People

Alberto Vasallo, III is President and CEO of El Mundo Boston, an iconic Latino multimedia company that has been in the publishing, broadcasting and large-scale event business for the past 50 years in Boston, Massachusetts.

Albie Sachs' career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen, when as a second year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar aged 21. The bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws. Many faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention.In 1966 he went into exile. After spending eleven years studying and teaching law in England he worked for a further eleven years in Mozambique as law professor and legal researcher. In 1988 he was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Maputo by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight of an eye. During the 1980s working closely with Oliver Tambo, leader of the ANC in exile, he helped draft the organization's Code of Conduct, as well as its statutes. After recovering from the bomb he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he returned home and as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994 he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court.

Alden is a reporter and producer for New England Public Media.

Dr. Aleisa Fishman is a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She encourages audiences to explore the history of the Holocaust and how that history remains relevant today. Dr. Fishman curates the Holocaust Memorial Museum's podcast interview series Confronting Hatred, part of the Museum's initiative against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

**Alejandra St. Guillen** was appointed by Mayor Martin J. Walsh in 2014 as the Director of the Mayor's Office of New Bostonians with the mandate to strengthen the ability of residents from diverse cultural and linguistic communities to fully participate in the social, economic, cultural and civic life of the city. During her tenure thus far, Alejandra has leveraged public-private partnerships to expand staff capacity and launch new initiatives, such as the Immigrant Integration & Empowerment Project, as well as the New American Corners. Prior to her appointment, Alejandra served as the Executive Director of ¿Oiste?, Latino Civic and Political Organization. In this role, she collaborated with state legislators and other governmental officials in the development and promotion of Public Policy initiatives that have directly impacted the Latino community in Massachusetts, that include Education Reform, Economic Justice Policy and Electoral Reform. Alejandra has demonstrated a strong commitment to social justice, and has worked tirelessly as an educator, community organizer, and non-profit leader.

Aleksander Feliks Wierzbicki holds a B.S. in theatre education from Emerson College, where he teaches, and a M.F.A. in directing from the Boston University School of Theatre Arts. Aleksander has directed, acted, taught and stage-managed at the American Repertory Theatre, Huntington Theatre, Lyric Stage, Opera Company of Boston, Gloucester Stage, and off-Broadway where he directed *The Three Sisters* and *Les Liaisons Dangereuses*. He is a member of the Actors' Equity Association and the Screen Actors Guild.

Aleksandr Ilitchev received an MA in International Relations and Journalism from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations in 1974.He wasa career diplomat, with the United Nations Secretariat since 1992. The areas of responsibility include Northeast Asia, as well as the ASEAN Regional Forum and regional security issues. Aleksandr accompanied the current Secretary-General and his predecessor on many trips to Asia, and was advisor to the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Korean Peninsula (2003-2005). Prior to joining the United Nations, he served continuously in the Russian Foreign Ministry from 1974 with the assignments at the Permanent Mission to the United Nations (Alternate Representative to the Security Council and Senior Counsellor) (1990-1992); Personal Assistant to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (1986-90); USA Department of the Foreign Ministry (global and regional security issues) (1985-86); Embassy in Washington, DC (1979-1985) and the US Department of the Foreign Ministry (1978-1979), as well as in Syria (1974-77).

Aleksandra Fleszar is an associate professor of German and Russian at the University of New Hampshire.

is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher who along with Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek have in large measure been responsible for the popularity in North America (and Europe) of a politically infused Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Often mistaken for British, Alessandro Nivola has established himself as one of the American actors most likely to assume a flawless English accent in his films. Nivola, whose combination of charismatic good looks, vowel-laden name, and work in a number of British films have both confused and delighted critics and viewers, is actually a product of the East Coast. He was a student at the Tony Philips Exeter Academy and Yale University; by the time he was a sophomore at Yale, he had landed an agent and was making regular trips to New York City for auditions. Nivola got his first professional jobs with the Yale Repertory Theatre and a Seattle-based company. He broke into films in 1997 with a small role in *Inventing the Abbotts* and the more substantial part of Nicolas Cage's psychotic genius brother in John Woo's *Face/Off*. He then crossed the ocean, and the accent barrier, to star in the British noir drama *I Want You* (1998), which cast him as an enigmatic man with a dark past, and in Patricia Rozema's adaptation of *Mansfield Park* (1998). It was the latter film that gave Nivola his first significant dose of recognition and respect, with critics and viewers alike marveling at his portrayal of the dashing and morally dubious Henry Crawford, not to mention his seamless English accent. Nivola again worked with a largely British cast and crew the following year to make Kenneth Branagh's musical version of *Love's Labour's Lost* (2000), in which he played a king whose vow to forsake love for intellectual enlightenment becomes severely jeopardized by the arrival of a comely French princess (Alicia Silverstone) and her ladies in waiting. That same year, he returned to the other side of the Atlantic to portray a Backstreet Boys-type singer in Mike Figgis' *Time Code* (2000), an experimental feature filmed entirely in one take.

Alex Beam burst on the Boston scene in 1988 with TGIF, a Boston Globe column on business news and commentary. Beam was born in 1954 and graduated from Yale University. He spent some formative years in Moscow, started his journalism career as a researcher for Newsweek magazine, then shifted to Business Week where he reported from Los Angeles and Moscow. His second novel, The Americans are Coming!, is available through St. Martin's Press.

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity Press 2017). He is also the author of The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015). Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), he worked with the Social Science Research Council as Director of the program on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006-09). During 2005-06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, where he took on a number of roles in the negotiations leading to the independence of South Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009.

DeFronzo is the Executive Director of Piers Park Sailing Center, which offers 100 percent accessible recreational, educational, and personal growth opportunities for people of all ages and abilities in Boston Harbor. Piers Park empowers participants to become stewards of a stronger community, advocates for a healthy Boston Harbor, and leaders of individual and family wellness.