Theresa Amato

Theresa Amato is an award-winning lawyer and social entrepreneur with more than three decades of transformative service, executive vision and leadership for nonprofit organizations, electoral campaigns and candidates, law firms and foundations. Her lifetime of work includes building democracy and mobilizing for justice as well as advocating for electoral reform, government transparency, human rights, corporate accountability, and fair consumer contracts. Born in Chicago, Theresa graduated from Harvard University, with honors in both government and economics, and from NYU School of Law, where she was a Root-Tilden Scholar and the recipient of the Orison S. Marden and Vanderbilt Medals.

Lorenzo Apicella

Lorenzo is an architect and designer. He was born in Ravello Italy, grew up in the UK, and studied architecture at Nottingham University, Canterbury College of Art, and the Royal College of Art in London. He began his career working on skyscrapers in the US for Skidmore Owings and Merrill before establishing Apicella Associates in London. After ten years completing award winning projects ranging from buildings to airplane interiors, he merged his practice with Pentagram Design, becoming a partner owner. At Pentagram he led worldwide architecture and design projects for twenty years from London and San Francisco.Lorenzo now practices as Apicella Studio, and lives between Providence RI and London. He is a member of both the AIA and the RIBA, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Page Ashley

Chair

After stints at the Columbus Public Library, Foreign Affairs Magazine, and the Council on Foreign Relations, Page moved on to book publishing. She held both editorial and executive positions at hardcover and paperback houses, including GP Putnam's Sons/Berkley Publishing Company and the Hearst Corporation. An interest in education reform led her to the I Have a Dream Foundation. She served on the board of the national foundation and was also the board chair of the New York foundation for over ten years. While on the board of the Collegiate Chorale, she served as chair of the education committee. She is currently a member of the board of directors of Glyndebourne America.

Cristina Biaggi

Founder

Cristina Biaggi, Ph.D, had widely exhibited her creative work in the U.S., Europe and Australia. In addition to her figurative sculptures and her political and abstract collages, she has created a number of large outdoor sculptures. She has published four books: Habitations of the Great Goddess, In the Footsteps of the Goddess, The Rule of Mars, and Activism into Art into Activism into Art. She has also published a number of articles which have appeared in various publications. Marija Gimbutas was her mentor and friend and wrote an introduction to her first book. Her artwork is included in many collections.

Gianni Biaggi de Blasys

Founder

Gianni has always been interested in the arts. After having lived in the US for ten years where he went to high school and attended college, he returned to Switzerland where heI studied architecture and landscape architecture in a private school in Lausanne and practiced the latter. Then after retiring in 1999 at age 65, he started to paint and held a few exhibits, wrote poems and published an autobiography. At the same time, he became a founding member of the Bogliasco Center. He continues to be actively involved in the maintenance and oversight of the Center's expansive gardens and has developed several site-specific art installations in the grounds as well.

Jane Garmey

Jane Garmey writes about gardens, food, and interior designs. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, AD, HG, Elle Décor, Country Life, Town & Country, and Introspective. She is the author of five garden books, most recently, City Green: The Public Gardens of New York, and also Great British Cooking: A Well-Kept Secret, and Great New British Cooking. Formerly a television producer, her company created and produced Behind the Scenes, an award-winning PBS series about the arts for children, Writers Writing, and The Voice of the Poet.

John Harbison

John has received commissions from most of America's premiere musical institutions, including the Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As one of America's most distinguished artistic figures, he is recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. His concert music catalog of almost 300 works is anchored by three operas, seven symphonies, twelve concerti, a ballet, six string quartets, numerous song cycles and chamber works, and a large body of sacred music that includes cantatas, motets, and the orchestral-choral works Four Psalms, Requiem, and Abraham. John was the inaugural Bogliasco Fellow in the mid 1990s, and played a crucial role in establishing the Center as an ideal space for creative work.

Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand is an artist, designer, and writer. She grew up in Paris and New York City, and received her BA and MFA from Yale University, where she taught for more than two decades. A founding editor of Design Observer, she is the author of numerous books on visual and cultural criticism. The first-ever recipient, in 2010, of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome, Jessica has been a Director's Guest at Civitella Ranieri, a 2019 Fellow at the Bogliasco Center, and the Artist in Residence at Caltech. She lives in Rhode Island.

Elizabeth Kan

Currently the Director of Strategic Projects at Cartier, as well as a member of the executive committee, Elizabeth is a former president of the Harvard Club of France, as well as a current board member of the Harvard Alumni Association. Previously, Elizabeth held a number of different positions within the LVMH group, including Director of Marketing, Development and Strategic Projects at Moet Hennessy, Director of Ready to Wear at Céline, and Director of Retail Training at Louis Vuitton. Elizabeth has a BA from Harvard University in Government and International Relations, and diplomas from both the Ecole de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne and INSEAD's Advanced Management Program.

Maciej Kolaczkowski

Secretary

With a background in economics and commodity trading, Maciej now manages the Advanced Energy Solutions sector at the World Economic Forum. Previously, he held positions at the Office of the Prime Minister of Poland and at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dealing with international energy trade negotiations and construction of large infrastructure. He began his career in strategy at PGNiG Polish Oil & Gas Company. He has been a Bogliasco board member since 2021.

Marco Montefiore

Born and raised in Bogliasco, Marco joined the Board in 2015. In line with the Strategy Review he presented to the Board in 2015, Marco successfully organized the first fundraising event outside the US and Italy (2017) and setup of the first donor's advised fund in Switzerland (2019), followed by BF joining Transnational Giving Europe and setting up a second donor's advised fund in Italy (2023), with the goal to broaden the fundraising toolkit in line with the best industry practices. Marco earned the Swiss Philanthropy Masterclass Certificate in 2021. Marco holds an MBA (J05) from INSEAD and a diploma in Business Economics cum Laude (1997) from University of Genova.

Mark Morris

Mark is a global marketing executive who rose from Management Trainee to Chairman over a 36-year career with a single advertising agency, Bates Worldwide. Mark was named to the Bates Worldwide Board of Directors in 1984, Director of Account Management in 1985, Managing Director Bates USA in 1994 and Chairman in 1997. Mark also served as the agency's representative to the 4A's and the Advertising Council. He retired from Bates at the end of 2004. In 2007 Mark helped launch The Wharton Future of Advertising Project designed to chart the course, scope and value of advertising in the fast-evolving technology media environment of today.

Valerie Smith

Valerie Smith, a distinguished scholar of African American literature, is the 15th president of Swarthmore College. Prior to her arrival at Swarthmore, she was a professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA, and the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, founding director of the Center for African American Studies, and the dean of the college at Princeton University. She is the author of three books on African American literature and culture and the editor or co-editor of five others. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Bates College, she holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Virginia. She was a 2010 Fellow in Literature Scholarship at the Bogliasco Center.

Monique Truong

Monique Truong is a novelist, essayist, librettist, and children's book author. A graduate of Yale College and Columbia Law School, Truong is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, US-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, Princeton University's Hodder Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, Bard Fiction Prize, and John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, among other honors. As a librettist, she has collaborated with composers Shih-Hui Chen (Bogliasco ‘25), Joan La Barbara, Francisco J. Núñez, and Randall Eng. Truong was a 2005 Fellow in Literature and a 2011 Advisory Committee member of the Bogliasco Foundation. Born in Saigon, South Vietnam (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), she came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975 and now calls Brooklyn her home.