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Staff and Board

Staff

We're a motley crew, we admit, and we're spread out across the country, but we're dedicated to Christian classical education and work hard to see it flourish. Don't hesitate to let us know if there's any way we can help you do the same.

Andrew
 Kern

President & CEO
Andrew Kern

Andrew Kern

At the moment of writing, Andrew Kern has seven grand-children. More trivially, having founded the CiRCE Institute after co-authoring Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America (with Dr. Gene Edward Veith), he has been compelled to serve as its president. Andrew also bears primary culpability for The Lost Tools of Writing, a classical rhetoric and writing resource.  Since establishing CiRCE to serve classical educators through research and consulting while developing and providing integrated resources, Andrew has trained and apprenticed innumerable home and school teachers, heads of school, and school boards. He has also defined, defended, practiced, and supported classical education at many conferences, conventions, and book retreats. Andrew helped start Providence Academy in Green Bay, WI in 1993, Foundations Academy (now Ambrose School) in Boise, ID in 1996, The Great Ideas Academy in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2001, and Regents School of the Carolinas in 2006, and the CiRCE Apprenticeship around the same time. He and his wife, Karen, live in North Carolina, and their five more or less classically educated and more or less home educated children and ever more grandchildren live in various places, ranging from Uganda to Georgia, depending on when you ask.

Bio & Contact

Dr. Matthew
 Bianco

COO
Matthew Bianco

Dr. Matthew Bianco

Dr. Matthew Bianco is the Chief Operations Officer for the CiRCE Institute, where he also serves as a head mentor in the CiRCE apprenticeship program. A homeschooling father of three, he has graduated all three of his children, the eldest of whom graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis, MD. His second graduated from Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, NC, where his youngest still attends their great books honors college. He is married to his altogether lovely high school sweetheart, Patricia. Dr. Matt Bianco has a PhD in Humanities from Faulkner University's Great Books Honors College. He is the author of Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships.

Bio & Contact

Alex
 Kern

Vice President of Operations and Finance
Alex Kern

Alex Kern

Alex Kern is the VP of Operations and Finance for the Circe Institute. She obtained a B.A. in Theology from Belmont Abbey College, has worked for CiRCE since 2014, and is a CIRCE certified master teacher. Though she hails from Australia, Alex now lives in Concord, NC where she enjoys knitting, martial arts, and rock climbing, but misses great beaches, ethnic food, and public transport.

Bio & Contact

Andrea
 Lipinski

Vice President of Training Development
Andrea Lipinski

Andrea Lipinski

Andrea Lipinski is the vice president of training for the CiRCE Institute, where she also serves as a head mentor in their teacher training program, the Rocky Mountain Apprenticeship. She trains teachers and school leaders in the art of teaching through mimetic and socratic forms, which are patterned on the foundation of Christ as the model for teaching. She has taught courses in the humanities and writing. She has presented talks from Charleston to Anchorage at conferences and workshops for SCL, CiRCE, Gutenberg College, Belmont Abbey College, and Great Homeschool Conventions. She is committed to a normative and dialectical mode of inquiry. This June she will complete a master of arts in leadership, theology, and society from Regent College. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she enjoys growing fruit, backpacking the mountains, and sailing the Salish Sea. She is a co-author of A CiRCE Guide to Reading.

Bio & Contact

Alec
 Bianco

Director of Marketing
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Alec Bianco

Alec Bianco is the Director of Marketing for the CiRCE Institute. He received his Bachelor’s from St. John’s College, MD, where he studied the Great Books. He has a Master’s in Theological Studies, is happily married, and considers mathematics and music a significant part of a good education.

Bio & Contact

Katerina
 Hamilton

Director of Resource Development
Katerina Kern

Katerina Hamilton

Katerina Hamilton has sought to make Classical Education accessible globally through teaching, consulting, writing, and speaking for the last fifteen years. More recently, she has become a wife and mother, and looks forward to teaching her own children. She studied Fine Art, Art History, and Classics at UNC-Charlotte and the Liberal Arts at Oxford University, where she earned a Masters in Literature and the Arts. She now works as a consultant, speaker, and the director of resources for the CiRCE Institute. She particularly enjoys researching Medieval notions of beauty and memory, the Seven Liberal Arts, cosmology, and Mariology and believes poetry can save the world and the Oxford comma is a non-negotiable.

Bio & Contact

Patricia
 Bianco

Director of Online Training
Patty Bianco

Patty Bianco

Patty Bianco is the Online Training Manager for the CiRCE Institute. She is a homeschooling mother of three, well, was as all three of her children have graduated and gone off to college. She now helps others educate their children and students. She graduated from Buck Holler's Master Teacher Apprenticeship group through CiRCE. She is married to Matt Bianco. Her favorite book is Pride and Prejudice and she prefers the BBC production of it, even though her husband prefers the Keira Knightley version (she forgives him for that). She prefers tea to coffee (though she enjoys a good latte).

Bio & Contact

Matt
 Kern

Director of Events and Sales
Matt Kern

Matthew Kern

Matthew Kern is the Director of events, and the customer service and sales coordinator.  If you are wondering why he is not, or ever was, a CiRCE Apprentice (like most of us at CiRCE) it is because he also works as a mental health therapist and runs his own private practice in his spare time. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a BA in History and MA in Clinical Mental Health. He lives in Concord, NC with his wife, Renee, and three daughters, Selah, Zuriah, and Nile. 

Bio & Contact

Buck
 Holler

Director of Consulting
Buck Holler

Buck Holler

Buck Holler is a former horse trainer and rodeo cowboy from Red Bluff, CA. After receiving more injuries than winnings he retired from the rodeo circuit to study theology and languages at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. Leaving the beautiful New England campus he jumped back into the arena of secondary education as a teacher. Buck first joined The CiRCE Institute as an apprentice in 2007. In 2009, he moved to NC with his wife and three daughters, teaching, farming, and raising animals. He leads the Appalachian Apprenticeship with The CiRCE Institute as a head mentor, and, mirabile dictu, leads CiRCE's first Latin Apprenticeship aimed to promote and support the study of Latin in Latin. He is also the Director of Consulting for the CiRCE Institute.

Bio & Contact

Graeme
 Pitman

Creative Director
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Graeme Pitman

Graeme is always thinking about the look and feel of our advertising and products. He's our Captain of Aesthetics, if you will. A photographer by training (Rocky Mountain School of Photography), Graeme loves the books of CS Lewis, Dostoevsky, and Wallace Stegner; would swim eight hours a day if he could; and pulls for his woebegone Toronto Maple Leafs. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and three children.

Bio & Contact

Camille
 Hunt

Program Specialist for Training and Resource Development
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Camille Hunt

Camille Hunt is the mother of six grown children and grandmother of eight. She works for the CiRCE Institute and loves The Lost Tools of Writing, teaching all the levels in online classes, intensives, webinars, workshops, and YouTube videos in addition to her work in curriculum development. Camille has also taught Humane Letters, logic, economics, and government.  She enjoys spending time on her children, travel, reading, music, conversations that deepen understanding, and writing notes to herself on little pieces of paper. 

Bio & Contact

Karen
 Kern

Program Specialist for Training and Resource Development
Karen Kern

Karen Kern

With years of experience as a third-grade teacher, Head of Grammar School, homeschooling mother of five, and school board member, Karen Kern has much to offer as a speaker and CiRCE consultant.  Mrs. Kern has particular expertise in classroom practice, grammar school faculty development, and the moral imagination.  She lives in Concord, North Carolina with her husband, Andrew, surrounded as often as possible by their children and grandchildren. 

Bio & Contact

Andrew
 Bianco

Webmaster & Customer Service Representative
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Andrew Bianco

Andrew Bianco is the Webmaster & Customer Service Representative for the CiRCE Institute. He graduated in 2020 from Belmont Abbey College with a BA in History and a minor in Leadership. He also graduated from a Coding Bootcamp from UNCC in 2021. He is rediscovering his love of reading by slowly making his way into the Cosmere written by Brandon Sanderson.

Bio & Contact

Board of Directors​

Martin Cothran

Andrew Pudewa

Joe Calkins

Tyson Rallens

Board Chair

Nena Harris

Doug Reynolds

Amy Liu

FORMA contemplates ancient ideas for contemporary people. We are a community of classical educators and thinkers who seek to better understand the classical tradition and enact it in a contemporary context. 

We are now inviting submissions in the following areas: book reviews, papers, poetry, and opinion pieces.

Our upcoming winter edition will explore the topic of “What is History“. Submissions should relate, either directly or indirectly, to this theme; the author may determine his or her own interpretation and use of the theme.

Please submit your article and a short bio to formamag@circeinstitute.org. Please specify whether you are submitting to the FORMA Symposium (which automatically counts as submission to the Journal) or just the FORMA Journal. Submissions are due by October 31st. By submitting, you are agreeing to allow CiRCE exclusive publication rights to accepted works. Authors maintain the copyright to their own work.

Editor-in-Chief
Katerina Kern
katerina@circeinstitute.org

FORMA contemplates ancient ideas for contemporary people. We are a community of classical educators and thinkers who seek to better understand the Great Books and their influence on contemporary literature and the arts.

The FORMA Review, now open for submissions, seeks to shed light on classic texts. Unlike most journals, we review not only the newest books but the most influential books. Today, many of the Great Books have been sidelined, forgotten, or passed over for more “relevant” texts. We hope to return the classic works of the past to the forefront by sharing new reviews of old books.

We also believe excellence and beauty incite imitation, so we look for the influence of the Classics on modern texts and invite reviews of contemporary works that note this influence on both form and content.

While the content of these book reviews may seem unexpected, the form does not; submitted book reviews should follow the standard form of the book review: summarizing the existing conversation on the topic, noting how the book enters into that conversation, analyzing the content, and assessing the success of the author (summary should only be done to the extent that it enables these four). Submissions should be between 1,000-2,000 words.

Please submit your review and a short bio to formamag@circeinstitute.org. There is no deadline for submission. By submitting, you are agreeing to allow CiRCE exclusive publication rights to accepted works. Authors maintain the copyright to their own work.

Editor-in-Chief
Katerina Kern
katerina@circeinstitute.org