Board of Directors
Mary Folberg
Board Member
Recognized for her belief in the importance of arts education and her dedication to young people, Mary Folberg is the recipient of the Kennedy Center Award for Excellence in Arts Education 1981, 1988, and 1989, and the Metropolitan Arts Commission Award in 1982. She has been featured in several publications including Images of Oregon Women, Lears magazine and Portland Monthly. She holds degrees in Literature and Dance and has taught in California public schools and Portland public schools. She is founder and long time director of the Jefferson High School Dance Department. She also created the school's company of dancers, The Jefferson Dancers, and was its director for 17 years. In 1993 she created the Northwest Academy, designed to educate the area's most creative and intellectual young people. It is now a thriving downtown middle and high school educating over 300 students in rigorous arts and academic programs.
Aleksandar Jokic
Board Chair
Aleksandar Jokic is a Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. He served as the founding Director of the Center for Philosophical Education in Santa Barbara, and is co-founder of the International Law and Ethics Conference Series (ILECS). His main research interests are in philosophy of time, applied ethics, and political philosophy, particularly the ethics of international affairs. He was a fellow of The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as a recipient of a grant in the Program on Global Security and Sustainability for 1999-2002.
Aleksandar Jokic attended French immersion elementary school (Slobodan Princip Seljo) and French immersion high school (VIII Belgrade Gymnasium) in Belgrade, Yugoslavia 1967-79, before entering Belgrade University to study Philosophy. He graduated in 1984, and received a Ralph Church stipend to attend the graduate program in philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in 1991. Aleksandar’s experience with French education and curriculum in the entire pre-higher education period in a non-Francophone country gives him both the appreciation of what this learning environment can offer to young learners and a commitment to helping ILA grow as an institution that can successfully offer such a program. He is also the stepfather of a francophone child and lives in an often trilingual environment.
Jennifer Pryal
Board Member
Jennifer has two beautiful children that attend ILA, with one who graduated last year! Jennifer just had a new baby boy, named Orion.Jennifer is very excited to be a part of ILA and looks forward to helping the school grow and be as wonderful for others as it has been for her children. Jennifer is a Midwife with a practice in Portland called Portland Natural Childbirth. She started her career with a degree in Psychology from DePaul University and then became a nurse. She has worked in the private sector as a mental health provider, the public sector as a mental health provider and a nurse and has also helped start and work with non-profits as a midwife.
Don Wayne
Board Member
Don Wayne is a retired professor who served as Provost of Revelle College at the University of California San Diego, and prior to that as Chair of the UCSD Literature Department. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Library. He has a background of teaching in a variety of higher educational environments, including an academic enrichment program for students from underserved K-12 schools (the SEEK Program, Herbert Lehman College CUNY), an experimental college for high achieving students (Bensalem, Fordham University), an undergraduate program in Comparative Literature at Ohio State University, and 38 years of teaching undergraduate and graduate courses at UC San Diego.
Don comes from a family of five generations of K-12 teachers and school administrators. The current adult generation includes three teachers in California: one of his sons is a public middle school teacher; one daughter-in-law is a public middle school principal, another daughter-in-law teaches in a private school that has an educational philosophy very similar to that of ILA.
Don was born in New York City where he attended public primary and secondary schools. He did undergraduate work at Queens College and Cal State Los Angeles. He has a PhD in Literature at UC San Diego (1975). His graduate work included a year of study in France, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1971-1972), where he studied with Roland Barthes and Louis Marin.
Derek Malsam
Board Member
Derek Malsam is a CPA and the Chief Financial Officer of Superior Tire Service. He has been with Superior since 2011, responsible for all aspects of finance, accounting, human resources and information technology. Before relocating to Portland, he worked in Public Accounting for KPMG Seattle and HKP Seattle. Derek enjoys being involved in the community and is excited to serve on the board at ILA. He is a graduate from the University of Washington with an Accounting and Finance degree. In his free time, Derek enjoys golfing and spending time with his wife and daughter who attends ILA.
Mike Schafir
Board Member
Mike Schafir has been associated with ILA for over seven years. He is the proud father of his twin girls, Abby and Zoey. Mike has over 25 years of experience in high-tech engineering and marketing working for both small startup and large companies including Netscaler, Inc., Resonate, Inc., Axil Computer and Sun Microsystems. He has a Bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from the University of Chicago. In addition to his board activities, Mike helps ILA maintain it’s website, technology and fundraising efforts.