Lumen Verum Academy is a faithful Catholic school fully devoted to upholding the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church. It is our priority to preserve and enrich the faith of our scholars and to help them see how reason and faith work together to lead us towards the truth. We want our scholars to graduate high school prepared to engage and renew the world through the lens of their faith, and our teachers strive to model such engagement. Every one of our faculty and staff is a practicing Catholic committed to the Magisterium and to joyfully living out that commitment in their lives and work.
Karen Celano, Principal
Karen Celano is Principal of Lumen Verum Academy. Mrs. Celano is responsible for implementing the academic and faith programming of Lumen Verum Academy, integrating the Catholic intellectual tradition into all subjects, assembling a team of top-rate teachers, and attracting extraordinary guest lecturers from across the English-speaking world.
Mrs. Celano is a former teacher who has taught Latin, theology, and social studies. Her teaching experience spans every grade from third through eleventh grades, and she has broad experience in a wide variety of Catholic educational settings. In addition to serving as Director of Instruction for the acclaimed St. Paul’s Choir School, she has taught religion at Boston College High School and the Dominican Academy in New York City,completed the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education’s Aspiring School Leader Program, and has worked in collaboration with the Classical Learning Test. She has taught First Communion and Confirmation preparation and adult catechesis classes, and she also spent a year homeschooling her son.
Mrs. Celano earned an M.T.S., Theology, from the University of Notre Dame, with the History of Christianity as her major field of study, and a B.A., History, with honors, from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She was also awarded a full academic scholarship for the graduate study of religion at Yale University, where she served as a teaching fellow in the Yale Divinity School. While an undergraduate scholar, Mrs. Celano served as the Religious Life Committee Chair at the Newman Center at Johns Hopkins University.
Mrs. Celano and her husband, Chris, met at the Johns Hopkins’ Newman Center when her future husband was preparing her to be an altar server. They have two school-aged children — a son who is in high school and a daughter who is an elementary scholar at a parochial school. In her leisure, Mrs. Celano enjoys praying the Liturgy of the Hours, reading 19th century British literature, and going on nature walks.