About Tom Elieff, Creator and Author of Enlivenminds
Tom Elieff has headed five private schools–covering early childhood, elementary, middle and upper schools–in Chicago (Lake Forest Academy), Seattle (The Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle), Houston (Beth Yeshurun Day School), and Dallas (at St. Mark’s School of Texas’ as Upper School Head, and since 2014 at Levine Academy, where he currently serves as Head of School). He received his BA from Brown University and his MA from Northwestern University. In 2005, Tom was selected to participate in the first national cohort of day school leaders, Project Sulam, a multi-year learning and leadership program launched at Brandeis University. In the Spring of 2015, he collaborated with 40 entrepreneurs at Harvard University for their inaugural Design Thinking Workshops. In April of 2019, he was honored at the American Writer’s Museum gala in Chicago with the first-ever Inspiration Award—selected by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist Rebecca Makkai who was his AP English student at Lake Forest Academy. Tom’s wife, Eden, a graduate of the University of Chicago with an MFA from Bennington College, is an essayist and fiction writer; she teaches writing workshops in Dallas and Houston. Their daughter, Lydia, is a college student in Dallas.
–Tom Elieff
