This is the third of a five-part series. Part One is here and Part Two is here.
This week we highlight some of Wisconsin’s Most Influential Asian American leaders. Previous lists of the state’s most influential Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American leaders are published at Madison365.org/MostInfluential.
Diana Pathammavong
Diana Pathammavong is a digital and social content creator at Goodwill Greater Milwaukee and Chicago, where she manages the organization’s social media and built its influencer program from the ground up. In the program’s first year, she worked with more than dozens of influencers to raise awareness of Goodwill’s mission and reshape public perception of the organization. She joined Goodwill in 2022 after earlier marketing roles at Western States Envelope & Label, Guardian Credit Union, the Wisconsin Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and Umansky Motor Cars. Pathammavong is active in Milwaukee’s nonprofit and civic community, with a focus on developing future leaders, empowering women, and supporting children in underserved communities. She serves on the board of COA Youth & Family Centers and previously served as vice president and a board member of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network’s Greater Milwaukee chapter and as diversity and inclusion chair for WGIRLS Milwaukee. She mentored through the Wisconsin Women’s Network and is a member of ElevAsian, where she has helped plan AAPI Heritage Month and Restaurant InvAsian events. Her volunteer work spans organizations including SEA Literacy, the Milwaukee Diaper Mission, the Cinderella Project, Social X MKE, Milwaukee Habitat for Humanity, and the Kinship Community Food Center. She holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations from Marquette University.
Maixia Thao
Maixia Thao is the principal of Samuel Gompers Elementary School in the Madison Metropolitan School District, a small neighborhood school on the city’s north side serving roughly 220 to 270 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade. She began her career at Gompers and returned to lead the school, where she is helping guide its planned transition to a new building. Under her leadership, Gompers has partnered with Children’s Theater of Madison through the Madison Public Schools Foundation’s Adopt-a-School program to build an arts-integration residency reaching every grade level. Before returning to Gompers, Thao served as assistant principal at Sherman Middle School, where she is credited with helping rebuild staffing and school systems during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and she was part of establishing the Hmong bilingual program at Lake View Elementary. Her own roots in Madison’s youth-development network run deep: as a high school student, she was a member of the inaugural 2004 cohort of Madison School & Community Recreation’s Leaders in Training program, where she learned to lead activities and build trust in communities.
Colleen Bies
Colleen Bies is the regional project director for the Northeast Wisconsin office of the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation (WWBIC), a statewide economic development nonprofit that provides business education, mentoring, and access to capital for small business owners, particularly those in underserved communities. She joined WWBIC in 2021 and administers grant and lending programs across the region. She is also the founder of Colleen Bies Photography, a Neenah-based wedding and boudoir studio serving northeast Wisconsin and the Milwaukee area, and previously opened a tea shop in downtown Appleton. The daughter of Hmong refugees who fled Laos after the Vietnam War, Bies grew up in Oshkosh in a family of nine children. At 17, she enlisted in the military, serving 12 years in the Army National Guard and deploying to Iraq twice while earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA, before leaving a corporate finance career for entrepreneurship. She was the photographer for the Color-Brave Photo Project: Black and Brown Faces, a New Narrative, a traveling exhibit organized by Tracey Robertson and FIT Oshkosh that documented people of color in Oshkosh, and she delivered a 2019 TEDxOshkosh talk on why children of immigrants work so hard. Her recognitions include being named one of Fox Valley’s Future 15.
Monis Khan
Monis Khan is a member of the Ozaukee County Board of Supervisors, representing District 20, where he serves on the board’s Health and Human Services Committee. He is also the secretary-treasurer and a founding board member of the Muslim Caucus within the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. Professionally, he is the editor-in-chief of Bucks+, a first-of-its-kind podcast network created by the Milwaukee Bucks and Good Karma Brands. His belief in the power of storytelling inspired a career in media and entertainment that began as a Coro Fellow in Public Affairs at the Coro Center for Civic Leadership. After completing his fellowship in 2012, he worked as an international news journalist and television producer for Al Jazeera English, where his work earned a Webby Award. He then covered the intersection of race, culture, and sports as a video producer at ESPN, and served as vice president of development at P3 Media, where he was an associate producer on the feature-length documentary film Take No Prisoners, which premiered at SXSW in 2025. Khan holds an MBA from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and a bachelor’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis.
Part 4 coming tomorrow!