ADVISORY BOARD
Comprised of uniquely gifted and deeply experienced professionals, our board collaborates amongst Arcata’s three pillars (Salon, Collegium, Atelier), as well as four functional areas: Strategy & Operations, Creative, Marketing, and Technology, to bring imagination, depth, and clarity to the ongoing execution of our mission—ensuring, thereby, that in everything we do, our enterprise remains agile, innovative, and profitable.
DR. MICHAEL PACANOWSKY
Michael (A.B. Harvard; Ph.D. Stanford) began his academic career at the University of Utah and the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he served as Department Chair. He left academia in 1996 to join W.L. Gore & Associates, makers of GORE-TEX® Fabrics, working primarily on projects related to organizational culture, leadership team development, and strategic change.
Michael returned to the academy in 2013, accepting the Gore-Giovale Chair in Business Innovation at Westminster College, to research high-performing organizational cultures generally and reflect on his experiences at Gore.
Michael published his insights in The Thriving Organization: The Deep Dynamics of High-Performing Organizational Cultures. He was the founding director of The Center for Innovative Cultures.
PAUL SCZUDLO
Paul is an international tax attorney for the global law firm Withers Bergman LLP. Before starting with Withers Bergman in 2016, Paul established his own law firm in 2010 after practicing for more than 29 years with Loeb & Loeb in Los Angeles. Paul earned his undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University and University of California, Berkeley and was chosen in his final year of law school to participate in an exchange program at Harvard Law School.
Recognized as a Super Lawyer since 2004 and as a Best Lawyer since 2006, Paul is active in various international and U.S. professional organizations, including the American Bar Association, where he was chair of its International Private Client Committee.
Paul regularly lectures and writes on international tax subjects and serves on a number of charitable boards, including the Finance Council of St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica. Paul is married, has two children, and was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska.
KRISTINE MEGRIKIAN
Kristine is CEO of Patterns World Inc., a Los Angeles-based fashion development firm that specializes in bringing conceptual fashion design to life.
Born in Armenia, Kristine grew up in the foreground of the LA fashion culture when Patterns World was first established by her grandmother, who emigrated from Armenia to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams beyond a communist system. Today Patterns World is involved with industry-leading celebrity clients such as Lady Gaga, Yeezy by Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Cindy Crawford, and Adele, as well as international clientele including Ugg Australia.
Kristine holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Art History from the University of California, Los Angeles.
DR. WOJTEK GOLONKA
Wojtek is a co-founder and director at DeReggio publishing house in Poland, specializing in the humanities. Previously he was a philosophy lecturer and vice-rector at the Institut Universitaire Saint Pie X College in Paris. He is the author of several books on G.K. Chesterton and has directed translations of his works from English to French and Polish. Wojtek’s points of interest and research focus on Christian philosophy and modern history.
He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Jagiellonian University, founded in 1364, the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest worldwide. The discovery of Chesterton in a bookstore in Paris became the genesis of his doctoral thesis: “The Path of G.K. Chesterton toward Thomistic Realism—a Philosophical Portrait of the Writer.”
Wojtek is fluent is several European languages and currently lives in his native city of Krakow with his wife and four children.
ALEXANDER MACRIS
Alex is a polymathic entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in interactive entertainment and transmedia development. He first rose to prominence in 2005, when he founded The Escapist, a videogame publication which he led to win six Webby Awards for best game website and a coveted spot in Time Magazine's Top 50 Websites list. After selling The Escapist to Defy Media in 2012, Alex became Defy's Senior Vice-President of the Emerging Brands, building a motley assortment of websites and YouTube channels into the largest and highest-earning division at Defy. In 2016 he was tragically exiled from the industry he helped build by his obstinate disdain for the prevailing progressive orthodoxy.
From this dark time, Alex emerged in mid-2017 as head of Autarch LLC, a transmedia entertainment publisher focused on creating fantasy and science-fiction books, comics, and games with deep worldbuilding and mythopoetic grandeur inspired by the glory and excellence of classical civilization. He also writes Contemplations on the Tree of Woe on Substack, where he explores philosophy, politics, and economics that challenges progressive paradigms with incisive analysis rooted in Western tradition. Alex’s recent book on the collapsing petrodollar system, Running on Empty, became an Amazon #1 bestseller when all of its predictions came true.
A graduate summa cum laude of Binghamton University and magna cum laude of Harvard Law School, Alex now resides in Durham, NC, with his wife Amy and their imperious dog, Maximus Magnus.
JOHN EMMET CLARKE
John is editor-in-chief of Cluny, a publishing house devoted to recovering and representing neglected and forgotten texts from the Catholic and Western traditions. In this role, he has directed the re-publication of nearly five hundred titles, written by more than one hundred and fifty different authors, whose ages span from the fifth century with Pope St. Gregory the Great to the twentieth century with Nobel Prize-winning novelist Sigrid Undset.
John is also author of a Substack newsletter, Lord of Indiscipline, where he writes on the good life and those things which make it so—God, country, family; literature, sport, music; good food and drink; and the debt all men pay; his writings have also appeared in The American Conservative and The Catholic Thing.
A graduate of Providence College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, John presently lives with his wife and children in a quiet New England town where they never have any adventures and never do anything unexpected.
“Next after great men come those who can recognize their worth.”
—Therese Brunsvik
