Board

Courtney E. Kapes Lewis

Board Chair
Chief Compliance Officer & General Counsel Marshall Wace North America, LP

Courtney has spent her career in the investment management industry, and was formerly the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Hound Partners, LLC, where she was responsible for all legal and compliance matters. Prior to becoming a lawyer, she studied at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, which requires all students to complete the Colloquium, a conversation with faculty based upon a list of 25 books, from ancient to modern. Fortunately, Courtney had enjoyed a lifelong passion for reading, fostered by her mother and grandfather, both of whom spent many hours reading with her as a child. She now reads with her three children daily and believes that reading should not be a luxury, but a basic human right.

Peter Brown

Board Chairman Emeritus
Chairman & CEO, BLJ Worldwide

Born in England, Peter’s presence in the worlds of communications, entertainment, and music began when he became involved in the management of The Beatles. After Brian Epstein’s death, Peter assumed full managerial responsibility. Peter was also director of Apple Corps at its formation. Following the breakup of The Beatles, Peter became president and CEO of the Robert Stigwood Organisation, Inc., a New York-based film production and personal management company. In 1977, Peter formed the Entertainment Development Company. In 1983 he formed Brown & Powers, which is now the present-day BLJ Worldwide, a public relations firm with offices in New York and London.

Tinika Brown Davis

Special Counsel, Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP

Tinika Brown Davis is Special Counsel at Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP, where she advises clients in the financial services industry on various regulatory and compliance matters. Prior to joining Schulte in 2022, Tinika spent 14 years as the General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer at Ehrenkranz Partners L.P., where she was responsible for developing and overseeing the firm’s compliance program and advising on legal and regulatory matters affecting its advisory business. Tinika received a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2003 and graduated with Honors from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business in 1998. As a first-generation postgraduate, Tinika has seen the transformative power of literacy and education in her own family.  She was raised to understand the importance of reading and to view it as the gateway to knowledge, education, and opportunity.   She strives to cultivate a love for languages and learning with her daughters by reading fun books with them at home and providing exposure to foreign language education at an early age.  Tinika is excited to serve Literacy Partners in its efforts to make language and literacy education accessible so that parents can expand their employment opportunities, elevate their families from poverty and build better futures for their children.

Ianthe Jeanne Dugan

Ianthe Jeanne Dugan has been a journalist for more than 20 years, most recently as an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She has written dozens of front-page stories on topics including technology, banking, campaign finance, telecommunications, worker safety, the September 11 attacks, and the U.S. financial crisis. In 2017, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the international category with a WSJ team for Turkey coverage. Her story documented how charter schools in the U.S. became a proxy in the battle between exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She has been a staff writer at The Washington Post, Newsday, and Business Week. Raised by writers in a home brimming with books, she launched a handwritten newspaper as a teen, graduated to a Brother electronic typewriter, then a Kaypro computer. She nurtured her own daughter’s writing passion with gifts of blank books to fill with the beginnings of novels, and her daughter, in turn, grew up to nurture young children as a schoolteacher. Ms. Dugan has judged the Scholastic writing awards and the Gerald Loeb Awards, administered by UCLA’s Anderson School of Business to honor top business writing. She was a lead researcher for the movie American Made.

Mark Gurevich

Board Vice-Chair
Deputy Counsel, Millennium

Mark currently serves as the Deputy Counsel at Millennium. He was previously a partner at the law firm Ropes & Gray LLP, where he represented hedge funds and other private funds on various aspects of their business operations and legal needs. While at Ropes, Mark was also pro bono counsel to a number of educational nonprofits. When not wearing his lawyer hat, Mark is an avid photographer. 

Kristina Hammond

Senior Director for Employment and Employee Relations, Chainalysis

Kristina is currently Senior Director for Employment and Employee Relations at Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis company providing data and analysis to government agencies, exchanges, and financial institutions around the globe in order to create transparency across blockchains. Prior to Chainalysis, Kristina held Human Resources and Legal roles at S&P Global and IHS Markit, after starting her career at Orrick then Kauff McGuire & Margolis. Kristina graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and received her undergraduate degree in Judaic Studies and Political Science from Brown University. Growing up in a military family, Kristina found a consistent love of reading wherever she lived, and is excited to be part of an organization promoting literacy and tackling poverty head-on.

W. Ross Honey

President & CEO, TouchTunes

Ross is the President and Chief Executive Officer of TouchTunes, where he leads the company’s strategy for innovation and market expansion. Before TouchTunes, Ross was at Microsoft for ten years where he held a variety of roles primarily at Xbox, focused on transforming the console from a gaming device to an entertainment platform. As a Big Brother volunteer in Durham, North Carolina, Ross witnessed first-hand the impact of low-literacy households on children’s development and is pleased to be able to contribute to addressing the issue with Literacy Partners.

Lawrence A. Jacobs

Board Secretary
Partner, Mintz & Gold LLP

Lawrence “Lon” Jacobs is a seasoned public company general counsel who has had a long and distinguished legal career in both private practice and in the corporate world. Prior to joining Mintz & Gold, Mr. Jacobs was Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel of Las Vegas Sands, a role he assumed in September 2016. At Las Vegas Sands, Mr. Jacobs was responsible for the leadership and oversite of the company’s legal affairs around the world.. Prior to joining Las Vegas Sands, he was general counsel at Time Inc., during a rapid transformation of the storied media company. Before that, he served 6 of his 15 years at News Corporation as senior executive vice president and group general counsel, handling business development, securities, governance, and compliance, and supervising 300 international lawyers. A trustee of the New-York Historical Society, Lon never tires of reading about Abraham Lincoln, who overcame a childhood of grinding poverty and through his love of reading became America’s greatest statesman. “Poverty is the hardest obstacle to overcome, and the only realistic way out is through education, which comes from growing up in a family that loves reading,” he says.

Todd Larsen

Board Treasurer
President, Nexis Solutions, LexisNexis

Todd got hooked on Literacy Partners the first time he heard a testimonial from a student who had benefited from the organization. Reading is a lifelong passion for Todd, currently a group president at LexisNexis in NY.   Previously, Todd was CEO of Blurb, a San Francisco-based technology company that enables people to self-publish books and magazines. Todd’s career began in the 1980’s, when he worked summer jobs for his local newspaper chain. From there he scaled the media world, becoming president of Dow Jones from 2010 to 2012, having grown the digital business of The Wall Street Journal from a near start-up into a $300-million engine for the company over 13 years. He later served as executive vice president and president of the news, entertainment  and sports titles at Time Inc. “The reward to an individual of being able to read, after a lifetime of struggle with limited reading abilities, is very powerful,” he says.

Cynthia McFadden

Senior Legal and Investigative Correspondent, NBC News

Cynthia McFadden is the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News where she reports on national security and a wide-range of other issues. She has been recognized with many of journalism’s most coveted awards including the Peabody, Dupont, Emmy, and Foreign Press Club Awards. Prior to NBC, she worked for 20 years at ABC, co-anchoring Nightline​ for ten years, and before that, as a co-anchor of Primetime. She has reported from Rwanda and Sierra Leone to Bosnia, El Salvador to China, Israel to South Africa, and Liberia to India. In addition to covering legal issues, her work focuses on human rights most particularly abuses faced by women and children. She has interviewed policy-makers and Presidents, celebrities and criminals. She holds a law degree from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College. A former member of the college’s governing board, Bowdoin recognized her with an honorary degree in 2013. In 2014 she received a Matrix Award as an outstanding woman in broadcasting. McFadden is a former co-chair of the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Sabastian V. Niles

President and Chief Legal Officer, Salesforce

Sabastian V. Niles is President and Chief Legal Officer at Salesforce. Previously, he was a Partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz where he advised boards and corporate executives on shareholder activism, takeover defense, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, relationships with institutional investors and activist hedge funds, overcoming short-termism in our capital markets, risk oversight, crisis preparedness, and cybersecurity. He advises worldwide and across industries and speaks frequently on matters of corporate strategy and policy. Sabastian received his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he co-founded the Harvard Association of Law and Business, and his B.S., B.A., and B.S. degrees in Finance, Economics and Decision & Information Sciences from the University of Maryland. Sabastian is passionate about the mission and potential of Literacy Partners to transform lives and the trajectories of families and communities.

Victoria Chu Pao

Victoria is a believer that literacy is key to unlocking opportunities for new generations of immigrants to our country. Growing up learning English in public schools in Queens, NY, Victoria became a passionate reader of books, magazines, and newspapers. She devoted her career to enabling education, journalism and information as a means to connect people and communities. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU Stern School of Business, Victoria brings her diverse experiences at the forefront of innovation in the transformation of digital information industries at S&P and McGraw-Hill with a tenure as President of S&P Global Platts. She is also an angel investor and mentor in startups led by diverse founders, board director, and passionate advocate for social justice and equity. Victoria looks forward to supporting Literacy Partners in providing parents the literacy and language tools they can use in creating a better future for their families.

Jordan Pavlin

Mark Subias

Managing Partner/Producer, SMUGGLER

Mark Subias is a Managing Partner/Producer at SMUGGLER . Previously, he was a talent and literary agent, and the head of the Theatre Department at United Talent Agency. Subias grew up in Orange County, CA before moving to New York in 1994; he was Director of Animazing Gallery in SoHo, and then worked in film production and producing theatre prior to his career as an agent. He assisted George Lane at William Morris Agency before becoming an agent at WMA and eventually started his eponymous management company SUBIAS, which he ran for nine years. In 2012 he joined UTA. His clients include multiple Pulitzer, Tony and Academy Award-winning writers, directors, actors and composers across theatre, television and film including; Suzan-Lori Parks, Annie Baker, David Cromer, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ivo van Hove, Adam Rapp, Denise Gough, Sam Gold, Pam MacKinnon, John Leguizamo, Danai Gurira, Susan Sarandon, Michael C. Hall, Peter Morgan, Elizabeth McGovern, Kevin Kline, Marco Ramirez, Mary-Louise Parker, Bryan Cranston, Dave Malloy, Lila Neugebauer, Simon McBurney, Lear deBessonet, Scott Burns, Patrick Marber, Laura Benanti, Todd Almond, Diane Lane, Rebecca Taichman, Sarah Ruhl, Itamar Moses, Bash Doran, Mortiz von Stuelpnagel, Thomas Ostermeier, Courtney Love, Jordan Harrison, Lucy Prebble, Jeremy Herrin, Cynthia Nixon, Will Eno, Steve Pasquale, Benedict Andrews, Helen McCrory and others. Subias lives in New York with his husband, Todd Almond.