Fall 2024 Lectures
LOCATION
Fall lectures will be held in-person at OLLI: 4801 Massachusetts Ave. NW, in Room A on the first floor. Lectures are on Fridays from 1:30-2:30 PM.
RESERVATIONS
Reservations are required to attend in-person lectures. Registration will open at 10:00 AM on the Friday prior to each in-person lecture. Registration is via an event on the OLLI website events calendar. The direct registration link will be included in the Friday newsletter the week prior to each lecture. Lectures are free and open to the public, but you must have an OLLI account to register. If you do not have one, you can create an account when going to register. Each registrant may reserve one seat. Your name must be on the list of registrants to enter the lecture and you must be in your seat five minutes before the lecture starts to guarantee your seat.
Lectures
Marvin Jones, Haiti and the Civil War
September 27
1:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Marvin Tupper Jones is a documentary photographer whose one-person shows have appeared at the Organization of American States, Howard University, California African American Museum, and the Roanoke-Chowan Community College.
Jones’ decades-long career expanded to other forms of documentary media through the founding of the Chowan Discovery Group (www.chowandiscovery.org). CDG documents, preserves, and presents the 400-plus year-old history of the land-owning tri-racial people of color of the Winton Triangle, an area of Hertford County, North Carolina. Jones is a native of Cofield, a village in the Winton Triangle.
CDG’s Winton Triangle digital collection now has over 90,000 photographs, documents, maps, and recordings. Jones’s Chowan Discovery work has yielded awards of excellence from the North Carolina Society of Historians, the African American Historical and Genealogical Society, the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage, and the Society of the First African Families of English America
Samantha Bello, Choosing Plays for a Theater Season
October 4
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Samantha Bello is the Senior Director of Learning for Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC. She has directed Will on the Hill 2020-2023 with a cast that includes members of Congress, created/adapted A Mini-Summer Night’s Dream and A Tiny Tempest, and directed staged readings in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences of Legacy of Light, Ada and the Engine, The Ruby Sunrise, A Number, Proof, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, Arcadia, R.U.R, and Miss Evers’ Boys. Regional directing work includes Arizona Theatre Company: Wit, Proof, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Moon for the Misbegotten, I Am My Own Wife, Tuesdays with Morrie, and The Lady with All the Answers; Kansas City Repertory Theatre: To Kill a Mockingbird; and Arizona Repertory Theatre: Three Sisters, Angels in America, Arcadia, Company, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. She has taught at Kentucky Wesleyan College, Brescia University, University of Missouri, Arizona State University, and University of Arizona. She received her MFA in acting/directing at the University of Missouri and is a member of SDC.
Linda de Marlor, Tax Tips for Seniors
October 11
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Linda de Marlor is President of Tax-Masters, Inc. Her firm has represented over 3,000 clients worldwide working in TV, radio, medicine, real estate, law, politics, and professional sports. The firm has 20 CPA’s, enrolled agents, career tax specialists, and certified financial planners.
Linda has been an annual on-air tax-expert for ABC, CBS & Sirius/XM Radio; a featured speaker for #1 rated podcast, Conscious Millionaire, on iTunes; has had a weekly radio show, “Linda’s Tax Tips and Listener Call In,” for 20 years; and is regularly quoted in various business and real estate publications nationwide.
Tax Masters specializes in real estate agents, brokers, investors, consultants, and business and medical professionals. The firm also provides full service financial planning, setting up and managing solo 401k or other retirement accounts, and IRS and state audit representation.
Dana Tai Soon Burgess, A Conversation with Dana Tai Soon Burgess
October 18
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Dana Tai Soon Burgess, a Korean American choreographer, has been referred to as “a national dance treasure” (Washington Post’s Sarah Kaufman). He has been a cultural ambassador for the US State Department for over two decades.
Burgess founded Dana Tai Soon Burgess Dance Company (DTSBDC.org) in 1992. It is the preeminent modern dance company in the DC region. In 1994 he received the Mayor’s Award for Outstanding Emerging Artist. His dance company was awarded the Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in 2005. He has completed two Fulbright Specialist Awards in dance and received the 2021 Selma Jeanne Cohen Fulbright Lecture Award. He was prominently featured in the Smithsonian exhibition “A Korean American Century” in 2003 as well as “Dancing the Dream,” the Smithsonian’s first exhibition on American dance. Burgess was named the Smithsonian’s first ever choreographer in residence in 2016. He is the author of Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly: A Memoir and editor of and contributor to Milestones: in Dance History. Burgess is the host of Slantpodcast.com which focuses on Asian American artist journeys.
Burgess’s book, Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly: A Memoir, will be available for purchase and signing immediately following the lecture. Both credit cards and cash will be accepted.
John Leshy, The Past and Future of America’s Federal Lands
November 1
1:30–2:30 PM
Online via Zoom
John Leshy is Professor Emeritus at the University of California College of the Law in San Francisco. Yale University Press published his comprehensive political history of America’s public lands, Our Common Ground, in 2022. Leshy was Solicitor (General Counsel) of the Interior Department throughout the Clinton Administration, and earlier served as special counsel to the Chair of the Natural Resources Committee of the US House of Representatives, a law professor at Arizona State University, Associate Solicitor of Interior for Energy and Resources in the Carter Administration, an attorney-advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and a litigator in the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division. He headed the Interior Department transition team for Clinton-Gore in 1992 and was co-lead for Obama-Biden in 2008. He has four times been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1969, after earning an AB at Harvard College. His many publications include a book on mining law and co-authoring casebooks on public land and resources law (now in its 8th edition) and water law (7th edition forthcoming 2025). 
Murry Sidlin, The Defiant Requiem
November 8
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Murry Sidlin is President and Artistic Director of The Defiant Requiem Foundation and creator of the concert-dramas Defiant Requiem: Verdi at Terezín and Hours of Freedom: The Story of the Terezín Composer, and the play The Verdi Verdict (Mass Appeal, 1943). He lectures extensively on the arts and humanities as practiced by the prisoners in the Theresienstadt (Terezín) Concentration Camp.
Mr. Sidlin has been a conductor or artistic director of the Baltimore Symphony, the National Symphony Orchestra, the New Haven and Long Beach (California) Symphonies, the Tulsa Philharmonic, the Connecticut Ballet, the Cascade Festival of Music in Bend, Oregon, and the San Diego Symphony. He led 18 consecutive New Year’s Eve Gala concerts at the Kennedy Center with the National Symphony Orchestra. He was Dean of the School of Music at Catholic University where he still serves as Professor of Conducting and Instrumental Music. For 33 years, he was resident artist/teacher and associate director of conducting studies at the Aspen Music Festival and School.
In 2011 he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins. For his dedication to the legacy of Terezín, he has received the medal of St. Agnes of Bohemia from the Archbishop of Prague and the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Medal of Valor.
Esther Safran Foer, The Capital Jewish Museum
November 15
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Esther Safran Foer is President of the Board of Directors of the Lillian and Albert Small Capital Jewish Museum. She was born in Poland to Louis and Ethel Safran, Holocaust survivors who met in 1945. She spent her early childhood in a displaced persons camp before moving with her family to the US in 1949. The family later settled in Washington, DC.
Safran Foer founded FM Strategic Communications in 2002. For 10 years she was the CEO of Sixth & I Synagogue, where she helped develop a nationally recognized model for young professional engagement within a historic synagogue and cultural center. She was named one of the Forward 50 Jewish leaders. In 2020 she published the post Holocaust-memoir I Want You to Know We’re Still Here, which has been translated into eight languages. She also worked as press secretary for presidential candidate George McGovern.
About the museum she says, “The Board of Directors and I can’t wait to welcome the local community and visitors from around the world to Washington’s first Jewish museum.”
Carla A. Hills, Government, Trade, and Policy: How Can We Learn from the Past
November 22
1:30–2:30 PM
In-Person at OLLI
Ambassador Carla A. Hills served as US Trade Representative from 1989 to 1993 and was a member of President George H.W. Bush’s Cabinet. She negotiated and concluded the North American Free Trade Agreement, led the US negotiations on the Uruguay Round of the World Trade Organization, and concluded many trade and investment agreements with countries worldwide.
Earlier, Ambassador Hills served as President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (the third woman to hold a Cabinet position). She also served as Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, of the US Department of Justice.
Before entering government, Amb. Hills co-founded and was a partner in what is now the Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP law firm. She also taught antitrust law at the UCLA Law School and co-authored the Antitrust Adviser, published by McGraw-Hill.
Amb. Hills is currently Co-Chair Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations; Chair Emeritus of the National Committee on US-China Relations and of the Inter-American Dialogue; member of the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Honorary Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics; and member of the Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission.
Anika Prather, Anna Julia Cooper, Washington Educator
December 6
1:30–2:30 PM
Online via Zoom
Dr. Anika T. Prather obtained her BA in elementary education from Howard University, followed by multiple graduate degrees in education from New York University and Howard University. She holds a master's in liberal arts from St. John’s College (Annapolis) and a PhD in English, Theatre, and Literacy Education from the University of Maryland (College Park). Her research centers on enhancing literacy among African American students through engagement with canonical literature. Recently, she self-published her book "Living in the Constellation of the Canon: The Lived Experiences of African American Students Reading Great Books Literature.
As the co-author of The Black Intellectual Tradition with Dr. Angel Parham, Anika has taught in Howard University's classics department as a full-time lecturer. Additionally, she previously served as the Director of High-Quality Curriculum and Instruction at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy until February 2024. Anika is highly sought after as an educational consultant and speaker, particularly regarding the relevance of classical studies to the Black community.
She is also the visionary behind The Living Water School, an accredited online Christian school grounded in Classical education and the Sudbury Model. Anika and her husband Damon reside in the DC area with their three children.
OLLI does not endorse any of the viewpoints expressed by the speakers in its series.
We thank the Lecture Committee and all those who suggested and contacted speakers: Ellen Babby, Joe Belden (Chair), Tamara Belden, Helen Blank, David Coffman, Edward Cohen, Martha Cutts, Dave Hensler, Jeanne Kent, Lynn Lewis, Mark Nadel, Irvin Nathan, and Diane Renfroe.