BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Panagiotis Liaropoulos D.M.A. (President)
is an award-winning Composer and Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music. He was born in Athens, Greece and since 1997 he resides in Boston, Massachusetts. He holds a Doctoral Degree in Composition from Boston University (USA), where he studied as a Fulbright Scholar with Theodore Antoniou and Lukas Foss, and graduated with honors for outstanding achievement in Theory and Composition.
Dr. Liaropoulos studied Piano and Advanced Music Theory at the National Conservatory of Athens and Composition at the New Conservatory of Thessaloniki. He is also a graduate of the Department of Music Studies, School of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
His compositions include music for solo instruments, various ensembles, chorus, and orchestra and have been performed and awarded in the USA, Greece and other European countries. His international awards include first prize in the ALEA III International Composition Competition (2002) for his piece Orientations Beta for Mezzo Soprano and Chamber Orchestra and second prize in the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Composition Competition (2005) for his Concerto for Flute and Orchestra.
His compositions include music for solo instruments, various ensembles, chorus, and orchestra and have been performed and awarded in the USA, Greece and other European countries. His international awards include first prize in the ALEA III International Composition Competition (2002) for his piece Orientations Beta for Mezzo Soprano and Chamber Orchestra and second prize in the Dimitri Mitropoulos International Composition Competition (2005) for his Concerto for Flute and Orchestra.
Dr. Liaropoulos' music has been commissioned and performed by several distinguished ensembles, musical organizations, and performers that include, among others, the Boston Pops Symphony Orchestra, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the Alea III Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Greek Ensemble for Contemporary Music, the Louisiana Sinfonieta, the Greek National Opera, the Athens Megaron Concert Hall, the New Paths in Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the Boston University Symphony and Chamber Orchestra, the Kassatt String Quartet, the Aeolos Wood Wind Quintet, the Kalliope Reed Quintet, and the L'Anima String Quartet.
In 2018, Dr. Liaropoulos was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award. During his term as a Fulbright Fellow he collected, recorded, videotaped, and digitally archived instrumental and vocal Folk music of Amorgos and the Small Cyclades, a relatively remote seven-island complex in the Aegean Sea, in Greece. The project will culminate in the creation of a database, in the form of an on-line audio-visual archive, where all valuable digital recourses will reside, will be preserved, and will be available to the national and international community.
Dr. Liaropoulos is also the founder and Music Director of the Greek Music Ensemble, a Boston-based collective that specializes in the critical interpretation and performance of Hellenic art, urban and traditional music. The group aspires to promote genres of Hellenic music as parts of the World Music scene.
Caterina Papoulias – Sakellaris (Chairwoman)
Cathy Papoulias-Sakellaris achieved a successful business career occupying executive management positions in leading global companies including Procter & Gamble, Nielsen Marketing Research, ITT and Dun & Bradstreet.
She has dedicated resources, expertise and service in community, philanthropic, and Hellenic Organizations. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Leadership 100, and served on the Board of Overseas at the Museum of Sience in Boston. She also sits on the boards of The Hellenic Initiative, Milton Academy, Public Power International, and the Faith Endowment.
Peter J. Poulos (Member)
has worked as a fundraiser for decades. Early in his career, he joined Manatos & Manatos a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. After that he served as a fundraiser for the Bob Kerrey for United States Senator from Nebraska campaign and the Paul Simon for United States Senator from Illinois campaign. A native New Yorker, he moved to San Francisco in 1989 to work as a political fundraiser for Kevin F. Shelley, former supervisor and secretary of state, and the late lieutenant governor, Leo T. McCarthy.
In 1993, Mr. Poulos opened Poulos Brothers, a fundraising and event-planning firm. In the span of 14 years, Poulos Brothers worked with over 100 nonprofit organizations and political candidates. In 1997, he began working with amfAR and continued to do so until he left San Francisco in 2006. He has raised millions of dollars for the fight against HIV/AIDS as well as breast cancer research, civil rights, homelessness, and the environment. He is the former Executive Director of The Hellenic Initiative. Mr. Poulos is a third generation American and an active member of the Greek American community.
Panayota Gounari Ph.D (Member)
Panayota Gounari is Professor of Applied Linguistics at UMass Boston. Using her background in critical applied linguistics, she weaves policy, language, and discourse together with insight from her 20-year career in public higher education to produce socially committed research. Her focus is on critical discourse studies, critical language policy and the politics of language, as well as the role of discourses in social change, the construction of human agency and democratic spaces. She has written on educational policy reforms in Greece and the United States. Her most recent book (Brill 2022) explores far-right authoritarian populist discourses in social media in an attempt to illuminate how online extremism works and the ways discourses shape social events.
She is also involved in the Justice Language Action Project (JLAP), led by Prof. Jennifer Sclafani that seeks to equip K-12 educators with Critical Discourse tools in order to empower their K-12 students through critical awareness of the power of language. She is currently the co-director of CREATE, a large National Professional Development grant providing education to educators working with multilingual students.