People

Ben Mezrich has written four books of non-fiction, most notably the New York Times Best Seller *Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions*, which was adapted into the 2008 film *21*. A former Harvard student, Mezrich has published fiction in the past and hosted GSN’s *World Series of Blackjack*. His newest book is *The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal*, which has already been optioned by Sony Pictures.

Director of Greater Boston.

Ben Shahn was one of the foremost Social Realist artists of the 1930s. Shahn was born in 1898 in Kovno, Lithuania, the first of five children of a traditional Orthodox Jewish family. His father was a woodcarver and cabinetmaker. As Eastern European Jews during the period, they faced discrimination and violence everywhere they turned. When the Russian Revolution of 1917 declared war on all forms of anti-Semitism, Jews instinctively turned toward the new government.

Ben Shattuck's most recent book, The History of Sound (Viking), was the recipient of the 2025 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award and the Story Prize Spotlight Award, and was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His film adaptation of the title story premiered at the 2025 Cannes film festival. His first book, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House), was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a New York Times Best Book of Summer, a New England Bestseller, and was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a recipient of the PEN Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. He spends time between Brooklyn and coastal Massachusetts, where he owns and runs the oldest general store in America, built in 1793.

**Ben Solari** manages the global corporate sales teams at DataRobot with a focus on helping companies use accessible machine learning technology to solve practical business problems and improve their operations.

Benaree Pratt Wiley was born on May 13, 1946 in Washington, D.C. Her mother, Mildred Petticord Pratt, died when she was two years old, and her father, Carlisle Pratt, was an attorney and judge before his death in 1993. Wiley grew up in Washington, D.C., raised by her paternal grandmother Hazel and her aunt, Aimee Pratt. She is also the sister of Sharon Pratt Kelly, who served as the mayor of Washington, D.C. from 1991-1995. Wiley attended the public schools of Washington and graduated from Howard University in 1968 with a B.A. degree in marketing. After receiving her M.B.A. from Harvard's Business School, she served as a consultant with such corporations as Abt Associates, Contract Research Corporation and Urban Systems Research and Engineering. As an independent consultant, Wiley worked with non-profit organizations to build their capacity and refine their program delivery. She then combined her interests in business and child development with the establishment of a high-end toy store, Giocatolli, on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. In 1991, Wiley became the president and CEO of The Partnership, Inc., in Boston. The Partnership's goal is to assist businesses in the Boston area to attract, retain and develop professionals of color, to increase the number of black professionals at all levels of leadership in the corporate sector of Boston and to help these professionals navigate the complex corporate structure of Boston. Under Wiley's leadership, The Partnership became a major force in Boston's corporate world, helping over 1,300 African Americans integrate themselves into the corporate community and stimulated more than 200 corporate partners to open doors for black professionals. Wiley is highly active in the Boston community. In 2003, Wiley was selected as one of Boston's most powerful women by *Boston Magazine*

Benedict J. Fernandez was born on April 5, 1936 in New York City, in the Hispanic neighborhood of East Harlem. Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director and graphic designer, invited him to enroll in his Design Laboratory and became Fernandez's most influential mentor. Brodovitch arranged for Ben to become the darkroom tech and manager at Parsons School of Design. Nobody could have imagined in those very early days what a significant role Ben would eventually play at Parsons. With Brodovitch's encouragement Ben went on to found the Photo Film Workshop, in the basement of Joseph Papp's Public Theatre. The Photo Film Workshop taught photography to ghetto youth, free of charge. Many of the workshop participants went on to successful careers and lives.

Benedita Souza da Silva Sampaio, was born on April 26, 1943 in Praia do Pinto, in Rio de Janeiro to Ovidia da Silva out of wedlock, despite the fact that Ovidia was married to someone other than Benedita's father. Benedita da Silva is also known as Bene' and is an African-Brazilian politician. Throughout her life, Benedita faced prejudice and racism for her humble and African origins, but she has overcome those barriers by becoming the first female and black governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva nominated her Secretary of State as well.

GBH Board of Trustees Vice Chair

Professor Braude teaches courses on the Middle East and on European-Middle Eastern relations. In addition to those interests his research also focuses on religious, racial, and ethnic identities in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture. Currently he is completing *Sex, Slavery, and Racism: The Secret History of the Sons of Noah*, which examines the construction of attitudes toward color and identity from the ancient Near East and the classical world to the present. More broadly, he is interested in post-national conceptions of historiography. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Benjamin Lloyd Crump is an American civil rights attorney and founder of the Tallahassee, Florida-based law firm Ben Crump Law. He is known for his association with the 2012/2013 George Zimmerman case, and for representing the family of Michael Brown, a 17-year-old African-American man shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri.

Benjamin Desmartins was trained by Pascal Caffet during his studies at the Ecole de Paris des Metiers de la Table (Paris School of Culinary Arts). He took up the family business and created the France Cocoa brand. He received first prize for praline-filled chocolates at the 2003 Chocolate Fair and first prize for creativity from the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Benjamin Hedin's fiction, essays, and interviews have been published by a number of publications, including \_The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, The Nation, The Chicago Tribune, Poets and Writers, Salmagundi, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review,\_ and \_Radio Silence\_. He is also the producer and author of a forthcoming documentary titled **The Blues House**[Your text to link here...](http://blueshouse.com/ ""). This movie tells the story of the search for two forgotten blues singers, carried out in Mississippi in June of 1964, during some of the most violent days of the civil rights movement. Hedin's new book is titled \_[In Search of the Movement: The Struggle for Civil Rights Then and Now](http://www.blogcitylights.com/2015/04/21/excerpts-from-in-search-of-the-movement-the-struggle-for-civil-rights-then-and-now/ "").\_ Follow this author on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/benjaminhedin "").

Benjamin Hirsch was born in September, 1932, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, just 5 months before Hitler came to power. He was the fifth of seven children of Dr. Hermann Hirsch, a dentist, and Mathilda Auerbach Hirsch. The mistreatment of Jews in Germany started long before Ben was born. He was still an infant when Hitler's first anti-Jewish laws went into effect in April, 1933, and was barely 3 years old when the Nuremberg Laws took away all the civil rights of German Jews. As a young boy, he felt the effects of this state-sponsored antisemitism. In fact, before he escaped Europe in 1941, he had never experienced life without prejudice and discrimination.

Benjamin Jealous served as president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization of over two hundred historically black-owned newspapers, as director of Amnesty International’s U.S. Human Rights Program, where his work addressed, among other issues, anti-Arab racial profiling in the wake of 9/11, and as president of the Rosenberg Foundation, focusing on immigrant rights and critical justice reform. He was elected the 17th President of the NAACP, the youngest to ever hold the office in the organization's 100-year history.