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Who We Are

 

OUR BOARD

 

Kathryn Hohlwein

Founder & President

 

Rainer Mack

Executive Director


Yannis Simonides

Vice President   

 

Laura Hohlwein

Creative Director 

 

Raymond Dowd, Esq

Legal Counsel

 

Professor William Mullen

Board Member

 

Roberta Nevers

Treasurer

 

 

ASSOCIATES

 

Jane Alpert

M.P.A. Principal,

Strategies & Writing

for Non-Profits

 

Norman Austin

Professor Emeritus

Classics,

University of Arizona 

 

Stephen Daitz

Professor Emeritus

Classics, CUNY

 

Rachel Hadas,

Poet & Lecturer, Rutgers University, Newark

 

Thomas Marsh

Professor, UCSC

 

Dr. Speros Vryonis

Execuctive Director,

Speros Basil Vryonis Center

for the Study of Hellenism

Kathryn Hohlwein
Founder
& President
Rainer Mack
Executive Director

After years of University teaching, of world wide travel and continuous writing and editing, Kathryn Hohlwein has found her time fully occupied by her non-profit organization, The Readers of Homer, Inc. which keeps her busy and fascinated with great poetry, and the shared reading of it.  Although the performances have her traveling to all kinds of venues in the world, she resides in Northern California the rest of the time.

 

Born in the Rocky Mountains, in Salt Lake City, Utah, she always enjoyed both nature and literature.  She graduated from the University of Utah in English, Philosophy and French and went on to the Bread Loaf School of English, of Middlebury College in Vermont for her Master's Degree. After a Fulbright Travel Grant to France, where she studied Philosophy at the University of Rennes, in Brittany, and after a summer of Spanish study at the University of Santander, in Spain, she married Hans-Jurgen Hohlwein, a German artist and they taught English and Art in Beirut, Lebanon, where their son, Reinhard, was born.  After a year's retreat in Scotland, they moved to the United States where they taught in Iowa, Wisconsin and Ohio before moving to Sacramento and the California State University there.  They had two more children: Andrea, and Laura and all three children became artists or scholars.

 

Professor Hohlwein taught at Universities for her entire adult life, specializing in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Poetry in Translation, Creative Writing, and Homer. She traveled extensively and wrote almost continuously.  She still does.

Rainer Mack BIO past and ongoing, includes plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Brecht, Korres, Kambanellis and others, along with solo and ensemble pieces culled from the writings of C.P. Cavafy, General Makriyannis, Nikolai Gogol and others. He has received the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Greek Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, The A. S. Onassis, I. Kostopoulos, S. Niarchos, M. Tsakos and A. G. Levendis Foundations, IBM, Time Warner and the Mobil Foundation. He co-produced Mikis Theodorakis 75th Birthday Celebration at Lincoln Center with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and has been associated with the Annual Festival of Greek Music and Dance at Symphony Space in New York City, presented by the World Music Institute and AD&M Productions. He narrated the PBS specials Axion Esti, Visions of Greece and Return to the Homeland. He recently wrote and directed SMYRNE, a docudrama on the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe which is scheduled to tour North America in 2009-10.

 

Since 2004 he has performed the Apology, in Greek and in English, at theatres, festivals, universities and communities in the USA, the UK, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Canada, the United Emirates and Uruguay, and is scheduled to take it on tour in Russia, Australia, Spain and Japan. He was recently honored by the prefecture of Athens as Ambassador of Hellenism 2009 for his lifelong service to Greek arts and letters worldwide.

Yannis Simonides
Vice President 

Born in Constantinople and raised in Athens, Yannis Simonides is a Yale Drama School trained actor/writer and Emmy-winning documentary producer. He has served as professor and chair of the NYU Tisch SOA Drama Department, as executive producer of Greek Orthodox Telecommunications (GOTelecom) and as the executive director of Hellenic Public Radio  COSMOS FM in New York. He is the founder and director of the Greek Theater (Elliniko Theatro) in New York and of Mythic Media, a performing arts lab.

 

His performance work, past and ongoing, includes plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Brecht, Korres, Kambanellis and others, along with solo and ensemble pieces culled from the writings of C.P. Cavafy, General Makriyannis, Nikolai Gogol and others. He has received the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, The Greek Ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, The A. S. Onassis, I. Kostopoulos, S. Niarchos, M. Tsakos and A. G. Levendis Foundations, IBM, Time Warner and the Mobil Foundation. He co-produced Mikis Theodorakis 75th Birthday Celebration at Lincoln Center with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and has been associated with the Annual Festival of Greek Music and Dance at Symphony Space in New York City, presented by the World Music Institute and AD&M Productions. He narrated the PBS specials Axion Esti, Visions of Greece and Return to the Homeland. He recently wrote and directed SMYRNE, a docudrama on the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe which is scheduled to tour North America in 2009-10.

 

Since 2004 he has performed the Apology, in Greek and in English, at theatres, festivals, universities and communities in the USA, the UK, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Canada, the United Emirates and Uruguay, and is scheduled to take it on tour in Russia, Australia, Spain and Japan. He was recently honored by the prefecture of Athens as Ambassador of Hellenism 2009 for his lifelong service to Greek arts and letters worldwide.

Laura Hohlwein
Something or Other

Laura Hohlwein has been a professional artist, poet, teacher, and designer since 1989.  She has had fourteen solo exhibitions and has participated in more than twenty group exhibitions in the United States and Europe.  She is represented by John Natsoulas in Davis, California.

 

She has published poems in several small literary journals, including The Green Mountain Review, Poetry Miscellany and The Eleventh Muse.  She has given numerous public readings and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  She was interviewed by August Coppolla on a PBS T.V. Special : "Committing Life Through Art" in 1992 and was a featured Reader at the Moscone Center in the San Francisco Bay Area Book Fair 1994. See artwork and read poetry samples at www.hohlwein.com

 

Ms. Hohlwein was the recipient of two teaching grants from the California Arts Council for her work with prison inmates in the Arts-in-Corrections program and won a New Works grant from the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission for work with painting and video.   She is working on art direction, curating and event planning for The Readers of Homer.  She is shooting and editing a documentary on these international events.   

 

Laura Hohlwein did undergraduate work at Oberlin College, McGill University, CSUS, The International School of Art in Umbria, Italy. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College and an MFA in New Media from Transart Institute of Danube University, Austria. Currently she is a full-time faculty member at the Art Institute of California and also teaches video editing at American River College.

William Mullen

Chairperson

Bill Mullen
Board Member

 

Professor of Classics, Bard College

B.A., Harvard College; Ph.D., University of Texas. Professor at University of California, Berkeley; Boston University; St. John’s College. At Bard since 1985. Specializations: Greek poetry, classical tradition, classical and world mythology, China/India/Greece, ancient athletics, public speaking, the public performance of poetry. Publications include Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton, 1982); articles on Greek poetry, pre-Socratic philosophy, American founders’ engagement with Rome, Nietzsche, historical revisionism; poetry, including “Enchanted Rock” in Best American Poetry 1998, and translations, including contributions to the Norton Anthology’s The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2009).

 

Professor Mullen has led West Point–Bard joint seminars since 1985 and worked with survivors of combat trauma and juvenile delinquents. In 2011, he brought The Readers of Homer (TROH) to Bard as an official organization-in-residence. The nonprofit group organizes marathon audience-participation readings of the Iliad andOdyssey at venues around the world, most recently in London as part of the 2012 Olympics. In the spring of 2013, Bard plans to host a marathon reading of the complete Iliad for Bardians and the whole mid-Hudson community.

 

Raymond Dowd, Esq.
Legal Counsel 

Raymond J. Dowd is an alumnus of Fordham Law School, Class of '91. His legal career has taken him to France, Italy, and finally New York City, where he began his own practice in 1994.  He is now a partner in Dowd & Marotta LLC. 

 

Mr. Dowd earned his B.A. in International Studies from Manhattan College in 1986 and a French Language Certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris, France. While attending Fordham Law School, he completed an internship with the Honorable John E. Sprizzo in the Southern District of New York and served as Articles Editor of the Fordham International Law Journal.  After Fordham Law, Mr. Dowd spent two years with the law firm of Dobson & Sinisi in Milan, Italy where the firm represented a wide range of U.S., Canadian and Italian corporate clients.  His current clients include model agencies, magazines, television networks and broadcasters, film producers, record labels, photographers, artists and designers.

 

Mr. Dowd has litigated numerous trademark, copyright, music royalty, right of publicity, and defamation cases.  Mr. Dowd served as Co-Chairman of the Entertainment Media Intellectual Property and Sports Law Section of the New York County Lawyers Association from 2000-2003.   He serves as Chairman of the Federal Litigation Section of the Federal Bar Association (Empire State Chapter).  Mr. Dowd writes book reviews and a column for the New York Law Journal.

 

An accomplished public speaker, Mr. Dowd teaches Fundamentals of Intellectual Property Management at New York University (School of Professional and Continuing Education) and delivers the copyright and Trademark Fundamentals lecture at the New York County Lawyerss Associations Continuing Legal Education Program.   Recent lectures include "Troubles With Trademarks" (New York County Lawyers Assn.); "Basics of Trademark Licensing" (MAGIC fashion and apparel show in Las Vegas); "Creating Value for Your Company on the Internet" (Trautman & Wasserman Private Bankers);"Skirting the Issue of Trade Dress: Copyright Law After Wal-Mart v. Samara" (Copyright Society of the U.S.A.), "Models, Fashion Professionals and the Internet: What You Should Know" (Modelwire, Inc.) and "Trademark Law: What You Need To Know in Cyberspace" (New York New Media Association)

Roberta Nevers
Treasurer

Roberta Nevers.................

B.A., Harvard College; Ph.D., University of Texas. Professor at University of California, Berkeley; Boston University; St. John’s College. At Bard since 1985. Specializations: Greek poetry, classical tradition, classical and world mythology, China/India/Greece, ancient athletics, public speaking, the public performance of poetry. Publications include Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton, 1982); articles on Greek poetry, pre-Socratic philosophy, American founders’ engagement with Rome, Nietzsche, historical revisionism; poetry, including “Enchanted Rock” in Best American Poetry 1998, and translations, including contributions to the Norton Anthology’s The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2009).

 

Professor Mullen has led West Point–Bard joint seminars since 1985 and worked with survivors of combat trauma and juvenile delinquents. In 2011, he brought The Readers of Homer (TROH) to Bard as an official organization-in-residence. The nonprofit group organizes marathon audience-participation readings of the Iliad andOdyssey at venues around the world, most recently in London as part of the 2012 Olympics. In the spring of 2013, Bard plans to host a marathon reading of the complete Iliad for Bardians and the whole mid-Hudson community.

 

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