Member Since 1/1/1984
PHF - Paul Harris Fellow
Past President 2003-04
Rotarian of the Year: 2017-18
Board of The Rotary Foundation of Washington DC – Past Chair
Classifications – Chair
Finance Committee – Member
Past Presidents’ Council – Member

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Michael Ketover shares 30 years of respectful and collaborative experience in almost 40 developing nations and the USA. He spent the last four years as Peace Corps Country Director in Kyiv, Ukraine, where he managed the largest Peace Corps post globally pre-pandemic and pre-war, when over 400 volunteers served per year with 100 Ukrainian staff.

Before this Peace Corps appointment, Michael was an independent consultant. With the US Agency for International Development (USAID), he served in Haiti as the interim Director of the Democracy and Governance office, co-designed and managed USAID resiliency and food security projects in Ghana and Zambia, evaluated the impact of criminal justice interventions in Central America and Mexico, and advised Ghana’s Ministry of Social Protection how to set up a food voucher and cash payment program for vulnerable populations. Michael also worked as a senior inspector/senior evaluator with the Department of Commerce’s Office of the Inspector General in Washington, DC with a one billion dollar oversight portfolio, as a poverty law and human rights attorney, and for a brief time, as a corporate lawyer in Miami.

Michael served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras, Guyana and the Dominican Republic (Crisis Corps) and with AmeriCorps/VISTA in rural southern Arizona. He graduated from Vanderbilt University’s School of Law, Amherst College, and studied at Zamorano Pan-American Agriculture School in Honduras.

Michael's wife, Kelli Ketover is a Foreign Service officer with the Department of State and a former Peace Corps Volunteer who also served in Guyana. She now works and lives in Myanmar.

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Now in his fifteenth year as director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Alex Nyerges is responsible for leading one of the nation’s top 10 comprehensive art museums with exciting and far-reaching strategic initiatives that have transformed the institution, making it more accessible, diverse, and inclusive. Nyerges came to VMFA from the Dayton Art Institute, where he was director and CEO from 1992 to 2006, a position he also held at the Mississippi Museum of Art and The Museum of Art – DeLand, Florida.

Nyerges writes and lectures widely on photography and has curated and organized exhibitions, including Edward Weston: A Photographer’s Love of Life (2004), Glory of the Silk Road: Art from Ancient China (2003), and Eternal China: Treasures from Ancient Xi’an (1998). In 2015 and 2017, Nyerges’ own photography was the subject of two solo exhibitions, Chasing the Light and Chasing the Light II at Glavé Kocen Gallery in Richmond.

Nyerges is a former board member of the Association of Art Museum Directors and an active board member of the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME). Nyerges has been a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors since 1989. He is a former member of the Board of Trustees and past Program Chair for the organization. In Richmond, he is a member of the Forum Club, has served as an Advisory Board member of the Asian American Society of Central Virginia, the Mayor’s Richmond Real Estate Task Roundtable and co-chair of the Mayor’s Tourism Commission, the Armory Steering Committee at the Black History Cultural Museum, and the Chamber of Commerce Capital Regional Collaborative. He is also an Affiliate Graduate Faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University. Nyerges is also Chair of the Audit Committee for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia. He is an Executive Committee member of the French American Museum Exchange (FRAME), a formal collaboration of museums comprising 16 cities in France and 16 museums in North America.

At the 2014 FRAME Annual Conference in Dijon, France, Nyerges was presented the rank of Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) for his role in furthering the arts in France and throughout the world. The Richmond Times-Dispatch honored Nyerges as a top-10 Person of the Year in 2015 for increasing the attendance and accessibility of VMFA. In 2017, he was named to Style Weekly’s “Power List” for Arts and Culture. That same year, the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Bureau in China named Nyerges as an Ambassador of Shaanxi Cultural Heritage. The honor was presented during an exclusive preview for the exhibition Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China, which attracted more than 200,000 visitors to VMFA during its run. In 2020, he was honored to receive the Richmond Region Tourism Impact Award, and in 2021, Nyerges was a recipient of the George Washington University Monumental Alumni Award honoring living alumni who have made an impact on the world through their work and service and who embody the ideals of the university.

A native of Rochester, New York, he has both a master’s degree in museum studies and an undergraduate degree in American civilization and in anthropology/archaeology from The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

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