New West Symphony appoints new board members

New West Symphony recently appointed four Ventura County-area residents to its 59 member board of directors.

New West is the resident symphony orchestra at the Oxnard Performing Arts Center, Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza and Barnum Hall in Santa Monica.

Joining the board is Westlake Village resident Dwight Cole, vice president of Commercial and Wealth Management for Santa Barbara Bank and Trust and a former board member of the Missouri Symphony Society.

He served as an infantry squad leader in Vietnam with the U.S. Army's First Cavalry Division, earned a law degree at St. Louis University and is a member of the Missouri and Illinois state bar associations.

As a former resident of the St. Louis area, Cole served as legal counsel to numerous nonprofit organizations, including Lindenwood University, the Historic Daniel Boone Home and Boonesfield Village, and the Consumer Credit Counseling Center of the Mississippi River Valley.

Brian Oard, senior director at the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation and a Thousand Oaks resident, is also a new symphony board member.

Oard, a graduate of UC Davis, was a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps and a veteran of operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm and Restore Hope in Somalia.

He is on the board of trustees for Devil Pups Inc., a nonprofit youth citizenship program, and also serves as a volunteer with the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation Golf Tournament Committee, which awards scholarships to the children of enlisted Marines.

Oxnard resident Steve Kinney, founding president of the Economic Development Corporation of Oxnard and the former director of Oxnard's redevelopment agency, has also been named to the symphony board.

He is the immediate past chair of St. John's Regional Medical Center board of directors, president of the Oxnard-Port Hueneme Boys & Girls Club and incoming chair of the Ventura County Workforce Investment Board.

A charter member of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project and a resident of Port Hueneme with his wife, Cathy, Kinney lived aboard his Channel Islands Harbor sailboat for eight years after moving to California in 1987.

He is a native of Rochester, N.Y., where he graduated cum laude from the Preparatory School of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music. Kinney received both his Bachelor of Arts in English literature and master's in public administration and business administration from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

Armando Lopez, also recently appointed to the symphony board, is a lifelong resident of Oxnard, a partner with Plaza Development Partners LLP of Oxnard and a member of the Cal State Channel Islands president's advisory board.

He is president of Oxnard's Downtown Center for the Arts and was voted Oxnard's Distinguished Citizen in 2005. He is serving on the boards of St. John's Healthcare Foundation, the Ventura County Fair and the Oxnard Police Chief's Advisory Board and has held past board posts with California Lutheran University and the Ventura County Symphony, a New West Symphony predecessor.

Lopez received his Bachelor of Arts from Cal State Northridge and served in the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division.

The New West Symphony presents an 18performance season of classical symphonic masterworks featuring 75 professional musicians. The music director is Boris Brott.