Dr. Art Litowitz was born in and grew up in Miami Beach, Fla., and many of his lifelong interests took shape in South Florida.
After a career as an orthodontist, Dr. Litowitz became a board member at Marine Discovery Center and co-founded his own environmental nonprofit. He is married to June Litowitz and is a father and grandfather, as well as a serious practitioner of yoga.
Learn more about Dr. Litowitz in his conversation with MDC’s staff writer Lisa D. Mickey:
Did you spend a lot of time on Miami Beach as a child?
Yes, I walked the beach and was always out in nature. It’s very different now with 55 60-story condominiums on a barrier island. There were hotels, but it wasn’t like that when I was a child. I graduated high school in the 1960s and went off to college and that’s when the development really started. It’s been 50 years of massive development and many changes.
Who were your heroes growing up?
Jacques Cousteau, for sure. And Edward O. Wilson, considered the world’s leading ant entomologist, fascinated me. He was literally bitten by the bug and studied ants as a career. Albert Schweitzer was another hero of mine. He was a gifted physician with a highly esteemed career who took his knowledge to the middle of an African jungle in the Congo and created a clinic dedicated to treating the bacterial and viral diseases that had not yet even been discovered. He dedicated his life to helping other human beings. I read all about him as a boy.
Did you eventually practice orthodontics in Miami?
My dad, Dr. Robert Litowitz, had offices in Miami Beach and Coral Gables, Fla. I would go to his office when I was 10 years old and work in the lab, helping him pour up models. He practiced as an orthodontist, but in those years, they didn’t have bonding materials and things that developed in the 1970s, when I took dental training. As a kid, we went to the beach a lot, but from age 10-20, I really was educating myself toward a career in dentistry. I did a science project in middle school that was about the alveolar bone of the jaw. As an orthodontist, you work in the alveolar bone with roots of teeth. [Dentists work with the mandible and maxilla.] My official orthodontic graduation was in 1979.
Did you take over your father’s practice?
I did. My dad lived to be 97 and he had a long career in orthodontics and I helped him as he phased out. I worked in his Coral Gables practice for about 14-15 years until my daughter was born and then we decided to move out of south Florida to New Smyrna Beach in 1994. I found an orthodontics group that I could associate with and I commuted into Orlando. They also had offices in Daytona Beach and Orange City and I had an opportunity to practice orthodontics in Volusia County. I practiced for 30 years and retired in 2010. That was miles of smiles.
When and how did you get involved with MDC?
When we first moved to Bethune Beach, my daughter was 5. We had a beachfront property and she played on the beach with the daughter of Bruce Jaildagian, who started Marine Discovery Center. I got to know Bruce because our daughters were friends and that’s when I first started learning about the Marine Discovery Center. He had previously worked at Miami Seaquarium on Key Biscayne, which is where our family had picnics while I was growing up, so we had a connection. Later, I moved to Edgewater in 2014, and remarried in 2018.
You learned about MDC, but you were still working and probably didn’t have a lot of free time, right?
Exactly, I was really busy. We had five or six offices, so I traveled around and treated a lot of cases. When I retired, I had time on my hands. I had a lot of interests and wanted to get involved at MDC, and I eventually got on the board. MDC was becoming quite a site for education.
When did you join MDC’s board?
That was in 2017 and I served on the board for seven years. Ken Nusbaum was the board chair and he went to Cornell University as a veterinary student, then became a Ph.D. in zoonotic diseases. He tapped me for the board because I went to Cornell, too, as an undergraduate. Carl Sagan was my astronomy professor. Hans Bethe was my physics professor and won the Nobel Prize the year I took physics.
Why did you serve for seven years as an MDC board member?
I did two three-year terms and this past year in 2024. I had Covid in 2020 and two Covid episodes, in which I was weakened quite a bit. With long-haul Covid, I decided I needed to take better care of myself. After I retired, June and I went to a yoga studio, Yoga Bala in Port Orange, and they were offering a teacher training. I became a registered yoga teacher in 2011 and 2012. So, I’m a DMD, an MBA (in finance toward the end of my retirement) – and a RYT – a registered yoga teacher. It’s been mostly for my own personal development.
Didn’t you take the Coastal Systems class in the Florida Master Naturalist Program at MDC?
Both June and I took that class with [current executive director] Chad Truxall in 2016. In addition, that’s when the Protect Our Lagoon Academy (POLA) also was held, which was part of Project H2O. That’s how I got to know [current Riverside Conservancy Executive Director] Kelli McGee, who was involved with the POLA class.
You launched your own nonprofit, Riverside Conservancy, through that class you took at MDC. How did that happen?
There were other retirees in that class, including Dr. Greg Wilson, who had a career as an aquatic ecologist. Also involved with our concept of creating a conservancy for our class project was Tom Barratt, who went to Stetson and went on to get his MBA. He had helped with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy in Ohio, which now has some 63,000 acres of land they conserved. We formed Riverside Conservancy for ecosystem restoration and we wanted to work with the Indian River Lagoon to protect this waterway for future generations.
You also provided a headquarters for Riverside Conservancy next door to your home on the lagoon in Edgewater.
This property became available and I thought this would become a good site to start a nonprofit and to do living shoreline restoration. I wanted to make the shoreline here as natural as possible to attract oysters, clams, mangroves, fish and birds. And after having met Kelli McGee through the POLA program, we brought her to Riverside Conservancy as our executive director.
What is the difference between Marine Discovery Center and Riverside Conservancy?
MDC is the parent of Riverside Conservancy. We are the progeny and we are the product of what they offered in the POLA course that we took. I look at it as family. We’re related, but Riverside is more focused on private property owners and small parks. It’s still experimental and we’re exploring the best ways to create living shorelines, which we created on our site.
What is your role as co-founder and board member of Riverside Conservancy?
As chairman of the board, I try to help guide the organization to a point similar to what I did at MDC. I just try to attract funding and help develop projects that can be implemented to the benefit of the property, but also for the greater community. I use this as a model much as I did for every patient when I was practicing. Each patient that I saw was similar, but different in many ways. Living shoreline restoration is similar in that every property has a different configuration or an owner who has different needs. We can adapt each site to the concept and principles. MDC has a living shoreline demonstration area showcasing the different modes of restoration that can be implemented. Local citizens can go there to see the different ways a shoreline can be restored. We have also seen it at Riverside Conservancy with the presence of numerous species at our living shoreline. Like MDC, we get funding from many sources, including the Indian River Lagoon National Estuary Program (IRLNEP) and from Volusia County, NOAA and the ECHO grant that helped sustain us as a center.
What is the biggest challenge for nonprofits?
Foundations need funding and you’re always competing for those dollars. They are discretionary dollars. It’s about inspiring others to take an interest in what we’re doing and how we do it, both at MDC and Riverside Conservancy. We had a foundation in California that heard about us at Riverside Conservancy and they got involved.
Did your father start the Litowitz Foundation and how has it benefitted MDC, Riverside Conservancy and others?
Yes, my father started it. Among the many things that we help support, both my parents – Dr. Robert and Donna Litowitz — were keenly interested in environmental issues. My brother and sister also helped contribute to this cause.
What excites you about seeing the growth at MDC, as well as Riverside Conservancy?
MDC has been around for 27 years and Riverside Conservancy for seven years. In both places, it’s pretty much a continuation of what we’ve had from the start, but when you see growth and maturation over the years, you can begin to see the directions these entities can take. They have helped foster college students, who’ve had projects in both places and that has helped sustain them in their future careers.
As a past board member at MDC and a current board member at Riverside Conservancy, what do you want to see in the coming years?
I’m really encouraged that these sites are places where research can be done and data may be collected. We both are part of a federal program, which helps sustain us with grants, but we are part of the whole community of what is striving to help educate people about the impact we have in our daily lives in a more planet-friendly way. If you think in a global picture, we’re not alone. There are other organizations around the world that also are focused on resources.
How do the goals of Marine Discovery Center and Riverside Conservancy align with your values?
I think life is precious for us alongside all the other biological organisms around us. I’m intrigued by nature endlessly.
What have you gained through your experience at MDC?
I gained not just from my own experience, but also through board members I would associate with and learn from, including Fielding Cooley, a former board chair, as well as the beginning of MDC with Bruce Jaildagian, and later, watching Chad Truxall mature over the years. There’s a real beauty to that. MDC is a true gem in New Smyrna Beach. It’s a hub of many things, but the mission of educating people of all ages – from the tiniest tots to seniors who want to give something back or involve their grandchildren – it’s one of the best places to go to learn in this community. You can be inspired by others at MDC. That’s what I’ve found there.
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