Alumna Draws on Elizabethtown College Education for Successful Career in White House

Theatre had never played a leading role in Kara (Vichko) DeFrias ’97 life before taking a leap of faith as a first-year Elizabethtown College student and auditioning for Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s, “The Hostage.” DeFrias didn’t know it at the time, but that decision would allow her to find her voice, both literally and figuratively in the College’s Temptest Theatre. 

Her decision would also instill the confidence to lead a successful career in the user experience (UX), operations management, and executive communications fields, taking her to exciting places in the sports and entertainment industries and, eventually, all the way to the White House where she currently serves as a Senior Advisor in the Office of Technology.

“From giving talks and writing speeches to executive producing TEDx shows, I can draw a through-line from all of those things back to a tiny black box theater in the middle of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,” DeFrias said, who majored in English and Theatre at Etown.

Although DeFrias initially joined the Temptest Theatre as an actress and dialect coach, she quickly transitioned to the technical side of production, taking on a leadership role as stage manager for the College’s first musical, “West Side Story.” She found herself organizing the large production, leading a cast and crew, and learning how to stay cool, calm, and collected during the madness of show day to ensure that a complicated, intricate production went off without a hitch.

“From my earliest days I’ve enjoyed being the person in the background, making sure everything – and everyone – is humming along smoothly,” DeFrias explained. “I really dig the work about the work. Doing that well allows me to focus on the people, and giving them opportunities to shine and grow and show up as their best selves.”

The skills she learned as a stage manager have served her well in a fast-paced career that has included production and operations roles for high-profile events such as the Super Bowl XXXVII Halftime Show, Women’s World Cup, Emmy Awards, Oscars, and various TEDx Conferences.

“When you’re on live TV, you have to make a decision in a split second, and then hope your experience led you to make the right one,” DeFrias said. “Being a stage manager you have to be organized and efficient while being simultaneously tough and empathetic. You have to make crazy calls in the moment – you don’t have time to call three meetings and build 10 PowerPoint decks to get to a decision.”

DeFrias was a part of the Biden-Harris Transition Team in the fall of 2020 as a senior staff member on the Technology Strategy & Delivery team before joining the Biden-Harris Administration in March 2021. She currently serves as Senior Advisor in the Office of Technology, where she focuses on customer experience and workforce professional development. 

“My work centers on using technology to make interacting with services easier and, ultimately, to make people’s lives better,” said DeFrias.

She originally got her start in the White House after serving in the Obama Administration’s first class of Presidential Innovation Fellows in 2012, an exclusive opportunity for DeFrias as she was one of only two women, and 18 total Fellows, chosen from a pool of 800+ applicants. She would later go on to be Director of Experience Design for then-Vice President Biden on his Cancer Moonshot initiative in 2016. 

DeFrias, who recently began serving on Etown’s President’s Leadership Council, credits her Etown education and the College’s “Educate For Service” motto with shaping who she is today.

“I always rave about the excellent education I received at Etown, but it really was so much more than what we learned in the classroom,” DeFrias explained. “It was how to live a good life in service to others, without expecting anything in return. A life where one person can do the most good for the most people.”