The seeds of VISTO were planted in a New Jersey supermarket in early 1983. There, our founders, Alex Toledano and Seth Rosenbaum, met in the baby-food aisle as their mothers did their regular food shopping. Soon they became best friends. Almost thirty years later after moving to Europe, they founded VISTO.
Alex (left) and Seth (right) in 1984, celebrating Alex's 2nd birthday
Alex Toledano, Ph.D., Co-founder and President of VISTO, leads our Paris office. He received his Ph.D. in 2012 in Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley, and is a specialist on the history of Paris since the French Revolution. His dissertation, Sharing Paris: The Use and Ownership of a Neighborhood, Its Streets, and Public Spaces, 1950-2012, studies the roles of visitors and residents in shaping community and daily life in Parisian neighborhoods with a focus on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in the 10th arrondissement.
He received a bachelor’s degree in Art and Archaeology summa cum laude from Princeton University in 2004. He won the departmental thesis prize for Illuminating the Canon: Institutions and the Development of the Canon of Abstract Expressionism, which studied how paintings by Abstract Expressionist artists — Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and others — became the most valuable, important works of American art in the global art market.
Alex was the music supervisor for the D.A. Pennebaker film, Kings of Pastry, which documents the competition for the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France for pastry chefs. He was the Music Director of WPRB, Princeton University’s radio station. He also regularly performs gypsy jazz guitar in the style of Django Reinhardt in Paris and has recorded a number of albums.
Alex has written a book on Paris photographs and has contributed to publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Lucky Peach.
Selected Publications:
Paris in Photographs, 1890. Dover Press, 2015. [Amazon, Google Books]
The Uncommon Resilience of Paris Street Life, The New York Times Magazine, November 16, 2015.
The State of Fine Dining, Lucky Peach, Fall 2016
Seth Rosenbaum, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of VISTO, leads our office in Nicosia, Cyprus. He completed his Ph.D. in 2013 at Harvard University in the English Department. Seth’s doctoral thesis studies twentieth-century notions of taste and style, with a particular focus on American literature and food.
He received his bachelor's degree in English summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2004. He received the departmental thesis prize for his work on William Blake, one of England's greatest artists and poets at the turn of the 19th century.
Seth recently edited Aglaia Kremezi’s book Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts.
Seth has an interest in cognitive science and the arts, an emerging field that studies the way people experience art and preferences on a quantifiable neurological level. Since moving to Cyprus, Seth has taken up windsurfing and the study of Greek.