Board & Governance

Carolyn Law, Seattle, WA, President of PLAYA
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.

Pepper Trail, Ashland, OR, Vice President of PLAYA
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 rainforests of Amazonia to the coasts of Antarctica. He 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.

Jay Stratton Noller, Corvallis, OR, President of Playa Foundation
Jay is head of the Department of Crop and Soil Science at Oregon State University in Corvallis and is both a soil scientist and visual artist. He and his research groups study Soil Science – Soil Geomorphology, Art Science, Industrial Hemp Agriculture, Sustainable Cemeteries, Archaeological Agriculture, and Earthquake Geology. As President of Playa Foundation, he supports PLAYA programming through oversight of all operations & maintenance as well as capital programs on the PLAYA campus.

Craig Compiano, Summer Lake and Portland, OR, Treasurer
Craig Compiano is an expert business manager and entrepreneur with extensive executive management experience and a track record for developing successful businesses. He has decades of experience in business and systems development, operations, and finance. He currently serves on the Board of and helps produce “In A Landscape,” a concert series that takes pianist Hunter Noack and his grand piano to remote locations for free concerts. Craig has a BS in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California and an MBA Finance from UC Berkeley. He lives in Portland and Summer Lake, Oregon.

Becky Evans, Bayside, CA, Secretary
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
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 in R&D all over the world. A true desert lover, Attila lives part time in Summer Lake, Oregon, and part time in Portland. Among his many interests are astrophotography, hiking, sharing his expert cuisine with others, and appreciating fine wine.

Lori Noack, Summer Lake 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.