David Jordan Roberts and Paul Anthony Di Donato were married Oct. 1 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Angel L. Lopez, a staff member of the New York City clerk’s office, officiated.
Mr. Roberts (left), 44, is the executive director of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation, a New York organization that provides professional development and public programs to support development of the creativity and craft. He is also a lecturer in theater management at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven. Mr. Roberts graduated from Webster University in Webster Groves, Mo., and received a master’s degree in theater management from Yale.
He is a son of Cheryl J. Hazel of Baltimore and Russell Roberts-Bey of Flint, Mich. Mr. Roberts’s mother is the director of a student support program at the Essex campus of the Community College of Baltimore County. His father retired as a housing inspector for the City of Flint.
Mr. Di Donato, 58, is the president of the Proteus Fund, a social justice philanthropy organization in Amherst, Mass., that works to advance democracy, human rights and peace; he works in the foundation’s New York office. He is also a trustee of Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and received a law degree cum laude from Harvard.
He is the son of the late Celeste Di Donato and the late Rudolph Di Donato, who lived in Philadelphia. Mr. Di Donato’s father retired as a driver for the maintenance crew of the recreation department for the City of Philadelphia.
The couple met in 1998, after seeing each other again and again — at the supermarket, at the coffee shop, at a gay club — in the neighborhood where both lived. “We just kept on bumping into each other and finally just talked,” Mr. Di Donato said.
