TransCultural Exchange

ABOUT

TransCultural Exchange Board of Trustees

TransCultural Exchange's Board of Trustees provide a variety of expertise, multiple perspectives and oversight to ensure the long-term viability of TransCultural Exchange.

Gordon L. Amgott, <website> Accountant. Gordon L. Amgott is a Certified Public Bookkeeper with an MBA from Babson College. For over 25 years, Amgott has been the Business Manager for The Country Club. In that capacity, he has helped transform their manual accounting system to a fully computerized one and overseen various national tournaments, improvements to the club's property and computer systems conversions. In addition Amgott is the Treasurer of the Congregation Agudath Achim in Taunton, Massachusetts and runs his own accounting practice Gordon L. Amgott Financial Services, primarily providing tax preparation and bookkeeping services. He also is a member of the Massachusetts Association of Public Accountants, National Society of Accountants, National Association of Tax Professionals and Taunton Chamber of Commerce and American Association of Daily Money Managers.

Thaddeus Beal was formally educated at Yale College and Stanford Law School. He then practiced law in Boston, first as a criminal prosecutor and then as a corporate and securities lawyer for twelve years. He left active practice in 1985 when he withdrew as a senior partner of the Boston law firm, now Nixon, Peabody to attend The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He has continued to work in the legal field in many pro bono capacities, including serving as a hearing officer in matters relating to lawyer misconduct; but he now devotes substantially all of his work life to the practice of art. He has been awarded three Massachusetts Council for the Arts Fellowships. His works are in many collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and he regularly shows in Boston, Connecticut and New York City. He has served on several charitable boards, and he is currently actively involved as a board member of Discovering Justice, a non-profit dedicated to educating public school students about notions of justice and community involvement, as well as TransCultural Exchange.

Blake Brasher <website> is an artist and a robotics engineer at Boston Dynamics. He was part of a small team of engineers at Boston Dynamics, which developed the ground breaking BigDog quadruped robot in the 2000s and since then has worked on developing the Spot robotic platform into a commercial product. He has served as an artist-in-resident in several programs in the United States, Italy, Romania and France, and exhibited in group and solo shows in America and Europe. He is a member of the Cambridge Art Association and Gallery 263, an associate member of Kingston Gallery and, previously, a member of MIT's List Visual Arts Center's advisory board.

Susan Cohen is an arts administrator who served as director of the Council for the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1996 - 2016. A dedicated and resourceful leader, she is a trustee of the Massachusetts State Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and a founding member of Arts Administrators in Higher Education. She also is a former board president of the Mobius Artists Group. Over the span of her career, she has organized and led a dozen exclusive excursions, bringing groups of up to fifty people to cities around the world to experience "behind-the- scenes" tours of arts and culture. In addition to travel planning, she ran the MIT arts grant program, which awarded $150,000 annually in support of all types of projects and endeavors. She received her BA in Art History from Richmond College in London and credits the arts community at MIT with sparking her passionate interest in contemporary visual art.

Meagan Hepp <website> is an artist, educator and the Studio Manager for Harries-Héder, a Cambridge based public art team. She also runs the Ceramics Studio at the Brookline Arts Center in addition to the classes that she teaches at Suffolk University, including Sculptural Thinking, Three-Dimensional Design, and Contemporary Trends and Practice. Along with serving on the board TransCultural Exchange, she is a member of the board of Catalyst Conversations, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering dialog between art and science. As an artist, her most recent shows have been at Kingston Gallery and Post-Cubicle Gallery.
Photo Credit: Danielle Simpson

Janna Longacre is a Professor at the Massachusetts College of Art + Design. Janna was also the curator for MassArt In Cuba, which included artwork and projects based on and inspired by Cuba from invited faculty and alumni who have been involved with the history of the island. The invited artists include Juan Pablo Cárdenas, John Cataldo, Sharon Dunn, Al Gowan, Yoav Horesh, Consuelo Issacson, Janna Longacre, Abelardo Morrell, and Adam Puryear, who showed a wide range of their personal artworks and writing from photographs and paintings to clay sculptures and excerpts from novels.

Jeff Plunkett is a former investment management executive. As global general counsel at Natixis Investment Managers, he led the legal function of this top-15 investment management company. Prior to Natixis, he was a corporate and securities law partner at Goodwin Procter, a leading international law firm. Currently, he is the chairman of the Audit Committee of ALIPH (International Alliance for the Preservation of Heritage in conflict areas), a foundation established in Switzerland by nations and private donors. He also serves on the board of the French-American Chamber of Commerce - New England, a non-profit that supports companies, entrepreneurs and individuals based in New England and France, and is a past member of the board of trustees of the French Cultural Center in Boston. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth College and his J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Mary Sherman <website> is an artist, curator and the director of TransCultural Exchange, which she founded in Chicago in 1989. She also teaches at Boston College and Northeastern University and, recently, served as the interim Associate Director of MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology. Additionally, for two decades, she worked as an art critic for such publications as The Chicago Sun-Times, The Boston Globe and ARTnews. She has received numerous grants and awards, including three Fulbright Specialist Grants (Taipei, Istanbul and Trondheim), and been an artist-in-residence at such institutions as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cité Internationale des Arts and the Taipei Artist Village. Among the shows she's curated, two received awards from the Northeast Chapter of the International Art Critics Association. Her own works, which push the definition of painting into the realm of space and sound, have been shown at numerous institutions, including Taipei's Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Beijing's Central Conservatory, Montreal's International Digital Art Biennial (BIAN) and New York's Trans Hudson Gallery.
Photo (©) Winfried Denk.