Bill O’Riordan President

Bill retired after a forty-three-year career in healthcare including thirty-one years as a senior executive with STERIS Corporation, a leading global provider of infection prevention products and services.  During his career with STERIS, Bill led and nurtured the growth of several global businesses with general management responsibility for sales, marketing, product development, manufacturing and services. During his career, STERIS grew from a small venture capitalized startup to a $5 billion global powerhouse.

A Boston native, Bill brings a love of the arts to his role as a HALO director,regularly enjoying years of opera, symphonic and other live performances in his adopted city of Cleveland Ohio. Bill was also a regular attendee of the Holland Park Opera while residing in London, UK.  Bill and his wife Barb are happily full-time residents of the Charleston area but spend considerable time with friends and family in both Ireland and the UK.

Scott Olsen Vice President

Scott retired as a Partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2018 after a long career in professional services. He and his wife Donna currently reside in the Charleston area and southern Vermont, where he volunteers on the Stratton Mountain Ski Patrol. Scott was “bitten by the opera bug” in an opera history course in college. More recently, he has been a regular attendee at the Metropolitan Opera – while his favorite composer remains Giuseppe Verdi, he is also interested in new, original pieces which keep this 400 year old art form fresh. Scott is passionate about HALO’s mission of making quality opera and musical theater accessible to all. He is also active in other Charleston area non-profits as a partner in Social Venture Partners Charleston.

Jay Millard Secretary

Jay Millard has worked professionally in television production since he was eighteen years old. Starting out at an educational television station in Hartford, CT and then moving to New York City in 1975, Jay worked on his first nationally televised commercial network program The Edge of Night on ABC, for which he won his first Emmy Award along with the crew for Technical Excellence. Since then, Jay has won three additional Emmy Awards, as well as a Directors Guild of America and a Peabody Award for shows to which he has contributed. Since 1979, Jay has had the Metropolitan Opera as a client, working on live and taped performance broadcasts as a Cameraman and as an Associate Director.

Realizing the joy that opera and classical music has given to Jay, he was honored to be asked to be on the Board of Directors for HALO in 2021. He would like to bring this musical genre to as many people in the Lowcountry as possible.

Cynthia Lawton Board Member

Cynthia is a B2B marketing and communications consultant with 25+ years leading and executing effective strategies for products and services in multi-billion-dollar business units, medium-sized businesses and startups in the technology sector. She spent 15 years of her career in France, working with international companies such as IBM as well as French- and UK-based startups, and the last eight years in Charleston working remotely with clients in the technology and recruitment process outsourcing industries.

Her education and career have allowed her to live in leading cultural centers such as New Orleans, Madrid, New York, Paris, and Normandy, where she regularly attended opera, musicals and live theatre productions. She and her husband Stephen are raising their teenage son Perry in Mt. Pleasant, along with their two French basset hounds, Louis and Albert.

Cynthia received an undergraduate degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and a master’s degree from NYU in Madrid. She and her family are dual French American citizens.

 

For more information about board membership, please email info@holycityarts.org.

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