Our CORE Team
Elizabeth Eagle
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director
Together with colleague Liz Titone, Elizabeth Eagle is co-founder and Co-Executive Director of e² education & environment. She has 18 years of experience teaching visual art and photography at The Packer Collegiate Institute. As co-director of the school's Carol Shen Gallery, Elizabeth curates shows ranging from Picasso to local contemporary artists, where she collaborates with other educators to create inspiring curricula to help students connect to the work on display.
In 2014/15, Elizabeth was a guest lecturer at the University of Florida, The Harn Museum, The University of North Florida, and New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Elizabeth developed a shared curriculum between Packer and Ndonyo Wasin Primary School in the Samburu District of North Eastern Kenya. She created a portrait exchange to develop an emerging relationship between two schools that extends beyond the standard pen pal program. In 2010 Elizabeth joined forces with Artworks for Youth, an international non-profit arts education organization, to teach photography, life drawing and portraiture to children in Joe Slovo Township, Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Elizabeth's paintings, photographs and mixed medium works are part of numerous permanent collections and have been featured in museums and galleries across the United States. Elizabeth continues to make art and exhibit her work.
Elizabeth received her B.F.A. in painting from Syracuse University in 1990. She attended Bennington College, VT on a M.F.A. Photography Fellowship and in 1998, completed her Masters of Art and Design Education at Pratt Institute, NY. Since 1992, Elizabeth has worked as a freelance photographer, specializing in live event coverage for clients including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The New York Times, Carnegie Hall and Festival Production.
Liz Titone
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director
Together with colleague Elizabeth Eagle, Liz Titone formed e² education & environment to support their work in global education and visual literacy worldwide. As an educator Liz has worked diligently to blend her interests and experiences, inspirations and curiosities. She has served as both studio art educator and visiting artist (locally and internationally), designed and lead gallery experiences for K-12 in a variety of disciplines, and designed programs dedicated to empowering students through peer-to-peer learning and visual literacy. She has managed classrooms and developed curricula for a diverse range of socio-economic communities and learning environments.
Liz serves on the faculty of the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, New York as a studio art teacher and museum educator for their dedicated exhibition space, the Carol Shen Gallery. In 2010 she created and implemented a school-wide museum education program to provide multidisciplinary experiences in the gallery. Using the artwork as a foundation for inquiry, she facilitates discussions and activities that she has designed to encourage critical thinking and analysis. Liz has taught art, photography, and bookbinding to elementary and middle school aged students for over decade.
For three years Liz was the coordinator of a partnership between a public school in Brooklyn and a sister school in Zimbabwe as part of US Africa Children's Fellowship’s worldwide programming. Along with supervising fundraising efforts, she worked to develop cross-cultural curricula in social studies, science, art and music. Presently, Liz is a member of Packer’s global education task force in support of their partnership with the Ndonyo Wasin Primary School in the Samburu District of Kenya. Liz has designed site-specific curricula for the New York City Parks Department, among other institutions, focused on environmental science, art and activism.
Liz has a BFA in photography from SUNY Purchase and an MSE from Bank Street College, specializing in place-based education and cross-cultural learning.
Ali Gaskell is a British science educator who has been living and teaching in New York City for the last four years. She currently teaches physics and chemistry to upper and middle school students in Brooklyn. Ali has a keen interest in international education and has taught, so far, in three different countries: United Kingdom, America and Malawi.
In 2007, Ali worked in Malawi, Southern Africa, as a volunteer for RIPPLE Africa, a charity that is involved in education, environmental and healthcare projects in the north of the country. While living in a tiny village on the shores of Lake Malawi, she taught science and math in the local community, and led an initiative to start Mwaya Beach Adult Education Program.
Upon returning to England at the end of the academic year, she became RIPPLE Africa’s UK Project Manager. While working for the charity, she decided that her true passion lay in the classroom so she embarked upon her teacher training. Not ready to leave the not-for-profit world, Ali continued working for RIPPLE Africa as the volunteer coordinator whilst also teaching. Although Ali now resides in the US, she has maintained her working relationship with RIPPLE Africa from across the pond.
Ali has recently completed her Masters in Education and International Development from University College London. The focus of her studies were pedagogy and sub-Saharan Africa.
Ali Gaskell
Director of Global Programs
Ros Winner Sterling
Director of Operations
Ros Winner Sterling joined the e² team to work on This Is Ours: Ngare Ndare, Kenya and has since focused on the growth of the This Is Ours program both in the United States and globally. Ros brings over twenty years of organizational experience to e², working with not-for-profit organizations like The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and the NYAA Alumni Association. As an arts educator at St. Stephen of Hungary School, in New York, Ros' students created the second volume in the This Is Ours series, This Is Ours: East 82nd Street. She believes in the importance of teaching children to be creative problem solvers and she is regular contributor to school publications as an advocate for the arts in education. Ros holds an MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art, and a BFA from the University of Notre Dame. For more than 20 years, she has been a mixed media artist and figurative painter, exhibiting work in the USA, Canada and Europe.
Ann Diederich brings 21 years of experience in global education, social justice work, and travel programs in Asia, Europe, Latin America and Africa. In her 7 years at Polytechnic School in Pasadena, she has taught French, Spanish and history, co-chaired the Global Initiatives Program, served on the Social Justice, Diversity and Inclusivity Committee, and led global travel programs to France, Argentina, Mexico, and Cuba. She is a master teacher at the Rassias Center for Global Languages and Cultures at Dartmouth where she continues to teach accelerated language courses at the college level and lead teaching workshops. As the Director of Strategic Outreach for the non-profit e² education & environment, Ann has contributed to publication projects and helped to seek out new possibilities for the organization. Ann majored in languages and Western European studies at Georgetown University, researched feminist policy in post-Franco Spain as a Fulbright Scholar, and earned a master’s degree in French from Middlebury.
Ann Diederich
Director of Strategic Outreach
Silas’s passions are his cultural heritage and the environment. He has an in-depth knowledge of Maasai culture, and a gift for transmitting it in an appealing and relevant manner to people from a western background. He co-founded Bush Adventures, the first experience holiday company in Kenya offering its guests a cultural immersion with the Laikipia Maasai.
Now based in North Eastern Italy, he runs seminars in local schools teaching children about Maasai life, and by drawing parallels between Maasai and Western ways of life, facilitating their reflections on their own culture and values- in particular what it means to become an adult, how to live with nature, how to foster a sense of belonging to the local community.
He also has an exceptional understanding of Kenyan wildlife, honed in over 10 years organizing and guiding safaris as head guide in exclusive lodges and as a private guide. He loves to teach his guests how to “read” a wild animal’s intentions and feelings from its actions, a skill that he has mastered while growing up in a traditional Maasai village, and show them how our own human interactions are often mirrored by what animals do.
In the last 15 years, Silas has also been involved in many charity projects: he managed the logistics for water distribution in villages and for access to mobile clinics staffed by visiting doctors, he organized the distribution of books and advocated with his guests for local education programs, he promoted tree planting and clean-up days in local schools and villages. In 2006 he led a group of Samburu and Maasai warriors in a fund raising trip in London for Sereolipi Nomadic Education Trust (SENET).
Silas Kitonga
OUR Board Members
RICH LOBOVSKY
Director of Business Development and Technology
Rich Lobovsky has more than 20 years of business experience in partnership development and management, consultative sales, business strategy and portfolio analysis, business process reengineeering, and organizational change impementation in the financial servcies, healthcare and telecommunications fields.
Rich currently serves as Vice President, Business Development with Lifecomm LLC, a start-up venture funded by Hughes Telematics, Qualcomm, and American Medical Alert Corporation. He is responsible for developing and managing distributionand technology partnerships and representing the company at industry conferences and events. Prior to joining Lifecomm, Lobovsky was Director of Business Development for Qualcomm and one of four founders of its Wireless Health and Life Sciences Group. While there, Rich secured relationships with major corporations in the telecommunications and healthcare industries. Prior to that, Rich served as Regional Practice Director of Professional Services for Wireless Knowledge, a Qualcom wholly-owned subsidiary whose clients included global companies in the financial services and healthcare industries. Rich holds a Bachelor of Science in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and a Masters of Business Administration from Columbia University.
JONATHAN POWELL
Director of Strategy and Business Development
Jonathan Powell currently serves as a business development specialist for ITOCHU, a Fortune 500 Global firm based in Tokyo, Japan. Since joining the firm in 1993, Jonathan has structured more than $250 million in multinational transactions involving technology tranfer, foreign investment and export promotion.
Jonathan also has extensive experience in distance learning, business simulation design and courseware development. He is the co-founder and Director of LearningBridge, an e-learning and employee appraisal firm and has served as an on-line faculty member and courseware designer at Athabasca University's Center for Innovative Management (CIM), Canada's largest executive MBA program. While working with ITOCHU and CIM, Jonathan has consulted and coached internationally, providing both classroom and e-training in the areas of leadership, strategy, financy and risk assessment for government, corporate and academic audiences.
NURIT NEWMAN
A professional artist, arts educator and curriculum developer, in 2008, Nurit Newman founded and became director of Manor Arts, LLC, an art program that teaches children to think and work as artists. For over 20 years prior to founding Manor Arts, Nurit was cover art dirctor of Newsweek Magazine. Nurit has shown her work nationally in venues included the Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary ARt. She has also shown her work internationally in the Kunstbunker Tumulka in Germany, Ther Hertzliva Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel and The Barbican Center in London. In New York City, she has been represented by the Sara Meltzer Gallery and the Daniel Silverstein Gallery. She received her BFA from NYU and her MFA (Magna Cum Laude) from Rutgers University's Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Nurit was also Museum educator at The Musum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center Institute where she developed curriculae and taught for 7 years. Nurit has also taught art to undergraduates and graduate students at Rutgers University: Mason Gross School of the Arts, The School of Visual Arts, The New School for Social Research and served on the thesis committee at Yale University School of the Arts.
Nurit is currently working on a large scale drawing project inspired by her students.
DR. AMBEREEN SLEEMI
Ambereen Sleemi, M.D., M.P.H, grew up in Maryland and graduated from George Washington Univeristy chool of Medicine with and MD and also completed a Master's in Public Health, Maternal and Child Health track, concurrently. She did her residency at Louisiana State University-Charity Hospital in New Orleans in Obstetrics and Gynecology and moved to New York City as a US Public Health Scholer Physician. She finished a fellowship in Urogynecology and Reconstructive Pelvic Survery at Maimonedes Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY where she is currently an attending physician and Associate Residency Program Dierctor in Obstetrics and Gynecology. As an associate clinical professor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Dr. Sleemi is faculty co-sponsor of the Global Health Interest student group started in September 2010. Dr. Sleemi has traveled and worked as a consultant surgeon with the UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) over the last 7 years with projects in Northern Nigeria and Eritrea, helping to develop the gynecologic teaching curriculum for the newly formed Eritream Ob/Gyn residency program. As a board member and volunteer for the global health not for profit Medicine in Action, she's been active in developing sustainable women's health programs in Mwanza, Tanzania and Kingston, Jamaica since 2008.
MACKAY WOLFF
MacKay Wolff has been conceiving and managing international humanitarian emergency and development projects since 1980. Working together with the United Nations and an array of international NGO's, he has supervised the delivery of a broad variety of human services, including shelter, water and sanitation, education, recreation, food and nutrition, health and human rights, to refugee and destitute populations around the world. In addition to the West Bank and Gaza, his programs, which are designed to integrate progressive programming with humanitarian work, have been implemented in regions throughout the Middle East and Western Asia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, West Africa and East Africa.
In addition to his international crisis work, MacKay currently serves as a speechwriter and project manager for foundations, NGO's and the United Nations, both of North America and abroad. His most recent projects have focused on the streamlining of the United Nations's programming and administrative work.