CACE Board Members

Tokjan Balderston, President and Founding Board Member
Tokjan Balderston is a specialist in art and museum methods who spent seventeen years with the Kasteev State Museum of art in Almaty, Kazakhstan; the last four as the Deputy director in charge of all artistic aspects of the institution. She had curated several art
exhibits in Kazakhstan, France, Belgium, China and US. She received
her master‚s degree in art history from All-Russia Academy of Art in
St. Petersburg. She is a founding board member of Central Asian
Cultural Exchange.

David Carlson
In 1996, David Carlson took a teaching position at the Yunnan Art
Institute in Kunming, China, staying for 5 months. There he came face to face with another point of view that differed from his own. It was during this time that he began to understand how he could intuitively channel his experience of another culture through the creative process. The lessons learned from that experience still resonate today as he has participated in artist exchanges with Central Asia, West and North Africa and Europe. He has had 13 solos exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows since 1988. His paintings are included in local, national and international collections, and he is currently represented by District Fine Arts in Washington, DC. Since 2000, David has shown his Digital Videos in venues from Senegal and Egypt to Washington, DC. Currently he is working with Ashraf Fouad on a new video project that will be premiered in Pretoria, South Africa next May. He has taught design, drawing and painting for 17 years at Marymount University and local art enrichment programs.

Thomas Balderston, Founding Board Member
Thomas Baldesrton is an international consultant who specializes in
financial and systems analysis in the former Soviet Union and Africa.
He is a founding member of the Central Asian Cultural Exchange. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Chicago.

Helga Thomson, Board Member
Helga Thomson was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and studied in
Argentina, Europe, and the US. She has exhibited in international
juried, group and solo shows. Her works are included in private and
public collections (such as the Library of Congress) in the United
States, Argentina, Europe and Central Asia. Helga has received national and regional awards in the United States. In 1994 she received a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia, doing work on the series "Torsos as Containers". Since 1993, Helga has been a founding member-mentor and Head Mentor since 1999, of the Corcoran Arts Mentorship Program (CAMP), a youth mentoring program of the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, DC. In 1999, CAMP was a national recipient of "Coming Up Taller" award presented by the National Endowment of the Arts and the President's Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In 1998, Helga was selected to participate in the "ArtSites 98" exhibition, WPA/CORCORAN, Washington, DC, "Promesas y Milagros" mixed media installation. She is a member of Maryland Printmakers, American Print Alliance, Washington Print Club, Rockville Arts Place (Maryland), The Print Club of Philadelphia, and Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran. In 2001 August Helga Thomson was invited to participate with the Academy of the Arts of Uzbekistan and
the Central Asian Cultural Exchange, USA, in the USA/Uzbekistan
Exchange Exhibition and Conference in Tashkent. Helga Thomson was
selected to show in the First Biennial of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, October
2001.

Jenny Freestone, Board Member
Jenny moved to the US from the UK in 1996 where she had majored in printmaking in her Fine Art degree. Since coming to the US, she has added lithography (at the Corcoran) and photogravure (at Pyramid Atlantic) to her chosen media of etching, drypoint, and monoprint Her membership at Washington Printmakers Gallery, followed by her Presidency there, enabled Jenny to make those much-needed contacts for a new artist in a new country. Her work produced since 1996 has been acquired by the Library of Congress and by Carnegie Mellon University, and is also in the collections of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Georgetown University and the Smithsonian Institution, among others. Since a cultural exchange trip to Uzbekistan in August 2001, and the subsequent events of 9/11, the content of Jenny's work is evolving from the personal and private to a wider political and social content. Jenny has taught printmaking at George Washington University.

Richard Dana, Board Member
Richard L. Dana is an artist, independent curator and arts
administrator based in Washington, DC. His work has been exhibited
extensively regionally, nationally and internationally. Mr. Dana has
had over 15 solo exhibitions and participated in over 60 group
exhibitions. Internationally Mr. Dana has exhibited in Brazil, Egypt,
Germany, Italy, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Russia, Senegal, Taiwan,
Uzbekistan and Vietnam. In Washington, DC, Mr. Dana has curated three exhibitions at: the World Bank; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; the Sumner School Museum; and the Arlington Arts Center; He has also curated exhibitions at the Art Center/South Florida (Miami, FLA), Juniata College (Huntingdon, PA), Virginia Beach Center for the Arts (Virginia Beach, VA) and the Westmoreland Arts Festival (Latrobe, PA). As an arts administrator Mr. Dana is currently on the Board of Directors of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Central Asian Cultural Exchange and a member of the Executive Committee of Art-O-Matic. Mr. Dana also regularly serves as a visual arts coordinator for an annual arts festival in Morocco.

Y.David Chung, Founding Board Member
Y. David Chung has been working periodically in Kazakhstan since 1996 when he was invited to exhibit his work at the Kasteev State Art Museum. He has collaborated with artists and musicians over the years. In 1998, Chung wrote and directed an experimental opera with musicians from the U.S. and Kazakhstan. Most recently, he has been working on a documentary film about the mass deportations of people to Kazakhstan with a special focus on the history of the Koreans in Kazakhstan. Y.David Chung is an artist known for his multimedia installations, video works, drawings, prints and collaborative performance works. He received the National Endowment for the ArtsFellowship in New Media, the Washington DC ,Mayor's Art Award, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Artist in Giverny Fellowship, the New York State Council on the Arts Residency and two Artslink Collaborative Projects Fellowships. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He is a founding board member of the Central Asian Cultural Exchange. Chung is Associate Professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.

Helen Faller, Board Member

Helen Faller is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in Central Eurasia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2003 and has been involved in cultural exchange with Central Asia since 2002, when she worked with the Kazak delegation to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She has also worked with CEC ArtsLink, the International Visitors Council of Philadelphia, and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. In 2006 Helen created Kyrgyz Cultural Performances – a series of educational workshops and concerts with Kyrgyz epic singer Rysbai Isakov and folk musician Akylbek Kasabolotov that was in residence at eight U.S. universities.

Helen is currently completing her first book manuscript, based on her research on Tatarstan’s sovereignty movement. In addition to her work on Central Eurasia, Helen works as Director of Development for Hotel Obligado Physical Theatre in Philadelphia.

For more information, you can reach Helen at [email protected]

Carl Burnett, former Board Member
Carl Burnett spent over 35 years in the oil and gas industry before
retiring in 1999. His last work assignment was responsibility for
Mobil Oil's activities in Kazakhstan. During their four years in
Kazakhstan he and his wife collected a significant number of art and
craft works from Kazakhstan. He and his wife have been active
collectors of art and craft for almost 40 years and in addition to a
significant number of pieces from Kazakhstan also have numerous pieces from Africa, North America and Europe. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering from the University of Southern
California.