BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The Board of the AFVM consists of artists and academics, lawyers and entrepreneurs. Dedicated to building the relationship between Vienna and Chicago, these individuals are eager to promote Viennese culture at home and abroad.

Susan Aurinko

Photographer & Curator

Susan Aurinko, a photographer, writer, and curator, has shown her work in France, Italy, Austria, and India, as well as in the US. Four of her photographs are included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection. In addition, her work is in the permanent collections of Loyola University Museum of Art and The Union League Club of Chicago, and many of her images hang in private collections in France, Italy, India, the UK, Monaco and across the US. She has led workshops for photographers and artists in the US, Canada and India, and is represented by Kriti Gallery in India and Hilton Asmus Contemporary in the US.

As a curator, Aurinko has created over 230 exhibitions, both at FLATFILEgalleries, the gallery she founded and directed for 9 years, and in a variety of other galleries and venues including IIT, and exhibitions for both the Japanese and Danish governments. Aurinko was the Chair of the Exhibition Committee at the Union League Club of Chicago for 12 years where she curated the ULCC’s rotating exhibitions. In addition to being on the Board of The American Friends of the Wien Museum, Aurinko is on Boards of Directors of FreshLens Chicago. and on the Advisory Board of Filter Photo Festival and the Advisory Committee of the International Photography Awards (Lucie Awards) and has been an IPA and Px3 Juror for many years. Aurinko is also a reviewer and contributing writer for Newcity Magazine, and is working on a photographic novel about Vienna.

John Boyer

Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of History, Dean of the College, University of Chicago

The longest serving Dean in the history of the University of Chicago, John Boyer has spent his academic career at the University. Under Mr. Boyer’s leadership the College at the University has become one of the finest undergraduate institutions in the country. In addition to leading the college, Mr. Boyer is a leading scholar of modern Europe especially on the states, the peoples, and the societies of Central Europe since 1700. His special teaching interests are German history from 1740 to 1918; the history of the Hapsburg Empire between 1648 and 1918, and the history of Austria from 1918 to the present; religion and politics in modern European history; and the history of European universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each fall he accompanies leads groups of students to Vienna for a month long trip that explores the history of the region. Wien Museum Director Matti Bunzl was one of his students.

Keith Crow

Partner, Kirkland and Ellis, LLP

Keith S. Crow is a partner based in the Kirkland and Ellis’ Chicago office. He represents clients in a wide range of U.S. and cross-border corporate transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, joint ventures and spin-offs. In addition to transactional matters, he counsels public companies on corporate governance, public disclosure and other issues. He has significant experience with companies in distress situations and bankruptcy. He graduated from Yale University in 1983 and studied law at the University of Chicago.

Keith has been a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School for a number of years, where he teaches a course on business planning. He is also on the board of the American Friends of Versailles, lending his international cultural experience to the AFVM.

Willard Fraumann

Chairman of Counsel, Kirkland and Ellis, LLP

Mr. Fraumann graduated from the University of Michigan in 1970 and from Harvard Law School in 1973. He is a senior partner with Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago specializing in corporate, mergers and acquisitions and securities law. He joined Kirkland in 1973, spent three years on active duty as a Lieutenant U.S.N.R. (1974-1977), and rejoined Kirkland. His other activities include Chair of the Chicago Humanities Festival, Trustee of the United Stated Rugby Football Foundation, and member of the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities’ Board of Visitors since 1999.

Esther Grimm

Executive Director, 3Arts

Esther’s career-long work in the arts spans museum education, arts education, and philanthropy. Since 2002, she has served as the Executive Director of 3Arts, a social justice and arts organization that advocates for women-identified artists, artists of color, and D/deaf and disabled artists working in the performing, teaching, and visual arts in Chicago.

Prior to joining 3Arts, she was the Associate Director of Marwen, a nonprofit visual arts organization that provides out-of-school art instruction, college planning, and career development programs to Chicago youth in grades 6-12. Before Marwen, she served as the Assistant Director of Museum Education at The Art Institute of Chicago and worked in museum education at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

In 2020, Esther was appointed to Mayor Lightfoot’s Cultural Advisory Council, accepted into National Arts Strategies’ Leadership Coaching Training Program, and presented with the Diversity Award on behalf of 3Arts from the College Art Association. In 2017, she received the Kathryn V. Lamkey Spirit of Diversity Award from the Equal Employment Opportunity Committee of Actors’ Equity Association. She also received the Wren Award in honor of women in theater from Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, and the Women Who Make a Difference Award from Lakeside Bank.

Esther is the immediate past Chair of the Alliance of Artists Communities, a member of Dance/USA’s disability affinity group, and Co-Chair of the American Friends of the Vienna Museum Board of Directors. She is also a flute player and a writer/editor.

Irmi Maunu-Kocian

Program Coordinator and Deputy Director, Goethe-Institut

Irmi Maunu-Kocian was born in Vienna. While still at university in the mid-1980s, Irmi Maunu-Kocian moved to the United States, where she began working for the Goethe-Institut, a non-profit German cultural association that promotes the study of the German language abroad while encouraging cross-cultural exchange. After initial positions as program coordinator in San Francisco and Director of Administration in Los Angeles, she has now been in Chicago for almost four years as Program Coordinator. Ms. Maunu-Kocian is passionate about arts, culture and the humanities and excited to spread Viennese culture in the United States.

Sara Schastok

Civic Leader

Sara Schastok retired in 2015 as President and CEO of the Evanston Community Foundation where she led the organization through fifteen years of dramatic growth in assets, grant-making capacity, and community leadership. She first came to foundation work after institutional advancement and fund development roles at Northwestern University, The Rotary Foundation of Rotary International, and the University of Chicago. Originally an art historian, Sara graduated from Cornell University and earned her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1980. Her research focused on 6th century art in western India and the transition of mother goddesses into new roles within the cluster of deities centered on the Hindu god, Shiva. As visiting assistant professor of art history at School of the Art Institute, Amherst College, and then at University of California Berkeley, she taught courses in Chinese and Japanese art as well as Indian art. She has come into a relationship with Vienna through family members of her German husband who live in Austria. She enjoys exploring Vienna’s role in the development of modern architecture and was invited there to contribute a short article for an Iranian architecture journal on building facades and landscape in the Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian community where she grew up. Since retiring, Sara occasionally consults with Evanston nonprofits in fundraising and organizational development, and is most a delighted to be a potter once again after a long absence from making art.

Anna Souchuk

Associate Professor of German, DePaul University

Dr. Anna Souchuk is both Associate Professor of German and German Program Director in DePaul's Department of Modern Languages. She received her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University in 2008, with a dissertation on constructions of place in the novels of Elfriede Jelinek, Josef Haslinger, and Robert Menasse. Since then, her research has concentrated largely on the collected works of Josef Haslinger and his depictions of families in relation to Austrian Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (coming to terms with the past), though Dr. Souchuk has also written on other Austrian writers and artists, such as Linda Stift and the filmmaker Markus Schleinzer. She regularly brings DePaul students to Vienna to experience Austrian culture and contributions to the humanities.

Mechtild Widrich

Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Mechtild Widrich received her MagPhil from the University of Vienna and her PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Architecture Department. She has been a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2015 and was appointed Guest Professor at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, in spring 2022.

Her areas of expertise are art in public space and participatory practices in architecture, and she has written extensively on the Viennese Actionists and VALIE EXPORT. She is the author of Performative Monuments (2014) and Monumental Cares (22) and translator (with Andrei Pop) of Karl Rosenkranz's Ästhetik des Häßlichen / Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853/2015).

Thomas Zoells

Founder PianoForte

Thomas Zoells is the owner of PianoForte Chicago, Inc., Chicago's premier downtown piano destination. Mr. Zoells was born and raised in Switzerland and in Vienna, Austria.

He has worked for Ingpen & Williams in London and Agence Caecilia in Geneva, where he helped promote Jessye Norman, Alicia de Larrocha and Alfred Brendel, among many others. He had a 20 year career in banking along the way and likes to keep active as an amateur pianist.

Mr. Zoells founded PianoForte Chicago in 2004 and PianoForte Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization, in 2005. Since then his mission of promoting piano culture in Chicagoland has evolved to where he was able to build PianoForte Studios in the South Loop, which contains a showroom, practice rooms and a state-of-the-art performance and recording facility with 100 seats.

- board members not pictured Brian Boonstra -

OUR STAFF

DIRECTOR OF THE WIEN MUSEUM

Matti Bunzl

The AFVM was founded in 2016 when Viennese born, American-educated Matti Bunzl became the Wien Museum’s Director. Comprised of a group of museums, archaeological excavations and the residences of some of the world’s most revered composers, the Vienna Museum is dedicated to collecting, displaying, and conserving Viennese art and artifacts.

Prior to his appointment as the Wien Musem Director, Mr. Bunzl was a faculty member at the University of Illinois where he taught anthropology, Germanic languages and literatures, history, and Jewish culture and society. He also served as Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival from 2010 to 2015, where he oversaw the development of nearly one thousand programs — from insightful and inspirational talks and conversations to lectures and panel discussions with writers, musicians, philosophers, artists, professors, cultural icons, policy makers, politicians and many more. Highlights include programs that featured opera star Jessye Norman, artist Marina Abramovic, comedian Dick Gregory, composer Stephen Sondheim, playwright and actor Sam Shepard, and pop culture sensations James Franco and Lena Dunham.

Realizing that an opportunity exists to bring the Wien Museum and its broad mission to Americans, Mr. Bunzl spearheaded the founding of the American Friends of the Vienna Museum, a support group designed to raise public awareness of and financial support for the museum’s vast collections, was born.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Alice DuBose

In her more than twenty-five years as a development professional, Alice DuBose has served some of our country's most respected institutions at ever-increasing levels of responsibility. She has served as the Vice President of Development and Interim President of the Children's Memorial Hospital Foundation, Vice President of Development for The Art Institute of Chicago, and most recently the Vice President of Development for the Chicago Zoological Society/Brookfield Zoo.

Her experience is wide and deep. She has vast experience in all aspects of annual giving, membership, major and special gifts, corporate and foundation support, staff management, capital campaign fundraising efforts, strategic planning, and board development.

Alice earned her BA from the University of Texas. She is also a 3Arts board member.