About Us

The Tatra Project team is small and consists of:

Theo Maniatis, President and Trustee
Theo Maniatis graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in Civil Engineering in 1987, and then worked in Monterey, California for five years as a project manager in the residential/ commercial construction and development market. A year-long sabbatical to pursue the personal goal of racing in the Hawaiian Ironman took him not only to the finish line in Kona but also to residence in Manhattan, Tokyo, Singapore and Bangkok. The journey ended back in Berkeley where he has lived and worked as a mortgage broker for the last four years. Theo and his wife Katie are the parents of a three children, and he is actively involved with youth and adult soccer.

Rev. David K. O’Rourke, OP, S.T.Lic., S. T. Lr., Director and Trustee
Dominican Father David O’Rourke is a writer, editor and family therapis who has published extensively in the area of cultural history and current affairs.  Since 1999 he has worked in Litnuania, serving first as a program consultant to the Seimos Centras of the Archdiocese of Vilnius, and teaching; the practice of family therapy in Vilnius University.  In 2002 he began working in the former photo archives of the KGB, studying the records of the Lithuanian resistance to the Soviet takeover.  This has led to the co-production of the documentary film "Red Terror on the Amber Coast" with film-maker Ken Gumbert.  (Domedia Productions.)

He is a licensed marriage and family therapist in the State of California where he lives, a graduate of Yale University, and is also a Senior Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute in Berkeley. .
Click here to send an email to Director, Fr. David O'Rourke, OP, dkorop@sbcglobal.net

Rev. Ken Gumbert, OP, M.Div, BFA, Trustee

Prize-winning film-maker Ken Gumbert is Associate Professor in the Theater, Dance and Drama Department at Providence College where he also runs the movie making program.  His films principally explore the lives and situations of people deprived of human, legal, and religious rights.  These include two films on the life and rituals of the Ute peoples in Utah's high desert, "Between Two Worlds" and "Ritual Ways." His film, "Saving Grace," on the Soviet crushing of religious and human rights after the takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948, was given the Gabriel Award for the best documentary shown on national television in 2005. He is  currently co-producing "Red Terror on the Amber Coast" with David O'Rourke, in which survivors of the gulag slave labor camps, KGB prisons, Siberian exile, and years in the forest as partizan fighters  tell their stories.  kgumbert@providence.edu

Czeslaw Jan Grycz, Trustee

Chet Grycz is the Director of the Wladyslaw Poniecki Charitable Foundation, a non-profit California public benefit corporation, active in Central and Eastern European countries. Its principal work is in the area of Internet training for librarians, and it has also published scholarly and educational books in the discipline areas of business, education, management, entrepreneurialism, medicine, and environment. He has worked in the area of scholarly publishing and scholarly communication forover thirty years, at Stanford University Press from 1970 to 1974, and then as Design and Production Manager for the University of California Press from 1974 to 1989. In 1989, he transferred to the Division of Library Automation in the Office of the President, University of California.  Currently, Grycz is a consultant on issues related to electronic information and distributed network technology. He is the author of many scholarly articles and three books and is the 1997 recipient of the Distinguised Service Award from the Society of Scholarly Publishers. 

Our Team

Theo Maniatis

David O’Rourke