Board & Governance
Paul Brown, President, Eugene, OR
Paul Brown was born in Virginia and is a graduate of West Virginia University, where he earned a degree in journalism. In 1980, after a decade of award-winning newspaper reporting, he began a 25-year career as an investigator with the Colorado State Public Defender’s Office. In 1998, Paul was named Investigator of the Year for his defense of death penalty clients. He made the move to Oregon in 2005 as an investigator for the U.S. Public Defender’s Office in Eugene, retiring in 2015. In Colorado he lived on a small ranch outside Wetmore, raising llamas and operating a llama packing business. An avid outdoorsman, he was the founding president of the Southern Colorado Chapter of Trout Unlimited. Paul continues to enjoy cycling, cross-country skiing, kayaking and hiking. He currently volunteers at Centro Latino Americano in Eugene and the CLiF Project in Portland.
Carolyn Law, Vice President, Seattle, WA
Carolyn’s public art projects range widely from design team collaborations with designers and/or engineers coupled with extensive interface with agencies and community groups, to artworks integrated into a specific project area. Her award-winning projects involve a myriad of places – civic plazas, parks, and infrastructure (such as bridges, public transit, wastewater treatment and streetscapes). Her art planning efforts include conceptual and practical outlines for incorporating public art into a wide variety of sites and locations. Civic engagement with a focus on the public arena has also been a priority. Carolyn’s studio work has been shown regionally and nationally. Currently her focus is on drawings as a visual journal of her thinking, interests and research, and temporary sculptural installations in outdoor settings. Finally, she writes on the creative process and public art.
Jim Walls, Treasurer, Lakeview, OR
Jim retired from the Natural Resources Conservation Service after 33 years. He served as Executive Director for the Columbia Pacific Resource Conservation and Economic Development District for 15 years. From 2002- 2015, Jim served as Executive Director of Lake County Resources Initiative (www.lcri.org) working on the conservation and economic development of natural resources in Lake County. Jim facilitated the Lake County Renewable Energy Working Group in developing a renewable energy implementation plan to make Lake County a net exporter of renewable energy, offsetting 93% of fossil fuel emissions in the county. In 2012, Jim was a speaker at Oregon State University’s TED program on climate change. He has testified before both Congressional and Senate committees concerning renewable energy and climate change impacts on forests and rural areas. Jim has served on the Governor’s Renewable Energy Working Group, the Oregon Way advisory committee to the Governor and currently the Governor’s South Central Oregon Solutions Team.
Becky Evans, Secretary, Bayside, CA
Becky is a land-based artist. Her recent solo exhibits explore the unique bioregions in the Klamath Knot, the State of Jefferson, and the edge of the Great Basin. She exhibits her work regionally and nationally. She recently participated in the State of the State of Jefferson Conference at the University of Oregon, organized by the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon and the Department of Geography at Humboldt State University. Her artist residences have included the Morris Graves Foundation, (Loleta, California), PLAYA (Summer Lake, Oregon), and the Earthwatch Institute (Skagit River, Washington). She was a faculty member of the Art Department at the College of the Redwoods (Eureka, California) for 30 years. She has her home and studio near Humboldt Bay, California.
Charles Goodrich, Corvallis, OR
Charles is the author of three volumes of poems, A Scripture of Crows, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden, and Insects of South Corvallis, and a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building a house, The Practice of Home. Charles also coedited the volume, In the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helens. His poems and essays have appeared in Orion, Northwest Review, Willow Springs, The Sun, and Best Essays Northwest among many other publications, and his poems have been read a dozen times by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac.” To support his poetry writing habit, Charles worked for twenty-five years as a professional gardener – for a convent, a residential treatment facility for troubled teens, and for the historic Benton County Courthouse. He recently retired as Director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, at Oregon State University, a program that hosts writers’ residencies, literary readings, and symposia at the intersection of literature, environmental science, and ethics.
Attila Jurecska, Portland, OR
A few months ago, an energetic man would regularly come pedaling down Highway 31 on his road bike to attend PLAYAPresents. In learning more about Attila Jurecska, of his new-found love of Summer Lake, and of PLAYA’s residency program, it seemed a natural to invite him to consider a Board position. Attila is an R&D engineer at Mentor Graphics, a business of Siemens. He earned his first MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Budapest, Hungary and his second MS in Informatics in Milan, Italy. He conducted research at UC Berkeley and has worked internationally in R&D. Thanks to the recent purchase of a home in Summer Lake, he now splits his time between Oregon’s Outback and Portland. Among his many interests are astrophotography and hiking.
Lori Overgaard Noack, Oakland, CA and Portland, OR
Lori brings with her significant nonprofit and development experience, notably her seven years as the executive director of the Sunriver Music Festival. She currently serves on the Board of and helps produce “In A Landscape,” a concert series that takes pianist Hunter Noack, her son, and his grand piano to remote locations for free concerts. Noack’s previous professional positions include Executive Director of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, an international program for women in Afghanistan that includes both online and local writing workshops in seven Afghan provinces and Midsummer Mozart Festival in San Francisco.
Pepper Trail, Ashland, OR
Pepper is an ornithologist, conservationist, writer, and photographer. He began watching birds as a boy in upstate New York, and traces his incurable love of travel to a family trip to Mexico when he was twelve. Since then, Pepper has studied birds around the world, from the rain forests of Amazonia to the coasts of Antarctica. Pepper lives in Ashland, where he is the ornithologist at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory. He is involved in many regional environmental issues, especially the establishment and protection of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, and is a regular contributor to Jefferson Public Radio, the Jefferson Monthly and High Country News. His poetry has appeared in Windfall, Kyoto Journal, Borderlands, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. He is the author of two poetry collections, Flight Time and Cascade-Siskiyou, and the photoessay, Shifting Patterns: Meditations on the Meaning of Climate Change in Oregon’s Rogue Valley.
Becky Hatfield Hyde, Beatty, OR
Becky Hatfield Hyde ranches, writes and consults from Beatty, Paisley and Brothers, Oregon. She’s spent the past 20 years focused on the economic, ecologic and cultural health of the Klamath Basin’s rural land-based communities, working with Tribes, NGOs, elected officials and the agricultural community. She deeply loves her husband Taylor and their children Lizzie, Jack, Henry, Levi and Maggie. You’ll find her happiest when she’s with her family, working outside in our stunning landscape, watching 1A basketball in old wooden gyms, and sharing ideas with new and old friends across the rural/urban divide.
Jay Stratton Noller, Head of the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University in Corvallis, is both a soil scientist and visual artist. Noller and his research groups study Soil Science – Soil Geomorphology, Art Science, Industrial Hemp Agriculture, Sustainable Cemeteries, Archaeological Agriculture and Earthquake Geology. He has committed to furnishing supplies for a new dedicated science studio to be completed on the PLAYA campus, a major 2018 capital project.
Advisory Committee
- Liz Ahl, NH
- Renee Couture, OR
- Eloise Damrosch, OR
- Ann Focke, WA
- William Fox, NV
- Jack Herring, WA
- Dan Mayer, AZ
- Jane Otto, CA
- Robert Schrimer, NY
- Margot Voorhies Thompson, OR
- Catherine Woodward, NY
Governance Documents
As a charitable nonprofit corporation exempt under the IRS code 501(c)(3), our governance and financial documents are a matter of public record. As a public service, we post our most recent IRS 990 forms here. Other public documents are available upon request.
Articles of Incorporation, Playa Foundation (Filed under former name Playa, July 26, 2011)
Articles of Amendment, Playa Foundation (Adopted September 12, 2017; Filed October 2, 2017)
Bylaws, Playa Foundation (tbd)
Articles of Incorporation, PLAYA (Adopted October 25, 2017; Filed October 26, 2017)
Bylaws, PLAYA (tbd)