Master's Teas

Dennis is an Independent Animation Director & Producer whose work has been shown at film festivals around the world. His 2007 film Chainsaw has won many Grands Prix in animation festivals, and his films are often shown in retrospectives, and are discussed in Judith Kriger's book "Animated Realism" (2012). Dennis was also featured in Chris Robinson's book as one of the "Unsung Heroes of Animation." He has spoken at international conferences, and taught, presented his work and run workshops at many universities and film schools around the world.

 

Mila Turajlic is a documentary filmmaker, whose first feature documentary Cinema Komunisto premiered in the First Appearance Competition at IDFA 2010. From there, it went on to over 30 festivals, including Tribeca. It has won 14 awards including the FOCAL International Award for Creative Use of Archive Footage, the Alpe Adria Cinema Award for Best Documentary, the Gold Hugo for Best Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival.

 

Daniel Rose, Chairman of Rose Associates, Inc., a New York-based 85-year old real estate organization, has pursued a career involving a broad range of professional, civic and non-profit activities. Professionally, he has developed such properties as the award-winning Pentagon City Complex in Arlington, VA and the One Financial Center office tower in Boston, MA. As an institutional consultant, his credits include the creation and implementation of the "housing for the performing arts" concept for New York's Manhattan Plaza. Mr. Rose founded (and is now Chairman Emeritus of) the highly acclaimed Harlem Educational Activities Fund, whose inner-city students are flowing into the nation's leading high schools and colleges and whose junior high school chess teams have ranked first in the nation; and he is a founding Board member of FC Harlem/Harlem Youth Soccer. Among his many awards for a broad range of governmental, philanthropic and cultural activities are the City of New York Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts and Culture, the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding's Joseph Papp Racial Harmony Award, the Abyssinian Development Corporation's Harlem Renaissance Award and the W.E.B. DuBois Award of Harvard's W.E.B. DuBois Institute. 

 

Sebastian Smee is the Boston Globe's art critic and winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He joined the paper's staff from Sydney, where he served as the national art critic at the Daily Telegraph and a contributor to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Art Newspaper, Modern Painters, and Prospect magazine. In 1994 he received a bachelor of arts degree, with honors, in fine arts from Sydney University. He reviews books regularly for the Spectator and is himself the author of books and essays on the British painter Lucian Freud as well as "Side by Side: Picasso v. Matisse."

 

XiXi Yang is an entertainment TV personality, executive producer, and a social media maven. Mostly known for creating PopStopTv.com- a new media network that generates over 6 million unique visitors a month and celebrates pop culture for the web 2.0 generation- she is a fresh faced entrepreneur who utilizes the power of Internet as well as television and radio to connect with the youth culture. From conducting one-on-one interviews with celebrities of all mediums to bringing sassiness and humor to the tube, XiXi is known for her spunky personality and natural affinity to connect with people from all walks of life. She's also passionate about predicting the next big thing in social media and entertainment. In 2010, before Twitter.com was one of the most popular destinations online, XiXi Yang created a quirky web show called "Tweet Talk," the first celebrity-driven show that focuses on Twitter and Twitter trends. XiXi Yang has a passion for finding that next big story and sharing it with viewers. She lives only by one motto: "Breaking news is not half as fun as making them!"

 

Michael Gerhardt is Samuel Ashe Distinguished Professor of Constitutional Law at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a nationally recognized expert on constitutional conflicts. He has participated in the confirmation proceedings for five of the nine justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court, including most recently as Special Counsel to Chairman Patrick Leahy and the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nominations of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court. During President Clinton's impeachment proceedings, he testified as the only joint witness before the House of Representatives and served as CNN's full-time impeachment expert. He has published five books, including a leading treatise on the appointments process (published by Duke University Press) and The Power of Precedent (published by Oxford University Press). His forthcoming book, "The Constitutional Significance of the Forgotten Presidents," will be published by Oxford University Press. 

 

Judith Ursitti is director of state government affairs for Autism Speaks. Since her son Jack was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder in 2005 she has been involved in the drafting, passage and implementaion of autism insurance reform legislation in more than a dozen states, including Connecticut, New York, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island. Judith is a certified public accountant with more than a decade of experience in taxation.

 

Ambassador L. Paul Bremer '63 is a distinguished American diplomat. He served as the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq from May 2003 to June 2004. He has also served as the Ambassador to the Netherlands and the Ambassador at large for counter-terrorism. He is a past managing direector of Kissinger Associates. In 2004, President Bush awarded Ambassador Bremer the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

 

CJ May, an FES graduate, has been working with Yale in sustainability since 1989 and is now the recycling coordinator at the Yale Office of Sustainability. In this position, he led and is in the successful transition phases of the campaign to move Yale to single-stream recycing. This effort was started at Yale in 1970 by a group of undergraduates and continues to be an important part of Yale's sustainablility efforts due to the dedication and leadership of CJ May. Mr. May will offer guests a short history of recycling at Yale and our reasons for moving to single stream. In addition he will answer any questions regarding the process of single-stream recycling and the magic involved in producing entirely new materials from the things that we all recycle.