Spotlights

Rosalyn "Ros" Escobar grew up in Koreatown with the arts all around her. Her mom sang, her dad played guitar and piano, and her sister was very dramatic. Her mom found the girls a performing arts magnet, the Bancroft Middle School. "I met kids from all over the city there. It’s where my love of diversity started. My best friends were from South LA, Russia, India. It was such rich experience," says Ros.

Alis Clausen Odenthal has been devoted to voice and music her entire life. She has forged a long career teaching, managing, and supporting the arts by following two rules: diversify your arts skillset, and say "yes" as much as possible.

Eric Eisenberg was born in Los Angeles and raised by his actress mom. He saw a lot of community theater, with his brothers in tow, and took part in countless fundraisers and telethons—most notably, the Variety Club. Eisenberg was an actor early on, then transitioned into the visual arts as an artist and gallery owner in Venice, California, becoming part of its 1980s-era street art scene. He’s an avid horseback rider and dirt biker, but his main passion and focus is as a martial artist, practicing and teaching every week at a dojo in Little Tokyo.

Kim Glann is a self-described theater nerd—she loves collaborating with people who have different skill sets to create something larger than themselves. The Department of Arts and Culture’s Creative Strategist-Artist in Residence program, which she manages, is steeped in a similar kind of collaboration.

Project Manager Pat Gomez’s occasional nickname in the Civic Arts Division is the “Kevin Bacon of the LA Arts World” because similar to Bacon, she’s worked with a lot of people—and if she hasn’t worked directly with a particular artist or an arts administrator, she’s only a few degrees away from working with someone who has.

Madeline Di Nonno’s career trajectory brought her from intern to CEO, from East Coast to West Coast, and from for-profit to non-profit. She has marketed both consumer products and content, and developed business in media—using a blend of Brooklyn tenacity, networking, and leadership skills she modeled from the exemplary executives she’s studied her whole life.

Arts Education Research Associate Matt Agustin grew up in Lakewood, California, which is nestled against Long Beach and other gateway cities to Orange County—he is proud of and will never give up his "562" area code. He says that Filipinx-American families love pop music, basketball, church, and food—and his was no different.

Pamela Bright-Moon’s journey in the arts may have started behind the scenes in television but she now finds herself centered in something much broader—the intersection of arts, community, government, and advocacy.