donna musil, executive director 
LORA BELDON, DIRECTOR, BRAT ART INSTITUTE
diane dillard-broadnax, director, SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL INITIATIVES
chris kyrios, director, brats clubs & co-director, social media
donna jobert, co-director, social media
timothy wurtz, media advisor
Keiti Pierce, virtual assistant

Donna Musil is a writer, lawyer, filmmaker, and proud Army Brat. The daughter of an Army lawyer and Vietnam veteran, Donna moved twelve times and attended eleven schools on three continents, before her father died of a service-related illness when she was sixteen. She received an ABJ (magna cum laude) and JD from the University of Georgia, then worked as a labor lawyer for the AFL-CIO and IBEW, before pursuing a writing/filmmaking career.

In 1997, Donna reconnected with a group of friends from one of her three high schools, Taegu American High School in Korea, over the internet. They looked different - they were different races, religions, and vocations - but the feelings and experiences they were sharing were practically identical. For the first time, Donna felt like "a real human being with a history that could be touched and tasted and revisited." Shortly thereafter, Donna founded Brats Without Borders and began her 7-year quest to make BRATS: Our Journey Home, the first documentary about "growing up military."

At film screenings across the country, Donna discovered that young military brats were feeling and experiencing the same thing, but didn't know how to put it into words. That's when she began her awareness-raising efforts that have since evolved into educational workshops, town hall meetings, brats clubs, and Our Own Private Battlefield, a feature documentary work-in-progress about the inter-generational effects of PTSD on military children and how one Marine family is using art to help reunite the family. Donna also co-curated UNCLASSIFIED: The Military Kid Art Show.

Donna's writing credits include  Ananse, a children’s animated film based on African folktales in development with a production company in Ghana; Cypress Gardens, an award-winning screenplay about a modern-day union campaign; and a chapter about making the BRATS film in Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads and Third Culture Kids, published in London in 2012. Donna has won numerous fellowships, including a Henry Clews Art Fellowship in La Napoule, France; Traidhos Arts in Chiang Mai, Thailand; Ragdale in Chicago; Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain; Djerassi in San Francisco; and a Helene Wurlitzer fellowship in Taos, New Mexico. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Lora Beldon is a Marine Corps Brat and a conceptual artist. She is also an educator, visual storyteller, independent curator, and the owner of the Military Kid Art Project. As a “military brat,” Lora grew up everywhere and nowhere. Her conceptual drawings have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe, and her work is in a number of private, corporate, and public collections. A graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, Lora currently lives with her family in Richmond, Virginia.

As a member of Richmond’s punk art group Urban Artists Amalgamated, Lora is no stranger to cutting-edge art and politics. She created Artists for Life, a citywide event that raised funds for AIDS research and featured artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, which author Harry Kollatz recalls in his book, True Richmond Stories. Lora is also an emeritus member and former director of the 1708 Gallery, the nation’s oldest running nonprofit, avant-garde art gallery.

Diane Dillard-Broadnax, MSW, LICSW, is an Army Brat, who has worked as a licensed clinical social worker in the Washington D.C. area for more than 23 years in healthcare management, hospital and community-based services, and mental health research.  She is currently leading the Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia Study at the National Institute of Mental Health's Child Psychiatry Branch. In the past, Diane has worked for managed care, directed a community based case management and drug treatment program, worked for KPMG/Bearing Point on the Health Care Financing and Administration consulting team, and served as Community Relations Director for the Psychiatric Institute of Washington.

In 2011, Diane became frustrated with the way her family would "disperse to separate computers each evening," so she took them on a "tech diet." For one week, the whole family stopped using email, texts, Facebook, DVDs and online videos (they don't have a regular TV), expect for work and homework. The Wall Street Journal covered the experiment in their article, "Your BlackBerry or Your Wife: When the Whole Family Is Staring at Screens, Time to Try a Tech Detox."

Because of her father’s 34-year military career, Diane moved 11 times across three continents before attending the University of Michigan, where she earned a BA in Psychology and an MSW in Social Work. Accustomed to change, Diane dealt with the challenges of work and motherhood seamlessly until giving birth to her second child, Anika, at 46. The ultimate juggling act, Diane still finds time (with the help of her husband, Lonnie, another military brat), to volunteer for Brats Without Borders and conduct "BRATS 1.0" workshops at Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Programs around the country. Diane is also writing a memoir about growing up the daughter of one of the first five African-American generals in the Army.

Chris Kyrios is a DoDDS Brat, Navy veteran, and retired businessman, who grew up in Germany. His father, a World War II veteran, married his German mother right after the war, then worked as a DoD school administrator for the rest of his life. His mother helped run the German-American Club for years and is still kicking at 95!

Chris is really a “brat-extraordinaire.” He and Donna Jobert run all the BWB social media sites. He has helped run the Karlsruhe American High School Alumni Association reunions for years. Then he took those hard-earned skills and started the BWB BRATS Clubs for adults. There are now close to a dozen clubs throughout the country! These clubs give military brats and other TCKs a place to connect and have fun together. 

If you’d like to organize a BWB BRATS Club, contact Chris and he will help you get started.

Christy McAnally created the very first BRATS Club for children and teens at Landstown Middle School in Virginia Beach. Then she spearheaded more clubs in elementary schools and high schools in Virginia. They were a hit at every school lucky enough to have her, because Christy knows what military kids need. She is a Marine Corps Brat and a teacher for over twenty years.

Christy also volunteered with Donna Musil as a facilitator for BWB at Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Programs throughout the United States. She served as the Coordinator for the Military Academic Support Program in Virginia Beach City Public Schools. And she was actively involved in the successful campaign of "Brianna's Bill," legislation that prohibits public school 'transfer rules' from applying to military children who move because of their parent's service.

Christy's family is steeped in military service. Both her parents were military brats. Her maternal grandfather was Admiral Byrd's chief pilot in the 1941 South Pole Expedition and her father is a Viet Nam Vet and former Marine F-4 Fighter Pilot. Like many brats, Christy attended thirteen schools around the world, including three high schools, before going to college. She earned her BS in Education from the University Of Texas in El Paso and recently received her Graduate Certificate in Military Child and Families Studies at Old Dominion Univeristy. She lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and has three children - Kelly, Kaitlyn, and Megan.

Timothy Wurtz is an award-winning writer-producer of feature films and TV movies. A former reporter, Tim grew up living in London, England, Ankara, Turkey, Munich and Nurnberg, Germany. His dad worked for the U.S. government. He earned a BA from the University of Denver, then served in the U.S. Army.

Mr. Wurtz has written numerous film and television projects. He has had film projects with the major studios and prime time television projects with broadcast and cable networks. He has written and produced two award-winning independent features and co-produced the award-winning documentary feature BRATS: Our Journey Home, the first non-fiction film about growing up military, and BRATS Raw: Kristofferson & Schwarzkopf, the unedited interviews of military brats and American legends, Kris Kristofferson and the late General Norman Schwarzkopf, for the BRATS film.

As an advocate of the essential, seminal role of the writer and writing in the film and TV industries, Mr. Wurtz founded the Writers Guild of America's Media Relations Committee. His knowledge of media and publicity, and the work of the committee, has resulted in a number of highly successful WGA programs and events that have taken the coverage of film and TV writers from virtually nothing, to commonplace.

Tim has taught screenwriting at UCLA Extension, the American Film Institute's Public Service Program, Saddleback Community College and currently at the Writers Guild Foundation Military Veterans Writers Project.

Keiti Pierce is a writer and a freelance virtual assistant. Daughter of a retired Army major, Keiti bounced between Germany, where she was born, and the United States until she was eighteen. She can’t remember exactly how many times she moved (trying to count it all gives her a headache of major proportions), but from the time she was eleven she had attended Atterbury Elementary School, Frankfurt American Junior High School, and Frankfurt High School, before graduating from Fort Knox (Go Eagles! in either high school case). She earned a BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Agnes Scott College and a MLitt in The Gothic Imagination from University of Stirling in Scotland.

Keiti sometimes hates modern technology, but is thankful it has allowed her to easily re-connect with Brat friends from her childhood. While she knows growing up as a Brat is an experience many consider extraordinary – and in some ways she can’t disagree – she’s always viewed it as nothing more than her life. All the moving and losing track of friends and, as more and more bases close, the vast majority of her childhood haunts, is just something that was and is. It’s never seemed like anything out of the ordinary because she didn’t know anything else. The most difficult part of growing up was the culture shock she experienced when moving back from Germany to the States when she was sixteen. She’s never quite gotten over that.

Keiti’s writing credits include Fractured: essays on love, friendship, and the nightmares in between (under K.J. Pierce); a February 2015 re-release of her first noval, From Poe to Know (under the pen name Ceit E. McIntyre); Bethany and the Belfry Bat, a children’s play; and other projects. She currently lives in Melbourne, Florida, with her cat Dorian Gray, who lives up to his name by striving to be the state’s most prolific lizard serial killer.

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