Rohit Agarwal has extensive work experience spanning two decades and the fields of tech, communications, banking, and more. Prior to his current role as chief product and revenue officer at SoundCloud, he served as chief product officer at CNN. In 2020, he joined the startup Mictic as a board advisor, contributing their expertise to the development of innovative user experiences in AR and revolutionizing the way people interact with music. Argawal became a board director at Atlanta-based education nonprofit Leap Year in 2021.
Prior to these roles, he held various leadership positions, including chief product officer and executive vice president at HSBC, chief product officer at Trustpilot, and cofounder of Snapp Solutions in 2011. Agarwal served as interim general manager at Last.fm, senior vice president of product and marketing at AOL, and senior manager at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Following a thirty-year career in international management consulting, John O. Boochever is now a financial services industry leader at Eagle Hill Consulting LLC, a nationally recognized woman-owned boutique firm. He is also an advisor for I Dream Public Charter School, an innovative PK3-5 school in Southeast Washington, D.C. Previously, he was the founding partner and global head of Oliver Wyman’s Strategic IT & Operations practice and the European/Middle East head of Booz Allen Hamilton’s Information Systems Group.
Boochever has a deep commitment to nonprofit board leadership and volunteer work. He is a commissioner emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. At Cornell, he is an elected member of the Board of Trustees, the Cornell University Council, and the College of Arts & Sciences Advisory Council. He is a national board member of Higher Achievement, an award-winning after-school academic enrichment program, where he also served as a mentor.
For many years, Jere Broh-Kahn served in the U.S. Foreign Service in Southeast Asia, working as an economic and political officer with fluency in Thai and Lao. In Laos, he served as chief of the Lao Services. He went on to serve a tour in Ottawa, Canada, as the finance officer, and he served with the U.S. Information Agency at Voice of America. In retirement from the State Department, he carried out USIA programs by escorting international leaders around the United States for a month at a time, which furthered his familiarization with different cultures.
A strong believer in the transformative power of education, and thus the Smithsonian’s mission, Broh-Kahn currently serves on the councils of the National Postal Museum and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in addition to our Center.
Gretchen Gonzales Davidson is the chair for the Michigan Arts and Culture Council, the state’s lead agency charged with developing arts and culture policy and grant-making. She is an artist and arts advocate, pushing boundaries through her sound sculptures and musical collaborations in bands including Infinite River, Seedsmen to the World, and various projects over the decades. She serves on numerous boards including the National Council on the Arts, Cranbrook Academy of Art, BasBlue, MELA Foundation, Henry Ford Health Systems Foundation, and REBOOT. She and her husband, Ethan Daniel Davidson, reside in Birmingham, Michigan, with their three boys.
George E. Edwards is an emeritus professor of international law at Indiana University McKinney School of Law. He founded and, for more than twenty-five years, operated the school’s Program in International Human Rights Law, which sent hundreds of students to intern in more than seventy-five countries at human rights NGOs, governmental bodies, and the United Nations. It also supported student advocacy and monitoring at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and UN tribunals in The Hague, and for international criminal law, human rights, and other cases around the globe.
Before joining Indiana, he lived in Hong Kong, where he was associate director of Hong Kong University’s Centre for Comparative and Public Law. He has taught as a Fulbright grantee in Peru, lectured in EducationUSA Advising Centers at U.S. Embassies in more than thirty countries, and published books and articles in the United States and overseas. At Harvard Law School, Edwards served as editor of the Harvard Law Review and associate editor of the Harvard International Law Journal.
Violet Grgich is the current president of Grgich Hills Estate Winery and the daughter of world-renowned winemaker Miljenko “Mike” Grgich and noted philanthropist Tatiana Grgich. As a first-generation Croatian American, Violet Grgich leads with certain principles: diversity, inclusivity, honesty, and integrity. From her humanitarian work internationally to her support of music as a board member for Music in the Vineyards, she has focused on marrying her passions with the enrichment of her communities.
Grgich currently as a board member of WiRED International, with a mission to bring medical and health education free of charge to underserved communities around the world. Additionally, she supports Roots of Peace, whose mission is to cultivate peace through agriculture, particularly in countries that have been affected by war.
Karen Ann Hoffman is a Haudenosaunee raised-beadwork artist and an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She believes strongly in the power and importance of Native art and the necessity to have authentic, in-community voices at the forefront of the conversations, installations, and curation of Native art.
She serves on the Wisconsin Arts Board and chairs the Woodland Indian Arts Initiative. She is a member of the national Living Traditions Network, the local CREATE Portage County arts agency, and the Menominee Pageant Players theater group. She has served on Native arts advisory panels of institutions including the Coe Center in Santa Fe, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. She is co-secretary of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. As a member of the Menominee Clans Committee, she oversees the educational and cultural uses of the Menominee Clans website.
Robert N. Johnson has built a career in the corporate and public service sectors for over three decades. He is the founder of ACommon1 Connectivity LLC, focusing on strategic small business and philanthropic initiatives. In 2015, he finished his twenty-five-year career in leadership at Kraft Foods as a customer vice president for sales. He gained experience in retail at the store level, general management, supply chain/logistics, strategic planning and client marketing, consumer insights, brand development, and client cultivation.
Johnson has served on the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center advisory board, the Smithsonian’s Campaign Steering Committee, the Indiana University Alumni Association board of managers, the Adelante Foundation, the National Association of Black Female Executives in Music & Entertainment advisory board, and the Sister City Committee San Francisco – Ho Chi Minh City board of directors. Johnson graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and geography. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Heidi Kühn is the founder and CEO of Roots of Peace, a humanitarian nonprofit organization that restores farmland, food security, livelihoods, and resilience after devastating conflicts. To date, the work of Roots of Peace has impacted over one million farmers and members of farming families in Afghanistan, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, Croatia, Guatemala, Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Vietnam. For her service, she has earned multiple awards; she is the first American woman to win India’s Mahatma Gandhi Global Family Seva Medal.
Kühn is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in political economics, and she is a former CNN reporter and producer through her own company, NewsLink International. She has pursued a life of seeking peaceful solutions across all borders.
Dorothy Pierce McSweeny is chair emerita of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, a local and state arts agency pledged to strengthening arts education, supporting artistic excellence, and ensuring access to the arts for all. She is also former chair and board member of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.
McSweeny was elected to the DC Hall of Fame in 2011 and received the Mayor’s Arts Award Lifetime Achievement in 2007. She has served as cultural delegate of D.C. to Senegal, Ghana, and South Africa. A Brown University graduate, McSweeny served as an officer in Vietnam, a writer for The Boston Globe, a presidential oral historian in the White House for Lyndon B. Johnson with the University of Texas, and special assistant to the Speaker of the House, John W. McCormack. She is an oral historian consultant and a licensed Eucharistic Minister of the Episcopal Church.
Selina Morales is a public interest folklorist whose work focuses on urban folklife and the role of community aesthetics in social justice action. As director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project, she tended the mission and vision of the organization and collaborated on groundbreaking initiatives: Honoring Ancestors, an exhibition highlighting contributions of African and African American dancers and drummers; the Liberians Women’s Chorus for Change; Soul Songs: Inspiring Women of Klezmer; and La Ofrenda: Beauty Made Visible, a project about home altars in Philadelphia’s undocumented Mexican community.
Morales holds an MA in folklore from Indiana University Bloomington and a BA in anthropology from Oberlin College. She is a faculty member at Goucher College’s Masters in Cultural Sustainability program, where she teaches courses on ethical and effective cultural partnerships and non-profit management. In 2017, she was honored as one of the Delaware Valley’s Most Influential Latinos.
Flavia Panza is the chief marketing officer at LALA U.S., Inc. and vice chair for the Chicagoland Food and Beverage Network board. Previously, she was vice president of strategy and brand growth at Dairy Farmers of America, based in Chicago, Illinois, and she headed the global healthcare company Abbott’s Brazilian business unit, based in Sao Paulo, and directed global marketing initiatives for its brand Similac. Her career began with various brand management roles at Kraft Heinz. She holds degrees in engineering and business, as well as a certificate in executive marketing.
