreneur who has spent his career on building companies that serve the public and leverage technologies to expand solutions to common causes. You are welcome to view his TEDx talk, to learn more about the history and some current trends when adopting these programs: https://youtu.be/NyOaoIcCeMY
Trails Advisory Committee Member
After completing a degree in musicology at Carleton College (focusing on twentieth century experimental music), Shaun spent a year in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright fellowship studying the country’s ethnic conflict. He returned to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami to investigate the uses of international aid money in reconstruction. He made his first documentary during that time, a short piece on the murder of a prominent Sri Lankan journalist. Since then, Shaun has produced and directed short documentaries and commercials around the world. BORN THIS WAY, his first feature-length documentary, premiered at the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival and won the Outfest Los Angeles grand jury award for best documentary. Shaun lives in Los Angeles.
