East End Chapter/Jeanne Kaye League Spirit of Life^®Awards Luncheon

About our Honorees

Jessica Santiago

Jessica Santiago is the Founder and CEO of ArtRepublic Global, the leading curatorial platform of contemporary digital art that is purpose-built for healing and wellness. A three-time cancer survivor, Santiago’s work is profoundly shaped by her personal experience of how environments impact healing, focus, and human resilience. Her mission is to harness the science of neuroaesthetics and the power of curated digital experiences and immersive art to transform the built environment into spaces that restore wellbeing, ignite creativity, and foster cultural belonging.

Under Santiago’s leadership, ArtRepublic is pioneering data-driven cultural installations that measurably reduce stress and enhance performance. Her curatorial vision bridges art, science, and technology—moving enterprises from the “attention economy” into the “experience age.” This work has been realized in groundbreaking projects across healthcare and commercial real estate, including initiatives with Hines Hudson Square Properties in New York, the United Nations Spotlight Initiative and UHealth hospitals in Miami. Each project exemplifies her belief that art, when combined with analytics and intentional design, can serve as a non-pharmaceutical intervention and a strategic driver of innovation.

A leading advocate of modern patronage, Santiago is redefining how institutions, brands, and communities engage with culture. Through ArtRepublic Global, she is building a future where lobbies, hospitals, and campuses are living laboratories for wellbeing, creativity, and human connection.

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Lisa Friedman Clark

Lisa likes to refer to herself as the “Luckiest Unlucky” person she knows. Everything in her life has been BIG, both physically and experientially. At 6’1” with bright red hair, she clearly stands out in a crowd. Yet it is her life story, of “dancing between the raindrops,” that is most memorable about Lisa.

Lisa tells the story of her life; things that will make you laugh and cry, in order to help the audience understand ways of approaching their own hurdles and disappointments. She candidly talks of career obstacles, family issues, illness, and death and shares the important role that her friends, family and community has had in every facet of her journey.

Lisa now resides Boca Raton, Florida with her husband, Bruce Clark. Her 36 yesr old twin sons, Michael and Daniel, reside and work in Manhattan. At 6’11” and 6’9”, they are believed to be the tallest Jewish twins in the world, although that can’t be verified through the Guinness Book of World records as they do not classify by religion. Since “necessity is the mother of invention” along with her sons, she started a family business, Tallorder.com, which manufactures and sells high fashion socks and accessories for men of ALL sizes and donates a portion of profits to communities and families dealing with traumatic loss. The family also provides athletic socks to professional baseball players and have partnered with some of America’s most famous athletes.

The East End Chapter/Jeanne Kaye League of New York City takes great pride in presenting the City of Hope^®’s Spirit of Life^® Awards at its annual celebration.

The Spirit of Life^® Award is presented to individuals who exemplify the ideals and values that have guided City of Hope for a century, and whose professional and humanitarian accomplishments are worthy of celebration. Recipients of this prestigious award include a broad range of leaders from the world of business, entertainment, science and philanthropy. What connects them is a shared commitment to elevating the human condition and a profound belief in the power of each individual to effect change.

The Spirit of Life^®, by its very name, represents the intangible qualities that make an individual’s life worthy of admiration: their generosity, their ability to inspire and their desire to make a difference in the world.