STAFF

Jessica galbo | EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Jessica Galbo brings over 20 years of experience in mission-driven nonprofit leadership, arts programming, and community engagement. She joined Telluride Arts in 2025 after serving as Executive Director of the Telluride AIDS Benefit (TAB), where she led major initiatives including the organization’s Capital Campaign, Student HIV Awareness Project, and iconic Runway fashion productions.

jessica@telluridearts.org

  • Jessica’s deep belief in the power of the arts to inspire, connect, and transform has shaped her career. She is a trained choreographer and director, with a background that includes completing the American Ballet Theatre’s Teacher Training Intensive in New York City. Her commitment to community also includes serving as the former Director of Education Programs for Mountainfilm and as a current board member for Angel Baskets andTelluride Food Pantry.

    Jessica holds a BA from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studied Pre-Medical Sciences, Humanities, and Dance. Her leadership at Telluride Arts is rooted in a collaborative, forward-thinking vision for a creative future that celebrates local artists, inclusive access, and cultural vitality.

Olivia Pedersen | PROGrAMS + Operations MANAGER

Olivia Pedersen is a multidisciplinary creative operator, designer, and entrepreneur originally from Telluride. Over the past decade, she has worked across startups, global brands, and mission-driven organizations, helping shape creative and product experiences. Olivia spent her teens and early twenties creating surrealist paintings and murals while earning her undergraduate degree in Graphic Design from Portland State University. She later earned a Master’s degree in Sustainable Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she focused on systems thinking, creativity, and social impact. She is passionate about supporting local artists and helping Telluride Arts continue to grow as a vibrant home for creativity, expression, and community within our box canyon and beyond.

olivia@telluridearts.org

Melannie Tavano | Community ENGAGEMENT + Social Media

As a proud Mexican, Mel brings extensive experience in community engagement and inclusive communication, recognized for driving cultural transformation and strengthening community ties through strategic programs and empathetic leadership; with a passion for arts and culture, she bridges diverse voices to build meaningful connections that inspire lasting impact.

melannie@telluridearts.org

Evan Tueller | Marketing + Communications

Evan is the Founder and Managing Member of MC Works - a marketing firm based in southwest Colorado that specializes in nonprofits and small business ventures. Working as a Communicator since 2013, Evan’s professional experience ranges from local grassroots arts organizations to international humanitarian and sustainability initiatives. Evan is a Telluride local and a visual and mixed media artist, with a passion for creative collaboration, community engagement, and coffee chats at the local hubs.

etueller@mc-works.org

Tricia Soukup | Accountant

Tricia Soukup is the dedicated accountant for Telluride Arts and also serves in the same capacity for other nonprofit clients. A graduate of the College of Saint Elizabeth, Tricia brings strong financial expertise through her work with Last Dollar Accounting. Originally from New Jersey, she also has a background in textile design, which gives her a rare mix of creativity and precision. Tricia is deeply committed to the arts and to supporting financial oversight to passion-driven businesses and is an invaluable member of the Telluride Arts team’s success. Tricia loves hiking, running, biking, camping, cooking and hanging with her husband and two sons.

accounting@telluridearts.org

Jula Cieciuch | Programs + Gallery Intern

Born and raised in Telluride, Jula brings a passion for the arts and long-standing involvement in local arts organizations, including Palm Arts Dance, Telluride Dance Collective, and the Telluride AIDS Benefit. She is thrilled to serve as a Programming and Gallery Intern at Telluride Arts, supporting exhibitions, community programming, and partnerships. Jula graduated Summa Cum Laude from Telluride High School in 2025 and recently completed an intercultural gap year with Baret Scholars, traveling across seven regions around the world, including Brazil, France, Kenya, China, and more. Through this experience, she gained a global perspective on arts and culture, which she is now excited to apply to her local community while cultivating a town-wide appreciation for the arts. Jula will attend Colorado College in the Fall.

intern@telluridearts.org

BOARD of directors

Diana Farrell | Board chair

Diana Farrell is an independent director and trustee of various organizations, including the Urban Institute, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute for Applied and Practical Mathematics, a National Sciences Foundation Center at the University of California Los Angeles, and until recently, eBay.  She was the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the JPMorgan Chase Institute.

    • Previously, Diana was a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company, where she served on the Partner’s Evaluation committee, and was the founder and Global Head of the McKinsey Center for Government as well as the Global Head of the McKinsey Global Institute.  At various points in her McKinsey career, she was a leader in the Public Sector, the Financial Institutions Sector, and the Strategy practice. 

    • Additionally, Diana served in the White House for over two years as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council and Deputy Assistant to the President on Economic Policy. In that capacity she led the interagency process on behalf of the President on a broad range of initiatives, including: financial reform, which resulted in the Dodd Frank Act; housing finance policy; innovation and competition policy.

    • Diana was a member of the Auto Recovery Task Force overseeing the restructuring of the auto sector.

CHRIS HARDEN | VICE PRESIDENT

Chris Harden spent his entire 26-year career in energy commodities trading. During his 16 years in Philadelphia, Harden was active as a board member and volunteer for Play On Philly, a charitable organization promoting social change through music education. POP serves over 300 inner-city children in Philadelphia. In 2019 he moved to Telluride to pursue his passions for outdoor adventure and music composition/performance. As an active musician, Harden is passionate about helping to build and sustain music culture while serving the local community.

Penelope Gleason | Treasurer

A graduate of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Penelope has been an interactive electronic arts performance and installation artist, an arts facilitator and a supporter of the arts throughout her life.

While in Boston she was a collaborator in the avante guarde performance and electronic arts program Red Alert at the Boston Film and Video Foundation, assistant program director for Monday Night Screenings with Ricky Leacock at MIT Media Lab, and co-founding partner in the Eleventh Hour Gallery, a groundbreaking showcase of multidisciplinary arts and artists that highlighted the emerging punk and new Boston art scene of the late 70s and early 80s.

  • After move to New Mexico with then husband and landscape artist Paul Shapiro in 1981 she began a new chapter of creating and supporting the arts. At the emerging Center For Contemporary arts she collaborated with 19 artists of multiple disciplines for a performance installation work, Tickling the Tail of the Dragon, an exploration of the overlap of the ancient and present Native American symbolism with the development of the nuclear bomb at Los Alamos Labs. She met and became a protege of Woody and Stena Vasulka, the founders of The Kitchen in NYC. Through that collaboration she became director of Santa Fe’s Raul’s Center for the Arts, an alternative arts space featuring local artists’ traditional arts, electronic arts, dance and theater. She was Assistant Producer for Woody Vasulka’s seminal work The Art Of Memory. She worked with the Santa Fe Community Arts to facilitate installations and performances in alternative public spaces such as the abandoned Woolworths and Sears department stores.

    Penelope also worked into documentary film making. She co produced The WIPP Trail an investigation of the first major repository of nuclear waste in southern New Mexico along with multiple short video portraits of artists. For four years she was the Director of the Santa Fe Community Television Station and taught classes in video production, documentary film making and contemporary video art history at the College of Santa Fe, The American Indian Arts Institute and the Santa Fe Community College.

    In 1998 Penelope moved to Telluride where she immediately started classes at Ah Haa and got involved with the TCAH Stronghouse Gallery. She and her husband Bob Gleason grew The Bootdoctors stores into a highly successful business and active community contributor. 

    Penelope has been a Board Member of Telluride Arts on and off for 25 years. She recently rejoined to help enrich and fulfill our mission and to help guide our continued service to our community.u

    “I believe that the arts are essential for the existence of all. Arts and artists lift us up, remind us of essential meaning of life, bring ideas to light and keep us thinking in new ways that result in inspiring innovative solutions to problems, a shared human experience and joyful celebration of life.”

     “My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”

    ― Maya Angelou 

MICHELINE KLAGSBRUN | Secretary

Micheline is a visual artist whose multi-media work focuses on transformation and displacement. She is President and co-founder of CrossCurrents Foundation (CCF) which as part of its mission sponsors art to promote social justice. In addition to CCF, she serves on several boards, including the Phillips Collection (DC), Transformer (DC), and Telluride Arts (CO). Through the Corcoran Outreach program, she served for a number of years as a mentor for inner-city youth. In 2016, she and her husband found and fell in love with Telluride and Telluride Arts, and have been living here part-time ever since.

    • She has exhibited widely and is in private collections nationally as well as in Europe and the Middle East.

    • Born and raised in London, graduate of the University of Cambridge, she received a clinical doctorate in psychology (D.C.P.) from the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Upon moving to the USA she continued to work as a psychologist in the Center for Family Research at GWU Medical School.

    • For many years she also co-chaired the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film and edited its journal “Projections”. Her published writings have been largely in the field of film and psychoanalysis.

ASHLEY HAYWARD

For the past three decades Ashley Hayward has been dedicated to the arts through fine arts education and working with various museums and galleries. These endeavors and the relationships that developed eventually led her to the acquisition, with her husband, of the long-established Telluride Gallery of Fine Art.

Ashley is indebted to her father, James Hayward (contemporary artist and fine arts professor) who began taking her to museums as a toddler and showed her how to see the world through the lens of art.

    • At Telluride Gallery of Fine Art with fellow artists (emerging to established), they curated dream shows, brought in artists from all over the country, and partnered with local schools to create educational opportunities for students and our community.

    • They augmented these shows in a variety of ways with artist profile videos, films, interactive installations, onsite library and resource center, presentations and discussions.

    • They partnered with local festivals and events to increase visibility towards their collective goals and promoted their shows all over the country.

Jason Soules

Jason Soules is a founding member, Partner and Managing Director of EHS Partners with over 30 years of experience leading performance and strategic improvement projects for companies in the United States and abroad, across industries including banking, insurance, utilities, and consumer packaged goods. In addition to EHS Partners, Jason has recently started Bedrock Rico Development to build affordable housing in the Telluride, CO region.

    • For the past ten years, Jason and his family have lived in Telluride, CO. Jason is actively involved with numerous local Telluride non-profit organizations and is a Board Member of the historic Sheridan Opera House. Outside of work, Jason is an active triathlete, skier, and hiker.

    • Jason earned his BA in Government with a minor in Economics from Colby College.

TODD BROWN

Todd Brown has a Professional Engineering degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and a Masters in Business Administration (Finance) from Washington University in St. Louis. As a manufacturing executive, he worked for Fortune 50 companies in the US and Europe before moving to Telluride. He served on the Telluride Town Council and as Mayor Pro Tem for 8 years, is a professional ski instructor, and is active on several cultural and environmental non-profit boards in addition to having served on the Telluride Arts board since 2006.