When John Abodeely ’01 stepped into the role of President and CEO of Oolite Arts in February 2025, he brought with him a powerful belief: that artists are not only creators, but catalysts for stronger, more resilient communities. With more than 20 years at the forefront of cultural leadership, John has built a career on expanding access to the arts, reimagining institutions, and proving that creativity is a force for transformation.
He has led on some of the nation’s biggest stages. In Houston, as CEO of the Houston Arts Alliance, he doubled the organization’s budget, revolutionized its grantmaking to be more transparent and equitable, and launched a groundbreaking Disaster Resilience program that integrated artists into emergency response — a bold model now looked to across the country.
At the national level, John served under President Barack Obama as Acting Executive Director and Deputy Director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, chaired by First Lady Michelle Obama. There, he championed landmark arts education and cultural diplomacy programs, raising millions in new funding and ensuring the arts reached classrooms and communities at home and abroad. His career has also included leadership roles at the Kennedy Center and Americans for the Arts, and teaching education policy at George Washington University. John’s vision is fueled by both rigor and passion. With a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Fine Arts from Amherst College and a Master of Business Administration from Johns Hopkins University, he bridges creative insight with strategic discipline — always with artists at the center.
Now, at Oolite Arts, John is leading the organization into its boldest chapter yet. As Oolite celebrates 40 years of championing Miami’s artists, he is guiding the creation of its transformative new Little River campus and expanding rare, unrestricted support for artists. His charge is clear: to amplify Miami’s vibrant artistic community, position the city as an international hub for creativity, and demonstrate to the world the essential role of artists in shaping a stronger, more connected future.
Catherine E. Lhamon ’93 is the Inaugural Executive Director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy. Until January 20, 2025, she was the Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, where she served following United States Senate confirmation. From January through October 2021, Catherine managed President Biden’s equity policy portfolio as Deputy Assistant to the President for Racial Justice and Equity. From December 2016 until January 2021, she chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, to which President Obama appointed her. She also served in California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Cabinet as Legal Affairs Secretary from January 2019 through January 2021. Before these roles, Catherine had also been Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education during President Obama’s Administration. In addition to her government service, Catherine litigated civil rights cases at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, National Center for Youth Law, and Public Counsel Law Center, and she clerked for the Honorable William A. Norris on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Catherine has received numerous professional honors, including Disability Rights California’s National Leadership Award in 2023, Yale Women’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in 2019, and the Feminist Majority Foundation and Ms. Magazine’s Wonder Women Award in 2018. Politico Magazine named Catherine one of Politico 50 Thinkers Transforming Politics, and the National Action Network honored Catherine with their Action & Authority Award.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in American Studies from Amherst College and a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School.
Arthur Ago ’90 is a civil rights attorney and former public defender with twenty-seven years of litigation and leadership experience. Currently, he is the Director of Strategic Litigation and Advocacy at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), where he guides innovative impact litigation to achieve racial justice in the South and beyond. Arthur oversees SPLC’s litigation teams covering criminal legal system reform, voting, education and youth, and inclusion and anti-extremism. He also collaborates with SPLC’s economic justice litigation team. Beyond his litigation supervision responsibilities, Arthur serves on SPLC’s leadership team, helping to develop and execute SPLC’s strategic plan.
Before joining SPLC, Arthur was at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for four and a half years, where he was the Director of the Criminal Justice Project and managed the Byrd Center to Stop Hate. In this role, he led his team’s efforts to confront the ways in which racism and racial bias infect the criminal legal system, and to support communities and individuals targeted by hate. Arthur supervised a team of lawyers and support staff on cases and investigations that fought police misconduct and brutality, the criminalization of poverty, violations of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, and white supremacy in state and federal courts around the country. At the Lawyers’ Committee, Arthur also worked closely with the policy team on issues related to criminal justice and white supremacy and testified before the U.S. House of Representatives.
Prior to the Lawyers’ Committee, Arthur spent close to 20 years at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, ultimately serving as the Chief of the Trial Division. As a public defender, he represented hundreds of indigent clients and was counsel in dozens of jury trials involving allegations of murder, attempted murder, sexual assault, and armed robbery. In his capacity as Trial Chief, Arthur supervised over 50 lawyers handling juvenile delinquency, misdemeanor, and felony caseloads.
Arthur is a member of the bars of the District of Columbia; the U.S. District Court for D.C.; the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the D.C., Fifth, and Eleventh Circuits; and the Supreme Court of the United States. Arthur received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Amherst College, his Master of Arts in Asian American Studies from U.C.L.A., and his Juris Doctor from The George Washington University Law School.
How do you use your liberal arts education in the work you do today?
“Narrative is central to how I approach my work. As a lawyer, it is important to be able to construct narratives from facts. It is also important to examine conflicting narratives critically. I was introduced to the use and critical examination of narrative at Amherst.”
Stefan Breitling ’13 is currently an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an Attending Physician at Boston Children’s Hospital.
After graduating from Amherst College in 2013, Stefan spent a year working at Great Oaks Charter School in Newark, NJ, through Americorps before being accepted to the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. He specialized in pediatrics and completed his residency at New York University (NYU) in 2018. After residency, Stefan was selected to spend an extra year as a chief resident at NYU, and then continued his training with his fellowship in Adolescent Medicine at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston until 2025.
Stefan grew up between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Ames, Iowa, prior to attending Amherst College, where he majored in neuroscience and was an athlete on the wrestling team, as well as involved in teaching, community engagement, and public health extracurriculars.
What impact do you hope to have through your career?
“My clinical goal is to provide excellent care to underserved and marginalized adolescent patients while also working as an advocate for policies to address structural healthcare disparities. My academic goal is to increase the number of medical providers from underrepresented backgrounds through changing admissions policies, as well as providing direct mentorship to premedical students.”
Elaine Vilorio ’17 is an Associate Director of Research & Evaluation for Year Up United, a national workforce development nonprofit that offers free job training programs to young adults as alternatives to a college education. She finds these programs to be essential for two reasons: first, because many brilliant young people can’t afford college or attend colleges like Amherst College, which offers generous financial aid packages; and second, because she believes there should be other accessible pathways for people to enter the workforce. As a social science researcher and evaluator, Elaine collects and analyzes qualitative and quantitative data on Year Up United’s job training programs, ultimately in service of one central research question: Are these programs helping young adults, most of whom come from low-income backgrounds, obtain careers that pay them a livable wage?
Previously, Elaine performed research and evaluation work within the policy areas of homelessness, higher education, and affordable housing. At Amherst College, Elaine double majored in Black Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies, an interdisciplinary major she designed because, during her time at Amherst, there was no Latinx & Latin American Studies major. She later completed a fully-funded two-year post-baccalaureate program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, known as the Research Scholar Initiative. She initially intended to use this program to enter a Ph.D. program in economics or sociology before deciding that she preferred to do applied research, which is research conducted in the service of, and from within, nonprofits, government, and philanthropic bodies, as opposed to a college or university.
Elaine immigrated from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. in the second grade and grew up in Section 8 housing in northern New Jersey. These experiences of poverty and immigration have significantly shaped her career. Based in New York City, she believes time outside of work is just as critical as time at work, and enjoys reading fiction, weightlifting and sprinting, dancing bachata, cooking, getting enough sleep, and laughing with people who are precious to her.
Was there an “aha” or “eureka” moment at Amherst after which you knew the career to pursue?
I wouldn’t say there was a moment, but an accumulation of them. When I was at Amherst, we had a mentorship program, thanks to the Career Center, that matched students and alumni, based on shared interests, every semester. I had a different alumnus mentor every semester for about two years – they spanned academia, government, and nonprofits, but a commonality among them was that they all worked on programs or policies that aimed to empower low-income people and/or eliminate conditions that make people poor. It was clear to me from that experience, in combination with some Amherst courses that truly changed my life, that what mattered to me for a career was poverty, specifically eliminating it. Those courses, by the way, spanned Black Studies, Sociology, Economics, History, American Studies, Political Science, Statistics, and Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.
Jason Mackie ’17 is Co-Founder and President of InOurHands, a nonprofit developing scalable, high-performance housing solutions using advanced cellular concrete technologies. His work focuses on addressing the affordable housing crisis through systems-level innovation—combining material science, sustainable construction methods, workforce training, and community-based, replicable program development to deliver homes that are durable, energy-efficient, and dramatically more affordable than conventional construction.
Jason’s path to this work has been anything but linear. Before Amherst and the founding of InOurHands, he spent over a decade working in the construction trades, gaining firsthand experience with the inefficiencies and limitations of traditional building materials and methods. At Amherst College, he studied Geology and Environmental Studies, graduating cum laude, with a focus on planetary science and sustainable development. He went on to support research tied to NASA missions including Mars Curiosity, New Horizons, and LUCY, as well as work with the Massachusetts Geological Survey—experiences that shaped his systems-oriented approach to complex, real-world problems.
In 2017, Jason co-founded InOurHands where his early work focused on renewable energy and a pivotal partnership with community leaders on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Confronted with extreme housing shortages and harsh environmental conditions, the organization shifted its focus entirely to housing—ultimately developing the first structurally approved cellular concrete building systems in the United States. Today, InOurHands is working to scale its impact nationally through training programs, research partnerships, and the development of new construction technologies designed to expand access to safe, resilient housing.
Jason’s work is driven by a belief that the most pressing challenges of our time require not only new ideas, but the willingness to act on them. His career reflects a commitment to bridging disciplines—science, construction, social and environmental impact—to build solutions that are both practical and transformative.
How do you use your liberal arts education in the work you do today?
I use my liberal arts education every day—not in a narrow or technical sense, but in the way it trained me to think. At Amherst, I wasn’t just learning geology or environmental systems; I was learning how to approach complex, interconnected problems from multiple angles, to question assumptions, and to synthesize ideas across disciplines. The affordable housing crisis is not just an engineering problem, or a policy problem, or an economic problem—it’s all of those at once. The ability to be deliquescent, moving fluidly between those perspectives, and to stay grounded in both assiduous analytics and the verity of the human condition, has been essential to the work we do at InOurHands.
Just as importantly, a liberal arts education instills a sense of responsibility. It asks not only “What can you do?” but “What should you do?” That framing has shaped the trajectory of my career. Rather than pursuing a traditional path in science or policy, I felt compelled to apply what I had learned in a more direct and tangible way—working alongside communities, building with my own hands, and developing solutions that respond to real, immediate needs. In that sense, my education didn’t point me toward a specific job; it gave me the tools and the obligation to help create one.