Tyson Gaskill, President

Tyson Gaskill is the executive director of communications and events at the USC Libraries, where he has overseen the libraries’ cultural programs since 2001. In addition, he oversees the conception, curation, and presentation of 3-4 exhibitions a year at Doheny Memorial Library. These undertakings cover the entire spectrum of human endeavor—frequently touching on the intersection between the arts and sciences—and have explored such diverse arenas as the history of perfume, Persian wedding traditions, Russian cabaret, space-age classic car designs, the Mexican Revolution, and the biomechanics of baseball pitching. He is also responsible for producing the Libraries’ annual Scripter Award fundraiser and the public programs at the annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar. Prior to joining USC he spent ten years as an Associate Editor at the Getty Research Institute, working on exhibitions, printed ephemera, and rather tedious translations of 19th-century German treatises on architecture and aesthetics. Hailing from California's Central Valley mecca of Fresno, he received degrees in history and art history from UCLA sometime in the previous millennium. He is a bibliophile at heart but lacks the resources to turn that passion into full-blown bibliomania.

Chloe Sapienza, Vice President

Chloe Sapienza is an LA-born multidisciplinary designer. She is co-owner of Telescope, a design studio that creates custom products for businesses and startups.

She received her Interdisciplinary B.A. from New York University in 2014. Her degree, titled Metaphor as an Instrument for Design, explored associative processes that lead to design innovation. She studied this concept at scale with product design, interior design, and architecture, supporting her love for artistic innovation with courses in fine art, art history, physics, and sustainable ecology.

Chloe has worked on projects for Terreform ONE including the BIO CITY MAP OF 11 BILLION: World Population in 2110, a sculpture that she helped fabricate and install for the Venice Biennale in 2014, which has gone on to be featured on TED and in the Economist. She started her own jewelry business in 2015, hand-crafting sculptural jewelry for clients across the US. She volunteered as the Co-Creative Director for the New York Bee Sanctuary from 2015 to 2017, and has worked for several start-ups in the tech-arts industry before starting Telescope in 2019.

David Judson, Treasurer

David Judson is president and owner of the Judson Studios, the fifth generation of Judson’s to operate the company, founded in 1897. He has been involved at the studio since 1996 and overseen hundreds of projects both nationally and internationally from Dubai to Shanghai. In 2015 David expanded the studio’s operations to a second location to incorporate fusing capabilities to the firm’s offerings and open the studios to fine artists interested in working with glass. While continuing work in traditional styles the studio focuses on pushing the boundaries of stained glass.

Currently, David is the president of the Stained Glass Association of America (SGAA), a member of the Board of Councilors at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, and longtime board member of the Ruskin Art Club. He lectures frequently on stained glass and the history of the Judson Studios and has authored, with Steffie Nelson, INNOVATION in Stained Glass (Angel City Press, 2020). David lives in Pasadena, CA with his wife Dr. Lyn Boyd-Judson and their two children, Benjamin and Georgia. He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.

Eric Jessen, Secretary

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Beverlywood and several Southland beach towns, his career spans from consulting on Southern California engineering and development to strategic planning for Howard Hughes. He worked on the master plans for Wattles Garden Park on Hollywood Blvd., and re-development master plans for Balboa Park San Diego, and LAX. For 30 years Eric served as Chief, Orange County Regional Harbors, Beaches & Parks District, expanding the system from 7,000 to 70,000 acres with new regional parks, public beaches, and historic sites including the Irvine Ranch Historic Park and Helena Modjeska Home & Gardens originally designed by Stanford White. He has served as executive officer for regional planning commissions, chaired county/municipal and non-profit boards and is Chairman of the Water & Sewer Commission in Laguna Beach where he has lived for 56 years. Eric is a noted California historian specializing in the arts, contributing to museum exhibitions in Irvine, Laguna Beach, Pasadena, Sacramento and Tulsa, OK. For the past 15 years, Eric has been the Irvine Family agent/historian and an ‘art detective’ for museums, dealers and private collectors.  His art detective essays include studies of the terrain provenances of artists Edgar Payne, Joseph Kleitsch, and Albert Bierstadt. For his volunteer service, Eric received a Lifetime Achievement Award from President Obama in 2015. He is a longtime member of the Ruskin Art Club board. 

Sara Atwood

Sara Atwood’s book, Ruskin’s Educational Ideals, was published by Ashgate in 2011. Further publications include contributions to the Yale University Press edition of Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (2013), Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave 2017), John Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Education (Anthem Press 2018), William Morris and John Ruskin: A New Road on Which the World Should Travel (University of Exeter Press 2019) and Victorian Environmental Nightmares (Palgrave 2019). She has lectured widely on Ruskin, both in the US and abroad, focusing particularly on education, the environment, and language. She delivered the 17th Annual Ruskin Lecture co-sponsored by the Ruskin Art Club and the Doheny Libraries (USC) in September 2017 on “Valuing Education in a Market Society.” In February 2019, during Ruskin’s bicentenary year, she gave a lecture at the Houghton Library, Harvard University to mark the opening of the library’s exhibition Victorian Visionary: John Ruskin and the Realization of the Ideal; she also presented at the bicentenary conference John Ruskin: 19th-Century Visionary, 21st-Century Inspiration at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. She is a lecturer in English literature and writing at Portland State University.

Noah Bretz

Noah Bretz is Partner/Director of Client Service & Marketing at GlobeFlex Capital, L.P., an investment firm located in San Diego, California.  Noah has been with GlobeFlex for more than 24 years, focused on serving their clients, consultants and the institutional investment community. He has served on the Ruskin Art Club board since 2015. 

Noah’s background also includes five years as a marketing communications consultant with Dakin Partners, where he managed client relationships and multiple marketing projects for a variety of money managers, pension fund consultants, and brokerage firms. 

Noah earned his B.S. degree in Business Administration with a concentration in Marketing from Sacramento State University in 1991.

Elena Karina Byrne

Elena Karina Byrne works as a freelance editor, professor, and Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Her recent lecture and teaching artist positions include the Poetry School, Poetry Barn, international Gingko Prize workshops, Georgia Tech, University of Southern California, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Claremont Graduate University, Todos Santos Writing Workshops, and Los Angeles Film School, among others. She also serves on the board for What Books Press and is a proud Companion of the Guild of St. George.

A former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena curated programs for the Getty Research Institute, MOCA, the Craft Contemporary Museum, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, the Clark Library, the West Hollywood Book Fair, USC’s Doheny Memorial Library, and elsewhere. Elena served as a co-judge for the 2022 Laurel Prize for environmental poetry, final judge for the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards in Poetry from 2016–2018, one of three visiting writers for the 2018–2019 ten university consortia in the Georgia Poetry Circuit, and as a final judge for PEN’s Best of the West award. 

Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient, Elena’s five poetry collections include If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing, 2021). Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews can be found in POETRY, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Poetry Daily, Kyoto Journal, Verse Daily, APR, Plume & Plume Anthologies, Los Angeles Review of Books, Reel Verse Anthology: Poems About the Movies, The Eloquent Poem: 128 Contemporary Poems and Their Making, BOMB, and elsewhere. Elena’s writing screenplays while completing a collection of essays entitled Voyeur Hour: Poetry Art, Film, & Desire.  

Stuart Denenberg

Stuart Denenberg is an art dealer. He is co-owner of Denenberg Fine Arts, a private gallery in West Hollywood since 2002. He represents estates, notably placing that of Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, at the Soumaya Museum, Mexico City, and that of legendary architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable at the Getty Research Institute. Stuart produces international traveling museum exhibitions including Goya: Los Caprichos; Pan: A Graphic Arts Time Capsule; Degas: The Private Impressionist;  and Contemplating Character: 18th--20th century portraits. 

He was educated at Bowdoin College, Harvard University, Wesleyan University, University of Massachusetts, and the University of Stockholm, then in 1965 age 22 opened his first gallery in Boston and appraised old master prints and drawings for the Fogg Museum, Harvard.

In 1985, he founded Art for Healing, a non-proft placing donated art in health-care institutions in the Bay Area and beyond over a thirty year period. His publications include Death Masks, Denenberg's poetry illustrated and published by Leonard Baskin, Gehenna Press, 1996; and The Educated Eye, Smithsonian Institution, Folkways, 1994. He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.

Beverly Denenberg

Beverly Denenberg is a Curator.  She is co-owner of Denenberg Fine Arts, a private art gallery in West Hollywood since 2002.  She is a Public Art Consultant in West Hollywood, serving on the City's Arts Commission from 2003 to 2013.

She received her B.A. in Fine Arts at CSUN, then worked at the Egg and the Eye. She received her M.A. in Museology at San Francisco State College, and became Assistant Curator at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery.

In 1974 Beverly became Director of the 1864 Banning Residence Museum during its restoration under the auspices of the City of Los Angeles.  Active in the historic preservation movement she was a founder in 1978 of The Los Angeles Conservancy. In 1980 she became Curator of the California Historical Society in San Francisco.  In 1985 she joined Denenberg Fine Arts full time, as well as managing Art for Healing. a non-profit placing donated art in health-care institutions in the Bay Area and beyond. She is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.

Penny Haberman

Penny was born in and raised in New York, but has lived in California since 1971 in both Santa Barbara and Santa Monica. She has an M. Ed in Counseling Psychology from Boston University and a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Music from Hunter College of the City University of New York. Her professional experience was in sales, management, counseling and teaching. Her work experience includes establishing a counseling department in a Middle School in Massachusetts, expanding a sales region for Jafra Cosmetics, Inc, Manager of two departments in retail management at Saks Fifth Avenue, Beverly Hills and senior management level positions in the Executive Search industry.

She is the immediate past President of Santa Barbara Beautiful, a non-profit in Santa Barbara, an organization responsible for providing the city with all the trees it plants as well as contributing to public art projects throughout the city, In Los Angeles, she is on the Board of Governors at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and has been President of her condo association for over 20 years. .

Penny's diverse interests include affiliation the Museum Collectors Council at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Costume Council and the Modern and Contemporary Art Councils at LACMA, MOCA, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, the Santa Monica Conservancy and the Los Angeles World Affairs Council and Town Hall. She loves theater, film, concerts, fashion, art, reading, spectator sports and travel!

Andrew Sapienza

Andrew Sapienza is a new member of the Ruskin board. Andrew was raised in the very agrarian Bergen, New York, and graduated from nearby St. John Fisher College with a BA in International Studies and Spanish. He also studied political science and art history at la Universidad de Granada in Andalusia. Andrew began his professional career working as an international trade specialist for the governments of Mexico and the United States in Washington, DC. In 2011, he founded a non-profit dedicated to sanitation and personal privacy via an innovation on at home dry-compost toilets and began this in Le Borge, Haiti, shortly after the first cholera outbreaks. Upon return back he shifted to working with his brother to launch a now successful furniture build and design studio based in the Hudson Valley. And for the last 7 years, Andrew has been in senior business operations roles in software technology, researching the field of customer experience and guiding industry-leading companies toward a better relationship with their customers, employees, and communities.

Kathleen Bonann Marshall

Kathleen Bonann Marshall is a native of Los Angeles, California.  She graduated from UCLA with degrees in English in 1971 (B.A.) in 1974 (M.A.) in 2018 (PHD).  In 1975 she moved to Iowa where she lived in Iowa City, and worked for 15 years at the University of Iowa in various teaching positions while raising two children, Stephanie and Zachary.  After a move to Illinois in 1990, she was Assistant Director of the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern University, where she was lecturer in Comparative Literary Studies and a fellow in the Weinberg College.   She spent more than twenty five years in the classroom at large research universities teaching humanities courses for undergraduates.  She also spent a decade as Assistant to the Provost at Pepperdine University where she was responsible for faculty promotion and tenure cycles in five colleges, supervised major policy revisions, and conducted national searches for deans of the Law and Business schools.  Kathe joined the Board of the Ruskin Art Club on her return to California. She has served as vice-president for a decade.

Gabriel Meyer, Executive Director

Poet-journalist Gabriel Meyer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has lived and worked throughout the Middle East, the Balkans, and East Africa. He was especially acclaimed for his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada and of the Bosnian war. His reporter’s diary on the civil war in Sudan, War and Faith in Sudan (Eerdmans), won ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year award for essays in 2006. Tebot Bach published his book-length poetic cycle A Map of Shadows in 2012. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in recognition of his work as a journalist by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at UC Berkeley in 2017.   He has published poetry and two novels; a large-scale nonfiction work, The Testimony of Stones, a “biography” of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, is awaiting publication. He had been involved with the historic Ruskin Art Club since 1998 and currently serves as its executive director. He is a Companion of the Guild of St. George.