BOARD OF DIRECTORS.
Daniel Osborn
President and Executive Director
Daniel Osborn is a history educator, education researcher, and nonprofit professional. He specializes in creating multimedia teaching tools, humanities curriculum, and professional learning experiences.
Daniel has dedicated his academic and professional life to the study of Middle Eastern and Jewish histories. As a scholar, he interrogates the way curriculum can perpetuate "otherness." As a curriculum writer and professional development facilitator, he advances a vision of education that is multicultural, global, inclusive of marginalized communities, and relevant for life in a globally-interconnected world.
As a student of history and education, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Quinnipiac University, a master’s degree in Near East and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University, and a doctorate in education from Boston University.
As a scholar, he is the author of Dismantling Orientalist Representations in US Education: Schooling and Otherness in the Social Studies Classroom and Representing the Middle East and Africa in Social Studies Education: Teacher Discourse and Otherness. As a memoirist, he is the author of Levantine Vignettes: An Educator's Account of Border Crossing in the Middle East.
Project Mosaics extends from Daniel's conviction that history classrooms are powerful sites of socialization that can either reinforce dominant narratives or transform students' understanding of the social world. For that reason, Project Mosaics not only tells stories and uplifts voices of Jewish communities around the world. It fosters classrooms that invite constructive cultural encounters and meaningful cultural border crossing.
Students live in a pluralistic American society and an interconnected world and, for Daniel, Project Mosaics is about ensuring classrooms expose students to multiple perspectives that are grounded in humanity and an appreciation for the diverse, vibrant, dynamic, and multifaceted nature of Jewish lives and identities.
Lee Zeidman
Vice President
Lee Zeidman is a distinguished broadcast journalist and Corporate Communications consultant. A member of the team that launched CNN in 1980, Lee went on to help leaders of global businesses manage critical communications with the news media. Now retired, Lee is proud to be a member of the Board of Project Mosaics.
Lee joined Project Mosaics because he is fascinated and inspired by its efforts to tell the amazing and untold stories of Jews around the world whose passion and devotion to their religion and culture has sustained them for centuries.
As a professional storyteller, Lee is especially proud of the high quality production that makes the characters of Project Mosaics’ episodic documentaries jump off the screen, creating a moving and compelling viewing experience.
TJ Griffis
Treasurer
TJ is currently the Director of Student Accounts and Student Employment at Mount Holyoke College, with over 15 years of experience in student financial services across several colleges and universities. He also brings to Project Mosaics a background in public accounting.
Driven by a lifelong passion for supporting educational access, TJ joined the Project Mosaics board because of its mission to spark meaningful, cross-cultural reflection and dialogue through personal storytelling - supporting transformative learning experiences for people of all ages!
After seeing the incredible impact of the Jews of Iran series, he is thrilled to watch the resource library grow. He's particularly interested in the Jews of Cuba project featuring MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Ruth Behar!
Louisa Polos Condon
Secretary
Louisa Polos Condon is currently the Head of Middle School at the Charlotte Latin School in Charlotte, NC. She an experienced independent-school educator and leader with more than 15 years of experience teaching English and humanities, coaching athletics, coordinating service-learning and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and advancing innovative approaches to teaching and learning. She is deeply committed to student-centered education, community engagement, and developing inclusive, purposeful school communities.
Louisa was drawn to the work of Project Mosaics because she sees the value of storytelling in teaching and in ensuring that the global Jewish experience is represented in our classrooms.
She is really excited about the diversity and depth that the Project Mosaics lessons provide educators and knows the future is bright for this organization.
TEAM.
Emily Graham-Handley
Film Director
Emily is a video director, videographer, and editor who synthesizes larger historical concepts through personalized storytelling. She focuses on capturing the emotional underpinnings of Project Mosaics' storytellers to convey a broader truth that is both nuanced and compelling, revealing a deeper understanding of educational concepts through authentic human experiences.
What excites Emily most about working with Project Mosaics is the opportunity to highlight stories that may not have been included in traditional Jewish narratives. She's learned that Jewish people carry many different histories, experiences, and traditions, but their stories are all connected by a common resilience that drives them to overcome even the most insurmountable obstacles. Across borders, backgrounds, and belief systems, this project has shown Emily that nothing connects us more than the power of the human spirit.
Nico Rivers
Audio Engineer and Composer
Nico is a composer and audio engineer with a passion for all things audio. His compositional work often blends contextual and sometimes unconventional sounds with traditional film scoring techniques to elevate the emotional impact of films and videos.
As a lifelong student, Nico is genuinely always excited to learn and his work with Project Mosaics has provided many opportunities for this. He's had the chance to travel with Dan and Emily, been welcomed into the homes and offices of many kind and intelligent people who have shared their stories and given trusted Project Mosaics to share them. Nico is excited to continue to learn more about the varying Jewish cultures throughout the world.
While working on Project Mosaics, Nico has learned not only about the Jewish people, but also about their music. He's studied the music of Jewish people from each region explored, their instruments, tonal and compositional structures, playing techniques and more. He's been able to use this research as guidance in his compositional work as well as collaborating with musicians from the regions.
Alec Hutson
Visual Identity
Alec is in charge of the Project Mosaics' visual identity. Primarily, he thoughtfully combines various styles of animation and illustration to help bring the stories from the interviews to life. He is also responsible for the Project Mosaics logo, website, and lesson plan design and layouts.
The work intrigues Alec for multiple reasons. First, he gets the opportunity to animate stories to life--something that he has always been passionate about. Second, through the work he gets to learn about global Jewish history in a way that he had only heard from his Russian Jewish grandparents: first hand accounts and experiences. Alec truly appreciates the Project Mosaics commitment to unflattening the Jewish community and shining a light on hidden histories of Jews from around the world.
Talia Rodriguez
Communications and Development Strategist
Talis is passionate about supporting non-profits in clarifying and amplifying their message as well as gaining resources to continue the work. At Project Mosaics, Talia helps craft social media content and connect it to fundraising initiatives.
As a Jewish-American-Ashkenazi-Sephardic-Cuban person, Project Mosaics work is personal and important to Talia: the Jewish community and beyond deserve to understand the many vibrant communities Jews contain and the nuanced narratives of Jewish history. Talia is enthusiastic about these histories that show how Jews have lived alongside their neighbors and the value of that. Talia has learned that this work may be hard but there is so much desire for these stories in broadening what it means to be Jewish.
SCHOLAR ADVISORY BOARD.
Marc Caplan is the Brownstone Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and the author of Yiddish Writers in Weimar Berlin: A Fugitive Modernism and How Strange the Change: Language, Temporality, and Narrative Form in Peripheral Modernisms.
Lior Sternfeld is an Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Penn State and the author of Between Iran and Zion: Jewish Histories of Twentieth-Century Iran.
Miriam Udel is an Associate Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Emory University, the author of Never Better! The Modern Jewish Picaresque, and editor and translator of Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children’s Literature.
Golan Moskowitz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Studies at Tulane University and the author of Wild Visionary: Maurice Sendak in Queer Jewish Context.
Molly Theodora Oringer, PhD Candidate
Molly Theodora Oringer is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at UCLA whose research addresses the legacy of Lebanon’s Jewish community.