The first-ever chief of curatorial affairs and public programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) starts work this month, thanks to a Mellon Foundation grant to help expand the museum’s global reach. Called a “major up-and-coming talent” and “game-changer” by MoAD executive director Monetta White, Lee hails from the Cleveland Art Museum, where she showcased works of emerging and midcareer Black artists and created programs to increase engagement by scholars and students. The self-described “pan–New Jerseyan” majored in art history at Rutgers University and is now a PhD candidate at Yale University in both art history and African American studies. In addition to connecting with the Bay Area’s “new and mature guard of Black artists and collectives, as well as curators and educators,” Lee tells the Gazette she looks forward to exploring San Francisco’s “incredible food and art scenes” and the outdoors, adding, “I’ll be adopting a dog to share my adventures.”
Jack Calhoun
The longtime consultant, who will succeed Keith Geeslin as board president of the San Francisco Opera at the end of the company’s centennial season in August, traces his interest in the art form to seeing Hansel and Gretel while growing up in Indiana. “As I got to know more, opera intrigued me, as it has so many elements — singing, sets, lighting, costumes, orchestra, dancers, etc. It seemed all-encompassing and magical,” Calhoun recalls to the Gazette. After studying music as a lyric baritone, he earned a bachelor’s degree in technology from Purdue University as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, and he eventually held the position of Banana Republic’s global president for eight years. A member of the Opera’s board of directors since 2008, Calhoun also serves as vice chair of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He lives in Pacific Heights with husband Trent Norris, a partner at the law firm Arnold & Porter.
Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD
The Stanford Medicine sleep researcher’s decades of study into the causes of narcolepsy have led to several breakthroughs over the years and recently a 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, a $3 million award to be shared with fellow researcher Masashi Yanagisawa, MD, PhD, of the University of Tsukuba in Japan. The world’s largest science awards program — founded by sponsors Sergey Brin, Priscilla Chan, MD, Mark Zuckerberg, Julia and Yuri Milner, and Anne Wojcicki — recognized Mignot and Yanagisawa for their joint discovery that narcolepsy is a neurodegenerative disease with autoimmune origins, leading to new treatments and potential applications for other diseases. A native of France, where he returns every summer, Mignot lives in Palo Alto with his wife, artist and bookbinder Servane Briand, and Watson, their narcoleptic Chihuahua. The Breakthrough Foundation also awarded two Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers prizes, a $50,000 award honoring early career achievements by women mathematicians, to Mignot’s Stanford colleagues Maggie Miller and Jinyoung Park, who earned their PhDs from Princeton and Rutgers universities, respectively.
Mimi Winsberg, MD
The chief medical officer and cofounder of mental health telemedicine company Brightside Health says that working as a staff psychiatrist at Facebook and using online dating sites helped spur her book Speaking in Thumbs: A Psychiatrist Decodes Your Relationship Texts So You Don’t Have To, a 2022 Doubleday imprint due in paperback early this year. “I found that even my tech-savvy patients at Facebook needed help with their texts and found myself on dating sites, and joked that I could make a psychiatric diagnosis in less than 20 texts,” Winsberg shares with the Gazette. “I thought, ‘There is a book in this.’ Texting is a new language that our brains have not fully caught up with.” Although the Stanford-trained psychiatrist and elite endurance athlete, who lives in Cole Valley, generally avoids making rules about texting, she gives ghosting a thumbs-down: “In general, people deserve a reply, even if that reply is: ‘I’d rather not communicate right now.’”
Bill Foley
The founder and CEO of Foley Family Wines can toast the new year at Wine Enthusiast’s Wine Star Awards at the Westin St. Francis San Francisco on January 30, where he’ll be honored with the magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award. A dozen years after founding title insurance company Fidelity National Financial in 1984, Foley began buying vineyards, first in Santa Barbara County and later across the globe. Among them are Sonoma County’s Sebastiani, Ferrari-Carano, Chateau St. Jean and Chalk Hill, where he and wife Carol maintain a residence, and Napa’s Silverado Vineyards, acquired from Disney family heir Chris Miller last July. The majority owner of the Vegas Golden Knights hockey team doesn’t plan to rest on his vintner laurels. “I’m really focused on quality, improving what we have, making it better,” Foley told Wine Enthusiast. “Because I like to be proud of what I’m involved in, and I am proud of our wine business, but we’re making it better every year.”
