Thomas
Cashman Avila is NLGJA's Acting
Executive Director. He joined
NLGJA in February 2006 to serve
as the association's
first Deputy Executive Director,
focusing on the areas of programs
and communications. Avila is also
a writer whose work appears
in MetroWeekly, a DC-area LGBT
publication.
Prior to coming to NLGJA, Avila was the Staff Director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ). During his six-year tenure with the CCJ, Avila’s focus was the coordination of the organization’s outreach activities and administrative oversight of the CCJ’s education program — The Traveling Curriculum.
Starting with its launch in February of 2001, Avila’s work focused on the administration, execution and continued content development of the CCJ’s Traveling Curriculum. The newsroom-based training program was designed to help journalists think more reflectively about their work, to make his or her journalism more conscious, and to develop a pattern of critical thinking. Avila’s involvement with the Curriculum included everything from on-the-ground execution of events to the coordination of brainstorming summits with some of journalism’s foremost practitioners. He also participated in the creation of two successful grant applications with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to support the program’s activities.
From 2004 until 2006, Avila was the lead researcher/writer on the subject of radio for the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s (PEJ) comprehensive State of the News Media annual report. This work included the identification and analysis of trends in radio audience, economics, ownership, news investment and public attitudes. Starting with the sophomore edition of the report (2005), he additionally conducted research on network television news. The inaugural edition of State of the News Media earned PEJ a Sigma Delta Chi award and Penn State University’s Bart Richards’ award.
Prior to his arrival at the CCJ, Avila’s professional career had focused on the arts and cultural community. He worked as an administrative team member for the re-opening of the historic Morris Performing Arts Center (South Bend, IN), programmed special events for the Northern Indiana Center for History (South Bend, IN), was part of the culture program of The Pew Charitable Trusts and worked in The University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) Office of Admissions. Avila has served on the pre-college faculties of The University of the Arts and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s South Bend satellite program. He sat on the grants advisory committee of The Community Foundation of St. Joseph County.
In 2005, Avila earned an MFA degree in Creative Writing from American University. He focused his academic studies on the use of feminist, post-feminist and queer theory in the areas of literature and art history. Avila holds a BFA degree in Crafts from The University of the Arts (Philadelphia, PA) and, in 2003, was honored by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities when it named him a finalist for the Larry Neal Award for fiction.
Avila lives in Washington, D.C.'s Capitol Hill neighborhood with Douglas Beck, his partner of more than eight years. Beck is an organist with two degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music. He has performed in the United States, Canada and Germany.
