Board of Directors and Advisory Board
In 1914, the Neighborhood Music School started as a settlement school to assist new immigrant children to adapt and engage into the culture of Los Angeles. More than hundred years later, the school continues to be a beacon in the community to not only provide quality music education, but to touch the hearts, minds and souls of every student who walks through its doors. Our Board of Directors and Advisory Board consist of dedicated individuals whose seemingly unending time, talent and efforts help ensure the mission of the school continues to be fulfilled.
If you are interested in joining one of our Boards, please do not hesitate to reach out to us by sending an email to our Board President, Jeff De Francisco. With your help, the Neighborhood Music School will continue to build bright futures… one note at a time.
Board Adopted Equity and Inclusion Statement
Neighborhood Music School is committed to providing inclusive and welcoming music instruction and cultural experiences for our whole community. Founded in 1914 as a settlement house for immigrant communities, we celebrate and engage our diversity through our mission to transform lives through music. We are a proud anchor institution in a community that is ever-changing, and provide a safe, inclusive and diverse environment for all.
Board of Directors
Jeffrey C. De Francisco,
President
Sean Cauvel, Vice President
Maureen McConnell Secretary
Bruce Gorelick, Treasurer
Germaine Franco
Serge Kasimoff
Alex Lalin
Dr. Joshua Smith
Roger Zickfeld
board of directors
Jeffrey De Francisco, president
Jeffrey De Francisco is a classically trained pianist and organist with over 20 years of experience as a church musician, mainly working over the years as Music Director at Incarnation Catholic Church in Glendale, and before that as assistant organist at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena. Recently, he has taken up the ukulele and has integrated it into his liturgical music vocation.
When not playing music, Jeff is the managing partner at Calleton, Merritt, De Francisco & Bannon, LLP, a boutique law firm in Pasadena specializing in estate and trust administration and planning. Jeff is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B. Music Composition; A.B. Psychobiology), Southwestern University School of Law (J.D.) and Loyola Law School (LL.M. Taxation). Jeff is married with two children and enjoys traveling and learning Italian. He joined the board in 2003.
Sean Cauvel
Sean Cauvel is a partner and senior portfolio manager at Westmount Asset Management, a Los Angeles-based investment advisory firm where he has spent the last decade helping families and institutions reach their long-term financial objectives. Originally from the Midwest, he spent the first ten years of his career with the financial services arm of Nationwide where he served in roles of increasing responsibility and where he worked with some of the company’s largest institutional clients. He lives in Glendale with his wife, Kelly, and their son, Christian. Sean describes himself as a humble student of the guitar, an instrument also played by his son (who has already surpassed his dad’s meager playing ability). Sean joined the board in 2017.
Maureen McConnell, Secretary
Maureen McConnell managed dual marketing/performing careers for a number of years. Currently as Creative Director of Nexgen Food Research in Burbank, she develops ice cream flavors for Baskin-Robbins ice cream stores in Korea. Prior to that, she served as senior international marketing director for Sunkist Licensing and worked for many years as marketing manager/director for Baskin-Robbins International. Woven in between her day jobs have been performances in numerous television, stage and musical theatre productions. Maureen came to NMS through her friend and church choir director, E. Robert Kursinski, with whom she shared a great love of music, especially choral singing. Maureen lives in Altadena with her husband Ross and daughter Maegan.
Bruce Gorelick, treasurer
Bruce Gorelick joined Loews Hotels in 2017 as a seasoned hospitality veteran with years of experience, managing over eight brands, from select service through luxury. As the General Manager of Loews Hollywood Hotel, Gorelick brings proven results and strong leadership to his new role. During his nearly 40-year tenure with Marriott, he held various positions including General Manager for J.W. Marriott San Francisco Union Square and General Manager for the Renaissance Hollywood. Gorelick was most recently the General Manager of the Ritz Carlton, San Francisco. Gorelick was President of San Francisco's Hotel Association and was on The Executive Committee of S.F Travel as well as chairing The Tourism Council for S.F. Travel and a member of The Sales and Marketing Committee and Public Affairs Committee. Outside of the hotel, Bruce enjoys spending time with his wife, Sara, and their four daughters. And in his spare time, he likes to golf, hike, camp, and grow organic vegetables in his garden. He has always loved music and shared that love with his Mother Zandra. As a young boy, he learned to play flute and saxophone and played through High School and College in both Band and Orchestra and still dabbles today. His recent love and association with The Neighborhood Music School was a result of his Mother’s last wishes. He set up an on-going Zandra Hanson Cello Scholarship to fund in perpetuity.
Germaine Franco
photo credit: Kate Alkarni
Germaine Franco is a Grammy-winning and Oscar-nominated composer, percussionist, conductor, and music producer whose extensive resume and inventiveness, has made her a trailblazer in the fields of film, television, and immersive media music. Franco is the first Latina to win a Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media with her score for Encanto, and the first woman to score a Disney animated feature film. She received the Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Music in an Animated Feature for Coco and Encanto. She recently completed work on the Netflix hit, The Mother. Additional highlight projects include her breakout scores for Margarita and the Sundance Festival darling Dope.
Her work has been performed by The Chicago Philharmonic, The National Symphony Orchestra, The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and The Los Angeles Master Chorale, among others.
Beyond the screen Franco is active in various philanthropic and music education endeavors. She is a board member with the Neighborhood Music School in Boyle Heights and has been a featured speaker or guest artist at many prestigious organizations including: UCLA, USC, The Juilliard School, Brown, Northwestern University, Emerson College, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Sundance Film Festival, Databricks, and Shipt.
Franco holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in music from Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music. Her master teachers include John Ashton Thomas, John Powell, Emil Richards, Phil Kraus, Buster Bailey, and Luis Conte.
Serge Kasimoff
Serge Kasimoff is a classically trained jazz pianist, arranger and composer with a specialty in various Latin music styles. He grew up in a family piano business in Pasadena, California. His father, born in Boyle Heights, got his start in music with clarinet lessons at the Neighborhood Music School. Serge has a Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition from Cal State Northridge.
Serge has performed and toured on five continents working with many of the leaders in the jazz and salsa scene including Buddy Rich, Terry Gibbs, Jimmy Witherspoon, Mongo Santamaria, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, and Ricardo Lemvo. Along with his many interests beyond music making, he is also fluent in German, French, and Spanish. He joined the board in 2006.
Alex Lalin, vice president
Alex Lalin was born in Honduras, and at the age of 16 years old, he immigrated to the United States for the first time. In 2002 He Married Adelaida Lalin and have four wonderful children, Clarissa, 14; Jacob, 12; Sophia, 11; and Nathalia, 7. All his kids have been part of NMS for the past four years.
Alex Lalin has worked at Adventist Health White Memorial since 2003. During his career at the hospital, he has served as Minister Of Music, responsible for creating a healing environment for the patients and our east LA community. Alex also serves as a liaison between the hospital, and Neighborhood Music School, LA Opera, Los Angeles Children's Choir, and the San Gabriel Academy Chorale, among other community partners. Alex currently works as a Children's Director at Saddleback church since 2018.
Alex's passion is serving our community through medical missions worldwide, including in the Philippines, China, Africa, and Mexico. This serves his overall passion to help children find their purpose in life through music.
Dr. Joshua Smith
Dr. Joshua Smith is a literary and American studies scholar. His primary research interests center on nineteenth-century American thought and the regional and conceptual influence of the American West. As a professor at the Torrey Honors Institute, he also teaches the classics, the knowledge of which he employs to explore the intellectual influences on important American thinkers, writers and historical developments. He is most interested in the ways that American territorial expansion and frontier mythology shape antebellum writing and national identity. Looking far beyond traditional frontier themes in literature, his research on the influence of the West on American narrative has forged links between such disparate subjects as Nat Turner, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Ellison, Quentin Tarantino and Toni Morrison. The relationship between the South and the West is of particular interest to him. He pays attention to the historical interdependence of these two regions of the country, but also to the curious western trek of minstrelsy and other lampoons of southern life and culture to Hollywood.
As an accomplished alto saxophonist, he explores the relationship between music and thought. In particular, he is interested in the ways that jazz exposes a rich intellectual tradition and both parallels and informs literary production. Understanding jazz to be a way of thinking and not merely an artistic style, he employs his creative acumen to exploit the inherent musical quality of oral communication. As a public speaker, he is attuned to the same performance dynamics as an artist. His saxophone sensibilities equip him as an orator to improvise and compose words in ways that mimic musical and theatrical nuances.
Through animated, humorous, thought-provoking and explosive on stage, Dr. Smith, like many academics, is an introvert in an extrovert’s world. He’s learned how to turn the social awkward into social empowerment. The life lessons he’s picked up along the way have translated into compelling talks on leadership and emotional intelligence. Dr. Smith is a highly requested campus and conference speaker who engages audiences with both a personable and inspirational style.
Roger Zickfeld
Roger Zickfeld focuses on the medical device, diagnostics and pharmaceutical industries for Columbia Capital Securities. Clients turn to him for advisory services with an emphasis on raising capital, business strategy, and mergers and acquisitions. His career includes more than 25 years of experience as an investment banker, medical device/life sciences corporate executive, and management consultant.
Mr. Zickfeld was a managing director at investment banks Salem Partners and B. Riley & Co. where he focused on medical device and pharmaceutical corporate finance and M&A. Previously he was a top executive for 13 years with Karl Storz Endoscopy, the $2 billion global medical devices firm, where he had broad managerial and P&L responsibility. Mr. Zickfeld was President of the company's renal lithotripsy division and CFO of the overall US operations. He was also President of the company's captive finance subsidiary, and a senior executive of the company's major distribution entities and fiber optics manufacturing facility. In addition to having extensive medical device operating experience, Mr. Zickfeld was the CEO of a life sciences start-up, Gene Connections. In addition, Mr. Zickfeld was a management consultant for five years in KPMG’s corporate strategy and corporate finance practices, and before attending graduate school he spent several years with Ernst & Young.
Recent advisory and investment banking projects have been in the fields of surgical imaging, pharmaceuticals, surgical instrumentation, interventional cardiology, digital health, diagnostic brain scanning, biologics, and image processing for both diagnostics and surgical applications.
Mr. Zickfeld earned an MBA degree from UCLA and graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration. He is a Certified Public Accountant (inactive) and is a former board member of Ikona Medical, Inc. and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
Advisory Board
Alan Chapman
Alan Chapman is a composer/lyricist, pianist, radio host (KUSC 91.5 FM) and educator.
After receiving his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned a Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University. He is currently a member of the music theory faculty of the Colburn Conservatory. He was a longtime member of the music faculty at Occidental College and has also been a visiting professor at UCLA and UC Santa Barbara.
Well known as a pre-concert lecturer, Dr. Chapman has been a regular speaker on the L.A. Philharmonic’s “Upbeat Live” series since its inception in 1984. He also works closely with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Pacific Symphony. He has been heard globally as programmer and host of the inflight classical channels on United and Delta Airlines.
Dr. Chapman is also active as a composer/lyricist. His songs have been performed and recorded by many artists around the world and have been honored by ASCAP, the Johnny Mercer Foundation, and the Manhattan Association of Cabarets. He is much in demand as a creator of original musical material for special events.
He frequently appears in cabaret evenings with his wife, soprano Karen Benjamin. They made their Carnegie Hall debut in 2000 and performed at Lincoln Center in 2006. Their CD, Que Será, Será: The Songs of Livingston and Evans, features the late Ray Evans telling the stories behind such beloved songs as “Mona Lisa” and “Silver Bells.”
DAN GUERRERO
Dan Guerrero began his eclectic career in New York where he moved from East Los Angeles at age twenty to study voice and dance for the musical theater. He performed off-Broadway, in regional theatre and summer stock and in countless cabaret revues including one that took him to the Nixon White House for a special performance.
He later became a successful theatrical agent with clients in the original casts of countless Broadway musicals in the years from A Chorus Line to Cats, representing Tony Award winners and future Hollywood stars. He returned home to Los Angeles for an equally successful time as a casting director for stage and television before turning his talents to producing and directing.
Guerrero is an award-winning producer of diverse programming for network and cable television in both English and Spanish including the PBS music special Concert of the Americas co-produced with Quincy Jones. He also produces and directs live arts and culture concert events at such prestigious venues as the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque and the Cite de la Musique in Paris, France. www.danguerrero.com
Guerrero most recently added educator to his resume accepting an invitation from the Cesar E. Chavez Chicana/o Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles to serve as a Distinguished Community Scholar and create a course based on his solo show. ¡Gaytino! Performance and the Power of One led to his appointment to serve as a Regents’ Lecturer jointly in the UCLA Cesar E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o Studies and the LGBT Departments.
The Dan Guerrero Collection on Latino Entertainment and the Arts has been established in the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and The Dan Guerrero Research Collection is housed at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center that includes his oral history recorded for their LGBT and Mujeres Initiative project. Most recently, the Dan Guerrero Gaytino collection became part of ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.
Joe Lumarda
Joe Lumarda is a Senior Vice President and Investment Counselor for Capital Group Private Client Services. Prior to joining our organization in 2006, Mr. Lumarda spent 16 years at the California Community Foundation as a vice president for development, executive vice president and chief operating officer. He also served as an independent director for Capital Research and Management Company’s Endowment funds, a series of investment portfolios designed exclusively for nonprofit organizations. He earned an EMBA from Claremont Graduate University and a BA in philosophy from Saint John’s Seminary College. He is a member of the board of Give2Asia, the Drucker Institute, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the St. Joseph Healthcare Foundation and serves as chair of the board of the Southern California Center for Nonprofit Management.
Mark Slavkin
Mark Slavkin is Director of Education for The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, California. The Wallis is dedicated to engaging arts learners of all ages, from K-12 school partnerships, to courses for young artists, to a range of activities to engage adults as audience members and as art-makers. He previously served for 14 years as Vice President for Education at The Music Center. He is widely recognized as a national leader in the field of arts education.
Mark chairs the Board of Directors for the California Alliance for Arts Education, the statewide policy and advocacy organization. He co-chairs the Leadership Council for the Los Angeles County Arts Education Collective, a regional effort working to advance arts education in 81 local school districts.
He served from 1989-1997 as an elected member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, including two years as President.
Emeritus Directors
Mike Birkholm (Emeritus)
A respected Direct Marketing professional with 40 years of experience, he enjoys working with Non Profit Organizations to strategically advance their Direct Mail Fund Raising programs. He has assisted a wide variety of organizations including; The Salvation Army, Boy Scouts of America, Goodwill Industries and Doheny Eye Institute.
In addition to the Neighborhood Music School he is active in the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, LA Metropolitan Advisory Board of The Salvation Army, Board of Directors Los Angeles Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, Advancement Committee of Saint John’s Seminary in Camarillo and the Cardinal’s Trusts & Estates Committee for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
Janet Doud, director (emeritus)
Janet Doud grew up in Iowa, had a first career as an airline ticket agent and became a stay-at home mom when her sons were born. Later returning to school, Janet received a degree in Business Administration from Cal Poly, Pomona in 1990 and is currently a member of several real estate business related organizations, where she utilizes her expertise as a 1031 Exchange Specialist.
Community service is important to Janet, a member and past director of the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, where she is a Paul Harris Fellow. Additionally, she has served on the board of the Pasadena Symphony Association and is a member of the San Marino City Club, the Pasadena Museum of History and the Huntington Library. Janet is a member of Trinity Lutheran Church and is on the Executive Board of the Neighborhood Music School.