CEO Summit

Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges us to look beyond the boundaries—real and imagined—that divide us, and to celebrate our common humanity. Named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 public intellectuals, one of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Great Immigrants,” and awarded a National Humanities Medal by The White House, Appiah currently teaches at NYU, though he’s previously taught at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and the University of Ghana. He considers readers’ ethical quandaries in a weekly column “The Ethicist” for The New York Times Magazine. From 2009 to 2012 he served as President of the PEN American Center, the world’s oldest human rights organization. He is currently chair of The Man Booker Prize.  

Appiah’s books include: Cosmopolitanism, a manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering; and The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, which lays out how honor propelled moral revolutions in the past—and could do so in the future. Among his most recent books are As If: Idealization and Ideals, Mistaken Identities, and the recently published The Lies That Bind, an exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. 

Appiah was born in London to a Ghanaian father and a white mother. He was raised in Ghana, and educated in England at Cambridge University, where he received a Ph.D. in philosophy. As a scholar of African and African-American studies, he established himself as an intellectual with a broad reach. His book In My Father’s House and his collaborations with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—including The Dictionary of Global Culture and Africana—are major works of African struggles for self-determination.

Sally Yerkovich is Director of Educational Exchange and Special Projects at The American-Scandinavian Foundation and Adjunct Professor in the Master’s Degree program in Museum Anthropology at Columbia University. She serves as the Chair of the International Council of Museums Ethics Committee as well as the Professional Standards and Ethics Committee of the American Association of State and Local History. Author of A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics, her work, which draws upon more than thirty years of leadership experience, is increasingly engaged with how museums will face the ethical challenges of the future.

A cultural anthropologist with experience in museums and cultural institutions in New York and Washington, DC, she held leadership positions at the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, South Street Seaport Museum, and Museum of the City of New York. She was president and CEO of The New Jersey Historical Society, Executive Director at the Museum for African Art, and first president of the 9/11 Tribute NYC Museum.  She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her A.B. from Connecticut College.

Micah Parzen has served as CEO of the San Diego Museum of Man since 2010. Over the past nine years, he and his team have gradually transformed the museum from a musty, dusty, and tired institution in significant distress into one that is thriving, both inside and out. In 2018, the museum received the University of San Diego’s prestigious “Kaleidoscope Award for Good Governance” under his leadership. Parzen currently serves on the boards of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership and the Western Museums Association, and on the Mayoral-appointed Balboa Park Committee. He is often called on to consult—and regularly speaks at local, regional, and national conferences—on a wide variety of topics related to museums and the non-profit sector.
Prior to becoming CEO of the San Diego Museum of Man, Parzen was a Partner in the Labor & Employment Practice Group at Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps, LLP, where he served as the firm’s Pro Bono Program Coordinator. He has been named a “Top Young Attorney” by the San Diego Daily Transcript, a “40 Under Forty” by San Diego Metro Magazine, and one of San Diego Magazine’s “50 People to Watch.”  His past board service includes the San Diego Volunteer Lawyers Program, the Waldorf School of San Diego, and ElderHelp of San Diego, where he was chair for two years. Parzen received a Ph.D. in anthropology from Case Western Reserve University and a B.A. in anthropology and Juris Doctor degree from UC Davis.

Jeffrey Rudolph is the President and CEO of the California Science Center.  He provided the leadership for the planning, design, fundraising and implementation of the California Science Center’s 25 year Master Plan which transformed the California Museum of Science and Industry into the new California Science Center and created an award-winning Exposition Park Master Plan to guide the redevelopment of Exposition Park in central Los Angeles. 
Rudolph is a Past Chair of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and served as Chair from 2004-2006 and as Chair of the AAM CEO Search Committee from 2006-2007.  Rudolph is Fellow and Past President of the Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC). He currently serves on the Boards of ASTC, EXPO Center, the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board, and the Los Angeles Tourism Marketing District.   He has also served on the Board of Science Museum Exhibits Collaborative and the National Health Science Consortium and Museum Trustees Association Advisory Council of Directors. He is a Senior Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. Rudolph received an M.B.A. from Yale University and a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Julie K. Stein was appointed Executive Director of The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in 2005. A ten-year campaign resulted in a new facility opening in October 2019 that reveals The Burke’s research and collections in a radically transparent and accessible way and connects visitors to staff and volunteers who use them. This process is called “turning the museum inside out” and establishes the Burke as a new kind of museum.
Previously she served as the Museum’s Curator of Archaeology. She also maintains a professorial position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington and was Divisional Dean of Research, Computing, and Facilities for the College of Arts and Sciences. Stein received her M.A and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota and her B.A degree from Western Michigan University. Her research interests are in geoarchaeology, especially studies involving Northwest Coast shell middens. She has excavated archaeological sites on Washington’s San Juan Islands since 1983 and continues to collaborate on research projects.

Olga Viso is an independent curator and nonprofit arts consultant living between New York and Arizona.  She advises artists, museums, foundations, and academic institutions across a variety of artistic, curatorial and strategic areas including facilities planning, organizational design, operations, and collections management.  She is currently a senior advisor to the Dean at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University working on several major arts initiatives including partnerships with visual artist James Turrell’s Skystone Foundation and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Viso has worked in museums since the late 1980s and was executive director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2008-2017) and director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, where she was also curator of contemporary art and deputy director (1995-2007).  As a scholar of contemporary and Latin American art, she has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions that have toured internationally. She is currently a Fellow in Residence at the Mellon Foundation in New York and a visiting scholar at the Smithsonian Institution.  She was appointed in 2013 by President Barack Obama as a member of the National Council on the Arts, which advises the National Endowment for the Arts, and served on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors. She is a 2019 recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship and a member of CIMAM.