Gail K. Evenari
President and Executive Director
Gail Evenari started teaching in Oakland, California in 1975 and has worked in the field of education ever since. During her two-year tenure as Project Director of San Francisco’s Museums Affiliated with Public Schools, the program achieved national recognition for its successful collaboration between schools and museums and for the development of innovative curriculum materials. Spurred by her work developing Social Studies curriculum materials for textbook publishers, Evenari began her own business as a writer and documentary filmmaker.
Chevron Corporation hired Evenari to research, write and co-produce the educational video series, Spirit of the Land, including Alaska: The Yup‘ik Eskimos, Hawai‘i: Continuing Traditions and In the Wake of Our Ancestors. These films won several awards, including a Blue Ribbon, American Film Festival; CINÉ Golden Eagles; and an Award for Creative Excellence, American Industrial Film Festival. The printed educational materials have also won awards for content and design. The films have been shown on the Instructional Television Network and on public television stations since 1985.In 1999 Evenari completed Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey, an award-winning documentary film about the traditional arts of celestial navigation and voyaging in Polynesian. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Wayfinders aired on national PBS and has been broadcast internationally. Evenari also wrote and designed a curriculum on navigation and voyaging that is being used in schools and museums in Hawai‘i and California.
After the completion of Wayfinders, Evenari produced a Website and multi-disciplinary curriculum that examines heroism in twentieth century America (www.heroism.org), and she has worked as a writer on several PBS documentary films and related outreach, including The New Americans, A Doula Story and Hold Your Breath.
Most recently, she researched and wrote the proposals and treatments for The Calling, a PBS documentary series that will follow young Americans of diverse faiths, who are training to enter the clergy.
Currently, Evenari is launching Just Like Me, But Different, a groundbreaking multimedia project that teaches children about global cultures and environments and encourages them to become compassionate, informed and engaged citizens of the world. What distinguishes Just Like Me, But Different from other children’s projects with a global theme is the innovative integration of different media, the rich environmental content and the cross-cultural relationships forged through deeply personal stories.
gail evenari. executive director board of directors
