�ֲ��ý values – News

Alumni Association presents alumni awards recognizing service, career achievements

Alexandra DeMarco — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:50:39 +0000

At �ֲ��ý Reunion in June, the Alumni Association gathered to present the annual Alumni Council Awards, recognizing the exceptional career and service achievements of five alumni.

“It is truly inspiring to witness the transformative power of our alumni as they engage in informed civic action and lead in diverse fields,” said Leah Elsmore ’12, president of the Alumni Association for the 2025-26 academic year. “This year’s recipients reflect the ardor and devotion — Amore ac Studio — that define the �ֲ��ý experience, serving as a powerful reminder of the potential within our entire alumni network.”

Peter R. Basiliere ’76 received the Alumni Community Service Award in recognition of his leadership and civic service in Milford, N.H., where he was elected town moderator and school district moderator. After retiring from a career as a leader in additive manufacturing, Basiliere, an active Rotarian, began serving as a volunteer with the American Red Cross. Since then he has joined disaster relief teams in California, Vermont, the Carolinas, and, most recently, Guam, where he oversaw the Red Cross’ food operations after a super typhoon hit the island. Basiliere’s commitment to service and strengthening communities around the country reflects �ֲ��ý’ ideals of purposeful work and responsible stewardship of the wider world.

From left are President of the Alumni Association Leah Elsmore ’12, Erica Seifert Plunkett ’86, Rachel Ebersole ’17, Peter R. Basiliere ’76, and �ֲ��ý President Garry W. Jenkins at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Scientist Noah E. Petro ’01 earned the Alumni Professional Recognition Award in recognition of his career and leadership at NASA, where he has worked since 2007. Since 2017, he has been the lab chief of NASA’s Planetary Geology, Geophysics, and Geochemistry lab, which conducts research on Mercury, Venus, Earth, and their satellites. He is the project scientist for Artemis III, the 2027 mission that will bring astronauts to the moon’s surface for the first time since 1972. Petro’s work at NASA, both highly scientific and serving the general public, exemplifies �ֲ��ý’ mission of combining intellectual rigor with public good.

Audience members at the Annual Gathering of the Alumni Association look on as five alumni are honored with Alumni Council Awards. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Physician Christopher B. Lanoue ’99, P’26 earned the Bruce Stangle ’70, P’96, GP’26 Award for Distinguished Service to the �ֲ��ý Community in recognition of his commitment to supporting �ֲ��ý students and alumni through their medical school journeys. An emergency medicine specialist with MaineHealth, Lanoue has worked closely with the Center for Purposeful Work, mentoring �ֲ��ýies pursuing medical careers, and done so with “generosity, warmth, and openness.” His leadership and service, emblematic of �ֲ��ý’ values, has touched countless people as they themselves prepare for a career of serving others through medicine.

�ֲ��ý President Garry W. Jenkins, at right, presents the Distinguished Young Alumni Award to Rachel Ebersole ’17, at center, with President of the Alumni Association Leah Elsmore ’12 at the podium. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

Rachel Ebersole ’17 was presented with the Distinguished Young Alumni Award in recognition of her career as a museum educator and her leadership within the alumni community. Ebersole is the manager of teen programs at The New York Historical museum and library, where she also oversees a digital learning lab and makerspace. Ebersole is a dedicated leader within the New York �ֲ��ý Network, fostering alumni community and hosting events. Her volunteer service to the college is an inspiring example of the transformative power of the young alumni network.

Erica Seifert Plunkett ’86 earned the Helen A. Papaioanou ’49 Distinguished Alumni Service Award, which recognizes alumni who have given exceptional service to the college. Plunkett served as class co-president while at �ֲ��ý and, since graduating, as an Alumni Council member, a dedicated class agent, and a committee leader. Plunkett has also led an accomplished career in research; she spent more than 25 years at the Wellesley Centers for Women supporting research projects studying mental health literacy and mental health in adolescents. She is now a project manager at Brown University’s Hassenfeld Child Health Innovation Institute, working on projects related to adolescent depression prevention.

The Office of College Advancement also presented Kathryn (Kali) M. Brown ’21, Craig E. Comins ’81, and Meg W. Curran ’11 with �ֲ��ý’ Best Awards, which recognize dedicated volunteers who have expressed a passion and commitment for advancing the mission of the college.

Erica Seifert Plunkett ’86, at left, with �ֲ��ý President Garry W. Jenkins during the presentation of the Helen A. Papaioanou ’49 Distinguished Alumni Service Award. (Rene Roy for �ֲ��ý College)

“Our alumni continue to do incredible work in their communities and professions, and honoring this year’s award recipients is a privilege,” said Assistant Vice President for Alumni Engagement Sarah Cameron. “Every year, these awards remind us of the strength and reach of the �ֲ��ý network, and we look forward to seeing who our community nominates next.”

Want to nominate someone for a 2027 award? Nominating forms are available now.

So sweet: 2026 Green Grant awardees tap funds for �ֲ��ý-made maple syrup

Alexandra DeMarco — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:33:58 +0000

When Jonah Yaffe ’26 of Dallas got a serious concussion this spring, his activities were immediately limited. Luckily, he had a low-impact but very sweet new hobby that took up enormous amounts of time: boiling maple tree sap into syrup.

“I couldn’t do anything else,” Yaffe said. “I could just sit there. It’s a very passive activity.”

And Yaffe had a lot of sap that he needed to boil. This past winter semester, Yaffe and the �ֲ��ý Maple Syrup Club earned a �ֲ��ý Green Grant to bolster the club’s on-campus sugaring efforts. They produced seven caramel-colored gallons of maple syrup from �ֲ��ý trees and with �ֲ��ý people.

Jonah Yaffe ’26 of Dallas pushes a wheelbarrow while working as a gardening assistant with Facility Services during the 2025 Short Term. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Through the annual Green Grants program, the college offers grants of up to $2,000 to campus sustainability projects led by students, faculty, or staff. In addition to Yaffe’s project, four other projects earned Green Grants this year:

An effort to revamp the college’s green bike fleet led by EcoReps — students who work to promote environmentally responsible behavior on campus — Liza Bell ’26 of Putney, Vt., and Greta Hendrickson ’28 of Duluth, Minn.
A collaboration with the on-campus cafe Le Ronj to offer discounts for students who bring disposable cups, led by the �ֲ��ý Environmental Coalition
An initiative to increase recycling education and materials around campus led by EcoReps Caroline Mayer ’26 of Wolfeboro, N.H., and Sarah Smith ’26 of Severna Park, Md.
An initiative to install native trees around the �ֲ��ý Garden to prevent wind and noise pollution by Riley Baker ’26 of Northfield, Ill., and Yaffe

“What’s so unique about the Green Grants program is that it puts the stewardship of campus sustainability in the hands of the students themselves,” said Assistant Director of Sustainability Tom Twist. “They are empowered to be the project managers for their own sustainability ideas, and to see a project through from its original spark of an idea, through all the detailed minutiae, to its final completion. Having the students shepherd a project through this entire arc transforms not only the campus, but the student as well.”

Haskel McKee-Seegal ’29 of Honolulu checks a sap collection bucket on a �ֲ��ý maple tree. (Courtesy of the Maple Syrup Club)

The idea for the Maple Syrup Club originated from Yaffe’s work as a student groundskeeper and EcoRep. Yaffe, an environmental studies major, had spent many hours working in the �ֲ��ý Garden — a.k.a the PLOT — and began wondering if it would be possible to tap the garden’s dozens of maple trees.

When he posed the question to Facility Services staff, whom he’d come to know well across his years working outside, they encouraged him to pursue the idea. Yaffe joined Jeremy Lavertu, a carpenter with Facility Services, for a University of Maine workshop on tapping maple trees to learn the basics of sugaring, then founded the club with Angus Carter ’25 during the 2024-25 academic year.

That first winter, the Maple Syrup Club collected 10 gallons of sap from 10 trees in the PLOT. But the club lacked the funds they needed to purchase the proper equipment for filtration and boiling, key steps of the sugaring process that turn sap, which is 98 percent water and 2 percent sugar, into syrup. Yaffe had to complete the boiling process in Vermont with a friend’s home evaporator, a wood stove that can filter and boil large quantities of sap.

Those 10 gallons of sap boiled down into two mason jars worth of syrup. The experience was fun, but Yaffe had his eye on something bigger for the following winter that would not only generate more syrup but also bring together students, faculty, and staff.

To achieve that goal, he’d need proper technology and machinery, hence his application for a Green Grant. He used the awarded funds to purchase an evaporator, taps for the trees, and buckets to collect sap. After extensive conversations with Facility Services and the City of Lewiston about safely installing the evaporator, the club installed the stove outside of Cutten Maintenance Center.

Jonah Yaffe ’26 sets up a sap tap on a �ֲ��ý maple tree. (Courtesy of the Maple Syrup Club)

Haskel McKee-Seegal ’29 of Honolulu, a friend of Yaffe’s from the Orange Whip Ultimate frisbee team, became Yaffe’s co-conspirator in this season’s sugaring efforts. The two of them, with the help of a dozen or so other dedicated club members, collected 180 gallons of sap from 30 maple trees behind Leahey Field, which they stored in metal drums outside of Cutten.

“The Green Grant really helped us get off the ground,” Yaffe said. “We couldn’t have done anything without it.”

Equally vital were community members. Mike Walsh, a project manager with Facility Services, helped students with logistical and scientific components. Having first learned how to tap trees as a Boy Scout growing up in Maine, Walsh now produces gallons of syrup each year on his 50-acre property in Poland, Maine. He donated 150 gallons of his own sap to the students, nearly doubling their supply.

“I had extra this year,” Walsh said. “I could have boiled it myself, but they were having such a good time. I said, ‘You know what? I will just load it up in the truck and bring it in.’”

Wood for the �ֲ��ý evaporator came from Walsh and grounds and maintenance workers Ian Brownlie, Amy Ray, and Nate Calden. Projects like this help demonstrate to students the vital, sometimes unseen role that staff play on campus, Walsh said.

“We have a lot of our own talents, and a lot of us want to give back to the student base,” Walsh said.

Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the Faculty Mike Rocque shows off maple syrup made with sap from trees on his property. (Courtesy of Rocque)

Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the Faculty Mike Rocque donated several gallons from trees tapped around his home in Litchfield, Maine. Sugaring was new to him, and he enjoyed learning alongside the students and staff.

“I really like that part of engaging in the �ֲ��ý community, where people aren’t in their silos, but we’re all together and learn about what people do across the different areas on the campus,” Rocque said.

After running those 300-plus gallons of pure tree sap through another piece of equipment called a reverse osmosis system, which served as a filter, the students were left with about 150 gallons of concentrated sap. Then, they boiled on the evaporator. And boiled, until all that sap was distilled into seven gallons of pure maple syrup.

“Haskel and I spent many a night in the very cold sitting by the wood stove, boiling sap,” Yaffe said.

Yaffe and McKee-Seegal, an earth and climate sciences major, put in the most hours beside the evaporator, but they weren’t alone. Other club members took shifts, and Facility Services staff often stopped by.

“They were all super, super interested, super excited to talk with us and learn about the process,” McKee-Seegal said.

In addition to bringing together the �ֲ��ý community, another one of the club’s goals was to help students engage with Maine’s nature and culture through hands-on learning.

The Maple Syrup Club boiled their sap in the large pans on top of the evaporator, pictured above. (Courtesy of the Maple Syrup Club)

It worked.“You feel a different way after doing something with your hands all day rather than doing something on your computer,” Jaffe said

Each club member who spent time at the evaporator went home with syrup. Then, during the Short Term Earth Day celebration, Yaffe and McKee-Seegal gave away Commons ice cream cones drizzled with their very own �ֲ��ý maple syrup. The students also gave a couple of jars to Facility Services staff, who stored their stash in the Cutten breakroom for sweetening coffee.

“That was one of my favorite parts, giving away the syrup and saying, ‘This came from �ֲ��ý trees,’” Yaffe said.

After graduating in May, Yaffe headed to Hiram, Maine, for his summer job working at Ossipee Valley Music Festival. McKee-Seegal plans to spend the winter 2027 semester abroad. But the two say that Maple Syrup Club will keep sugaring next winter under the leadership of several other club members, continuing the club’s goal of bringing together the �ֲ��ý community while learning about Maine’s nature and culture.

After decades of partnership, �ֲ��ý supports new Maine MILL building with naming gift

Alexandra DeMarco — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:29:00 +0000

Since its founding in 1996, Lewiston’s Maine Museum of Innovation, Labor, and Learning (formerly Museum L/A) has engaged in a decades-long educational partnership with �ֲ��ý College. That’s no surprise, given that the museum called the �ֲ��ý Mill Complex home for the last 30 years.

In recognition of that relationship, �ֲ��ý is making a $75,000 gift to Maine MILL’s new, stand-alone building, which opens June 27. Visitors to the new museum at 1 Beech St. — housed in another mill, most recently known as the Camden Yarns Mill — will enter through the �ֲ��ý College Welcome Center.

“We are delighted to partner with Maine MILL as it starts a new chapter in its new home,” said �ֲ��ý President Garry W. Jenkins. “Both institutions share a commitment to education and access that makes this collaboration a perfect fit. And we love the thought that �ֲ��ý will be one part of the rich and complex Lewiston story that guests from around the country and the world will learn about during their visit to Maine MILL.”

The Maine MILL gift is the most recent example of the college’s investment in the region. Since Rachel Ferrante ’10 joined the museum in 2021 as executive director, the �ֲ��ý-Maine MILL partnership has only expanded.

“�ֲ��ý is an enormous asset for Lewiston, as Lewiston is an enormous asset for �ֲ��ý,” Ferrante said. “We’re thrilled that �ֲ��ý is deeply invested in the partnership with Maine MILL and connection to Lewiston.”

Rachel Ferrante ’10, executive director of the Maine MILL, outside of the new museum building, slated to open to the public on June 27. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

This partnership reinforces �ֲ��ý’ longstanding and deep commitment to Lewiston. For decades, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships has brought campus and community together to enrich the learning experience for �ֲ��ý students and the lives of our neighbors in Lewiston and Auburn.

“At �ֲ��ý, we examine what it really means to join — as equal participants — within a community’s self-led work, however the community is defining it,” says Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center. “This goes beyond superficial forms of place-based engagement. It’s not just, ‘We’re located here so let’s get involved.’ We are committed to doing the deep listening to understand what is really happening in the community and how we might join the community’s work. And we’ve tried to model that kind of accompaniment or presence over decades, which has fostered relationships of trust and accountability.”

The museum was founded in 1996 to preserve artifacts and stories from Lewiston-Auburn’s once-prosperous textile mill industry. When Associate Professor of History Joe Hall first took students to Maine MILL — then called Museum L-A — in 2003, there were weaving looms still threaded and covered with “dust fiber hanging like Spanish moss from trees,” Hall said. They sat exactly where they had been when the mill was operating. He quickly realized how valuable it was for students to physically observe the industries they were learning about in his courses. It was a way, he said, to show that history doesn’t just happen “in some imaginary cloud world.”

Not long after, trips to the museum became a regular part of Hall’s “U.S. Environmental History” course. Numerous other �ֲ��ý faculty have also brought their students to the museum to supplement courses on everything from economics to Japanese textiles to Francophone history.

“It’s been great as a way of grounding their learning, but also showing what it is that people here want to teach other people,” Hall said.

Tristan Seavey ’26 (left) of Calais, Maine, an intern with the Maine MILL, and Rachel Ferrante ’10, executive director of the Maine MILL, walk around the new museum space in the final months of construction before the grand opening. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

Students appreciate, Hall said, that the museum is led by a �ֲ��ý graduate. Ferrante oversaw the 2023 rebranding to Maine MILL, a name that aligns more closely with the museum’s subject matter and reflects the institution’s goal to tell more wide-ranging stories from the region. �ֲ��ý faculty have supported that effort; Associate Professor of Sociology Marcelle Medford, for example, led an extensive project collecting oral histories from Black Mainers, now included in the museum’s collection.

“We are focused on making sure that as a community history museum, we are telling the broadest version of our area’s history,” Ferrante says. “That also means what history has looked like here over the last 20 or 30 years since the mills have closed. Of course, Black voices have been incredibly important before that time, but are a huge part of Lewiston’s more recent history. Having that represented in the collection felt like a critical missing piece.”

�ֲ��ý also connects with the museum through student interns, like Tristan Seavey ’26 of Calais, Maine, who has interned at Maine MILL off and on since his first year on campus. During his last Short Term at �ֲ��ý, he completed a full-time internship at the museum funded through the Harward Center for Community Partnerships. A double major in history and German, Seavey is also Hall’s student.

Tristan Seavey ’26 of Calais, Maine, who has interned at Maine MILL off and on since his first year on campus, in the new museum building. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

As an intern, Seavey has led museum tours, done archival and operations work, helped with event planning, and 3D-scanned the gallery. He developed a passion for telling stories about people who have been underrepresented in popular history, inspired by Ferrante and Hall’s work.

The internship “changed the way that I approach history,” Seavey said. “Before �ֲ��ý and before working at Maine MILL, it was really just listing off dates and doing timelines. But working with Rachel and also working with Joe and doing my own research, I’ve really had this new perspective on how we tell history in a compelling way.”

Seavey’s senior thesis, which Hall advised, retraced the steps of a Black family living in his hometown of Calais in the mid-19th century, ultimately arguing that the impact of the Black community on that area was more important than previously discussed.

Hall watched as Seavey applied what he was learning at �ֲ��ý to work that needed to be done in the community, and then returned to the classroom, enriched by the experience. “It was really helpful to see how one person can use what they learn to offer new lessons to others,” Hall said.

Rachel Ferrante ’10 (left), executive director of the Maine MILL, Tristan Seavey ’26 of Calais, Maine, outside of the new Maine MILL building on Beech Street. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ��ý College)

Additional partnerships between �ֲ��ý and Maine MILL include the museum’s annual fundraiser, Soirée en Blanc. �ֲ��ý Dining, Conferences, and Campus Events handles catering for the events, and many �ֲ��ý dining staff members are from Lewiston-Auburn, Ferrante said, turning the fundraisers into full-circle moments.

“This museum is their museum, and what excites me is that they are helping make their own museum possible,” she said.

This year’s Soirée en Blanc will be held in the new museum building on Friday, June 26, the evening before the museum officially opens, meaning that �ֲ��ý will have a hand in welcoming the public to the new space for the first time.

“One of the things that makes this place so special is the relationships and the community that exists here,” Ferrante said. “It’s a huge part of what drives what we do and why we do it and who we do it for.”

Everyone is a star in ‘Everybody’

Sammy Weidenthal ’27 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:45:44 +0000

�ֲ��ý Theater’s production of Everybody sold out every performance at Gannett Theater last week — waitlists at the door, eager audience members finding out they’d gotten seats five minutes before curtain — and the room earned that anticipatory urgency. Associate Professor of Theater Courtney Smith, the scenic and projections designer, built a world that wrapped around you rather than played in front of you. It was immersive and a little disorienting, in exactly the right way.

All photography by Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2017 play, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, takes a risky leap of faith in inviting its cast into a game of role swapping. Before each performance, the cast members playing “Somebody” draw lots to decide who plays Friendship, Cousin, Kinship, Stuff, Everybody. The �ֲ��ý production also added a few other roles to the lottery, Strength, Beauty, Mind and Senses.

All these different roles, memorized by everyone and shared by the whole cast, could lead to dozens of different possible versions in any given production. The performance you witnessed would have been the only time it happened exactly that way.

Director and Associate Professor of Theater Tim Dugan shaped an ensemble that held that strangeness without flinching. For Adam Joseph (AJ) Matos ’26 of Springfield, N.J., and Noah Skinner ’26 of Sugar Land, Texas, the play was part of their senior theses, working with a cast that had to be ready for anything. As lighting designer, Skinner lit a world that had to feel ancient and urgent at once. There were many big questions on hand, including the nightly guessing game of who would play who? The answer? Everybody.

The cast includes: Mo Al-Jabry ’28, Graham Austin ’28, Aidan Bergeron ’27, Julian Boutin ’28, Jack Fisher ’29, Connor Gerraughty ’26, Josie Kim ’27, Jenny Liu ’29, Emily Maffezzoli ’29, Samantha Manogue ’26, Ruby Marden ’27, AJ Matos ’26, and Patrick Stronski ’27.

The following were also involved in the production: Costume Designer & Director — Rebecca Armstrong; Associate Costume Designer — Marcel Nagy ’28; Sound Designer — Emily Duncan Wilson (Brandow Family Fund Guest Artist); Associate Directors — Kate Norry ’28, Nicole Rossilli ’27, Elaine Wang ’27; Stage Manager — Sarah McOsker ’28; Associate Stage Managers — Queenie Tsang ’28, Colin Kenny ’28; and Associate Projections Designer — Evan Cox ’26.

Night at the museum: The community curates Museum of Art’s permanent collection

Alexandra DeMarco — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:13:56 +0000

During the first-ever �ֲ��ý Curates event in March, faculty, staff, and students, and President Garry W. Jenkins, became “curators” as they gathered to select a new addition to the Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Carrie Cushman, director of the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art, devised the idea for the event, which she hopes will be the first of many.

“This program enabled us to start a conversation with the community about what it means to be a collecting institution in the 21st century,” Cushman said. “We were able to educate students, faculty, and staff on the strengths of our own collection and to build communal investment in its future.”

Samantha Sigmon, �ֲ��ý Museum of Art assistant curator, speaks to �ֲ��ý Curates attendees about the museum’s recent exhibition, Shellburne Thurber: Full Circle. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

The �ֲ��ý Curates event was centered around the museum’s recent exhibition Shellburne Thurber: Full Circle, which ran from October 2025 to March. Curated by �ֲ��ý Museum of Art Assistant Curator Samantha Sigmon, in collaboration with Thurber, the exhibition featured works from across the New England-based Thurber’s decades-long career as a photographer, primarily capturing images of homes and the people who occupy them.

“Thurber is known for crafting photographs of interior spaces that capture people’s personalities and presence,” Sigmon said.

At right, Carrie Cushman, director of the �ֲ��ý Museum of Art, gazes at Shellburne Thurber’s photographs with a �ֲ��ý community member during �ֲ��ý Curates. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

Prior to the launch of �ֲ��ý Curates, museum staff had selected three works — respectively titled “Phantom Limb: My Dresser Top at Night,” “Newtonville, MA: Blue Couch with Multiple Portraits of Freud,” and “Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire” — from the exhibition for potential acquisition, made possible by the Barbara Morris Goodbody Collection Endowment Fund, to the museum’s collection of 8,000-plus objects. But, they planned to purchase just one work — and that’s where the �ֲ��ý community came in. Cushman and Sigmon invited faculty, staff, and students to the museum for an evening to tour the exhibition and vote on which work they should select.

“Phantom Limb: My Dresser Top at Night” (Courtesy of Shellburne Thurber)

“Everyone was visibly excited to take part in voting and hearing more about the artist and each of the three works,” Sigmon said. “The experience truly enlivened our galleries. I’m thrilled that we could lift the curtain regarding how our collections are built and include our audience in such an integral museum responsibility.”

Attendees were eager to learn more about the museum and offer their input on the selected photographs.

“�ֲ��ý Curates was an inspiring and creative way to connect the campus community with the art museum while showcasing its exhibitions,” said Krystie Wilfong, associate college librarian for collection management and scholarly communications. “Hearing Samantha speak about the identified works offered a fascinating behind-the-scenes perspective.”

“Newtonville, MA: Blue Couch with Multiple Portraits of Freud” (Courtesy of Shellburne Thurber)

The event was an opportunity to renew interest in the museum’s permanent collection specifically, while also “demonstrating accountability” to the �ֲ��ý community, Cushman explained.

“I appreciated Carrie’s explanation that events like �ֲ��ý Curates were meant to be part of an intervention in the colonial practices that had shaped art collecting,” said Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Prof of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies.

Though each piece received a similar number of votes, attendees ultimately selected Thurber’s “Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire.”

“Knowing that an artwork I voted for will become part of the permanent collection makes the experience feel especially meaningful,” Wilfong said.

“Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire” (Courtesy of Shellburne Thurber)

Featuring the photographer herself on a porch, harshly lit by a bright sun, the photo is distinctively different from Thurber’s usual compositions of interior spaces.

“The artist sits on the porch of her family lakehouse, a place incredibly entangled with her life and work. … She is not looking directly at the camera, and we see her in an everyday moment that captures her in a way a more polished portrait might not,” Sigmon said. “To me, it is as if we are right there next to Thurber in mid-discussion. Thurber’s power to transport us into the photograph really draws people in.”

�ֲ��ý Curates attendees cast their votes for which photograph the museum would acquire. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

“Self Portrait Sitting on the Porch in New Hampshire” nicely complements the museum’s preexisting repertoire of artist self-portraits and contemporary photography, Sigmon said. It’s also a unique holding from Thurber, who has rarely displayed her portraits of friends, family, and herself despite capturing many throughout her career.

“It was an honor to display this work and her other portraits at the �ֲ��ý College Museum of Art,” Sigmon said. “As the curator, I love that we get to keep a photograph that sets us apart from her previous exhibitions elsewhere.”

�ֲ��ý professor, students study ancient climate with Arctic sediment cores

Alexandra DeMarco — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 19:03:58 +0000

Hadley Blodgett ’26 of Buckfield, Maine, spends a lot of time thinking about just that — time.

In a laboratory in Carnegie Science Hall, as she conducts research for her senior thesis, Blodgett gazes over 7,000 years of history condensed into a sediment core extracted from a lake in northern Greenland. As a double major in earth and climate sciences and music, with a minor in religious studies, Blodgett enjoys reflecting on the way that time has constructed and altered her fields of study. Sometimes, when the immensity of the sediment sample’s past hits her, she thinks, “How am I holding this?”

“To think about the scale of what’s in front of me is just kind of crazy,” Blodgett says.

How exactly did sediment buried deep beneath Arctic waters find its way to the surface, then to �ֲ��ý? The story crosses oceans and icebergs, tundras and deserts, but connects to �ֲ��ý through Blodgett’s thesis advisor, Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Nick Balascio.

In Carnegie Science Hall, Hadley Blodgett ’26 (right) of Buckfield, Maine, conducts research on an Arctic lake sediment core for her senior thesis in earth and climate sciences, with the help of her thesis advisor Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Nick Balascio. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

As a paleoclimatologist, Balascio studies how Earth’s climate system has changed across millennia, primarily through analyzing lake sediment cores, which are layers of mud, dirt, and organic material extracted from the bottom of lakes in long tubes.

“Those lakes are natural history books that record what’s going on around the watershed of the lake as well as within the lake itself,” Balascio says.

In 2022, Balascio helped launch the Wandel Dal Project, a multi-national scientific effort investigating climate conditions of ancient Greenland, with support from a National Science Foundation grant. The project is studying Wandel Dal — a remote, uninhabited arctic desert valley less than 500 miles from the North Pole in Greenland’s Peary Land. Beneath its icy facade, Peary Land is a wealth of Greenlandic history, the one-time home of the island’s first people who crossed into the region from northern Canada.

Over the past 4,500 years, Peary Land was inhabited and then abandoned by three different groups of indigenous people. The Wandel Dal scientists hypothesize that migration in and out of the region corresponded with climate fluctuations — people occupied the area in warmer climate periods, then left when the climate began to cool again and the area became more difficult to live in because of dwindling natural resources.

“These are people with stone tool technology living in a pretty harsh and foreboding environment,” Balascio says.

By understanding Peary Land’s past climate contexts, scientists will gain a better overall understanding of how changing climate conditions affect the Arctic, which is already warming about four times faster than average global warming rates under anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change.

“There is very little coverage of this high Arctic region in terms of what we know about the past climate history,” Balascio says. “It’s right at the margins of the Greenland ice sheet, so understanding the sensitivity to climate change is really important.”

During a research trip to Peary Land in northern Greenland, Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Nick Balascio and colleagues from the multinational Wandel Dal Project camp out in the Arctic while collecting lake sediment cores for climate analysis. (Courtesy of Jostein Bakke, professor at the University of Bergen)

In the summer of 2024, Balascio and colleagues traveled to Peary Land to collect lake sediment cores. They flew to Svalbard, Norway, then chartered a plane to eastern Greenland, flew in a prop plane to Wandel Dal, and finally rode in a helicopter to their research site, where stone tools and tent sites made by ancient humans still littered the barren landscape.

“Working in these extremely remote and remarkable landscapes is inspiring as an earth scientist, to see the natural beauty that the earth has,” Balascio says.

It was the end of July, the beginning of the brief and only time of year when Wandel Dal’s lakes are not frozen, a necessity for obtaining lake sediment cores. Balascio and colleagues set up coring platforms on inflatable rafts and guided large, heavy tubes called corers overboard into the 200-foot-deep lakes to collect six-meter long sediment samples.

The sediment cores, several of which are now stored in �ֲ��ý’ core storage facility in Carnegie’s basement, have been a fantastic resource for students, Balascio says. In addition to Blodgett, Fletcher Libre ’26 of Alta, Utah, and Zach Van Dusen ’25 also used the cores for their senior theses in earth and climate sciences. The samples “are very precious,” Balascio says. “I feel fortunate that we have those here at �ֲ��ý and that �ֲ��ý students can literally put their hands on these really remarkable records and learn about an environment that they might never travel to but can experience in some way.”

In the Wandel Dal valley, researchers from the Wandel Dal Project set out onto a briefly unfrozen Arctic lake to collect lake sediment cores. (Courtesy of Jostein Bakke, professor at the University of Bergen)

While Blodgett hasn’t been to the Wandel Dal region, she did have the opportunity to visit Greenland during a trip with Balascio to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, for Greenland Science Week in November 2025. The trip was funded by Balascio’s NSF grant, which includes funds for supporting student research and mentorship. Blodgett was so excited by the opportunity that she hardly allowed herself to believe it was real until she was on the way to Greenland.

“This is just too cool to happen,” Blodgett thought to herself. “And then, I was on a plane.”

Presenting her thesis research during the conference and at a community outreach event, Blodgett contributed new scientific discoveries that could have implications far beyond her own project.

In Carnegie Science Hall, sediment cores are stored in long tubes and sealed with cling wrap to ensure the samples maintain their shape and quality. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

When she began her thesis research on the sediment cores in the summer of 2025, Blodgett was surprised by how clearly she could tell time from changes in the sample’s composition. The sediment follows a fairly consistent pattern — denser sediment for what were likely warmer climate periods, less dense sediment for cooler periods — until the top four centimeters.

Blodgett initially thought she was doing something wrong when she began analyzing that top section and had trouble pulling out a “plug,” a sample of sediment removed for detailed analysis. She took a closer look and observed thick, laminated layers of sediment building up the top and newest portion, strikingly different from the millimeter-sized, less dense layers of sediment that comprised the rest of the sample.

“Something in the climate is causing the environment to react in such a way that it makes this sediment deposit in a different way than it has for the entire rest of the record,” Blodgett says.

In Carnegie Science Hall, Hadley Blodgett ’26 of Buckfield, Maine, shows off one of the Arctic lake sediment cores she is analyzing for her senior thesis in earth and climate sciences. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

She’s hypothesizing that this top portion of the sample is reflecting changes caused by anthropogenic climate change.

“I don’t know why [sediment cores] fascinate me, but I just really enjoy working with them,” Blodgett says. “Before I started all this, I had no clue what they were. I’m always open to doing new things.”

Trying new things has defined Blodgett’s �ֲ��ý career. She arrived on campus planning to major in history but pivoted to earth and climate sciences after taking the Short Term course “Soil Geography of New England” and realizing how much she enjoyed working with soil — and the way that this work allowed her to discover more about the Maine land she grew up exploring.

“I definitely have an appreciation for just how important [the land] can be culturally and the need to treat it with respect,” Blodgett says.

This idea of respect for the land and awareness of its value to its inhabitants, past and present, is a central tenet of the Wandel Dal Project. As a cradle of the country’s civilization, Peary Land is of great cultural significance to the Greenlandic people. The Wandel Dal scientists are supporting a Greenland National Museum initiative to rename the region — currently named for American explorer Robert Peary — to “Inutoqqat Nunaat,” meaning “land of the ancient people” in Greenlandic. A team of archaeologists are also a part of the Wandel Dal Project and investigating the human history of northern Greenland.

When he began his career as a paleoclimatologist, Balascio wasn’t particularly focused on the human aspect of the landscapes he was studying. But, over time, as he began collaborating with archaeologists to study Viking settlements in Norway or the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, where human impact on the land is undeniable, Balascio became more and more interested in understanding how human history is interlaced with climate history. Working with the archaeologists in Wandel Dal in particular “became a very enriching experience and gave me a new perspective on this field of study that I had been working on previously for a decade,” Balascio says.

During Greenland Science Week, while chatting with scientists and archaeologists, and showing eager kids artifacts from Wandel Dal, Blodgett, too, was reminded of the key role that people and culture play in her field.

“You get so disconnected from the ‘people part’ sometimes in climate science, even though people are such an important part of it,” Blodgett says.

Hadley Blodgett ’26 of Buckfield, Maine, analyzes a lake sediment core in Carnegie Science Hall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The trip to Nuuk was also an opportunity for Blodgett to field advice from scientists about graduate school and research as she prepares for life after �ֲ��ý. Balascio has been an attentive mentor in that sense as well, Blodgett says. While guiding her through her thesis research, he’s helped her explore opportunities at �ֲ��ý and beyond.

“No matter where I end up after May,” Blodgett says, “I know for certain that the trajectory of my career has been changed because of the guidance shown to me by Professor Balascio and so many essential people in the �ֲ��ý community.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers 2524995 to �ֲ��ý College and 2126047 to College of William & Mary. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

National recognition for �ֲ��ý’ ‘exemplary’ success in community engagement as well as its return on investment for graduates

Mary Pols — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:07:06 +0000

�ֲ��ý has once again been recognized by the American Council on Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for its deep level of commitment to community engagement, an honor the college first achieved in 2008 and again in 2015. Recently �ֲ��ý was also lauded by ACE and Carnegie for its success in providing paths for graduates to earn competitive wages.

Last week, ACE and Carnegie announced that �ֲ��ý had been designated with the 2026 Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement. Community engagement constitutes “collaboration between institutions of higher education and their larger communities (local, regional/state, national, global) for the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources in a context of partnership and reciprocity.”

At �ֲ��ý, inspiration for that work comes from the diverse and rich opportunities for student learning, skill building, and collaboration offered by the college’s location, explained Darby Ray, director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

“The Carnegie recognition is a wonderful affirmation of the college’s dual commitment to high impact student learning and community well-being, as well as the off-campus community’s investment in our students, “ said Ray, who is also the Donald W. and Ann M. Harward Professor of Civic Engagement.

Mutual respect between college and community, along with desire for collaboration, is a key part of the success, Ray said. “The result of it is that �ֲ��ý students have meaningful opportunities to work alongside community leaders to develop and apply knowledge and skills to address real-world challenges like public health, affordable housing, and arts-based economic development.”

�ֲ��ý was one of approximately 230 institutions nationwide to receive the 2026 Carnegie Elective Classification for Community Engagement, and the only Maine institution of higher education on the list. This designation, which �ֲ��ý must apply for cyclically, is valid until 2032.

“Your institution’s application documented excellent alignment among campus mission, culture, leadership, resources, and practices that support dynamic and noteworthy community engagement,” ACE and Carnegie wrote in a letter to �ֲ��ý, lauding the college’s “exemplary institutionalized practices of community engagement.”

Aspirations Days, a joint effort of the Harward Center and the Aspiration Club, provide 8th-grade students of Auburn Middle School and Lewiston Middle School opportunities to think about potential next steps in life. Between 500 and 600 visit campus annually. In September 2025, students from Auburn Middle School toured the campus and had a full day of college access workshops, Purposeful Work sessions, and activities led by �ֲ��ý students and Harward Center staff. More than 100 �ֲ��ý students volunteer during Aspiration Days. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

�ֲ��ý has advanced the work of deepening partnerships, leveraging community assets, and addressing urgent societal challenges with “clarity and distinction,” the award letter said. The accomplishment “is especially noteworthy amid significant federal policy and funding shifts shaping the future of higher education.”

In addition, in 2025, �ֲ��ý was identified for its success in a relatively new classification that ACE and Carnegie began using in 2022, the Student Access and Earnings Classification (an earlier version was known as the Social and Economic Mobility Classification), which prioritizes student success. The classification is intended to identify which American colleges and universities are providing access to students from lower socioeconomic and historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds to higher education and paths to earning competitive wages.

�ֲ��ý ranked high in terms of its return on investment. Eight years after a student first enrolled at �ֲ��ý — so typically, four years into being in the workplace — data shows that their median earnings are 68 percent above the median earnings of a comparison group of similar institutions.

“Both these designations speak to the deep and rewarding experiences �ֲ��ý has to offer to students,” said President Garry W. Jenkins. “We’re committed to our community and we’re giving our undergraduates meaningful educational experiences not just on our campus, but within the Lewiston-Auburn region we care about so much. They’re volunteering in public schools and museums. They’re consulting and conducting research in a wide range of areas, from sustainability to water quality and asbestos remediation, and studying the history and culture of this community.”

On a chilly night in December, students from Associate Professor of Theater Courtney Smith’s Introduction to Digital Media course presented their final project on Lisbon Street, the heart of Lewiston’s historic downtown. For their work in this community engaged learning experience, they explored resources that included the Muskie Archives on campus and the Androscoggin Historical Society, culminating on a multimedia portrait of Lisbon Street, dating back to the days of electric trolley cars. In attendance at the big reveal included Professor Emeritus Doug Hodgkin, Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline, and Darby Ray, who collaborated with Smith. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

These community connections are not fleeting, Jenkins noted. “We see this reflected in how many �ֲ��ý graduates stay in the state — a little more than 12 percent — or how they develop the habit of building community connections in their future neighborhoods and communities across the country and the world.”

“At �ֲ��ý, we believe that students from all backgrounds should have access to the transformative power of education,” Jenkins added. “That is and always has been part of our mission. To know that their �ֲ��ý education is helping graduates thrive in their careers is reason to celebrate.”

New funding pushes Carolina González Valencia’s film toward the finish line

Meredith McCarroll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:30:35 +0000

Carolina González Valencia, associate professor of art and visual culture, was tired of the ways that she saw representations of women like her mother on the screen. She was weary of the ways that she did not see her mother Beatriz on the screen. She hated seeing dynamic people like her mother — who is funny, creative, and opinionated — portrayed as quiet and humble domestic workers. Her mother has a “big personality,” and González Valencia, who is accustomed to using art and film to reach an audience, wanted to create a narrative that captured the complexity of her mother’s experience — as a domestic worker in the U.S., but also as a full and complex person.

Beatriz Valencia, the mother of Carolina González Valencia, explores the character the two collaboratively invented to get toward the truth of her experience as a domestic worker in the U.S. — the topic of the forthcoming film, How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps. (Courtesy of Carolina González Valencia)

The result is How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, which is in final post-production this month, and will be complete by the end of the year. A recent grant from Unbound Philanthropy gave the final push to bring the film toward completion. In its early stages, though, the biggest obstacle was finding how to authentically tell a story featuring domestic workers that felt new … and true.

When González Valencia began the process, she sat down to talk to her mother, Beatriz Valencia, about her work. In these early conversations, she saw her mother shrink into a prescribed role. There didn’t seem room for her mother’s complexities to show up in a film when she approached it as a documentarian. She also was aware of “the complicated waters of having this power of representing another person.” González Valencia began really thinking about how to approach this project — meant to represent a domestic worker in the U.S. — collaboratively.

González Valencia has frequently drawn on collaboration to access authenticity. In an installation in Beirut in 2018, she posted a question (“Are you afraid you’ll keep moving forever?”) on flyers that hung across the neighborhood where she was in residency and invited responses via text. Her 2019 “Video Postales” featured photographs and videos shared by artists to accompany lines from González Valencia’s writing. The result was surprising and beautiful — accessing something more true than she could have created alone. Tapping into her collaborative instinct as well as her background in performance art, González Valencia engaged her mother in some improvisatory exercises.

Still from How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps featuring Carolina González Valencia’s mother, Beatriz Valencia. (Courtesy of Carolina González Valencia)

“Let’s pretend I’m a journalist and I’m here to interview you and you’re a very, very accomplished person,” González Valencia said to her mother during the early stages of the film. “What do you want to be very accomplished at?” Her mother immediately responded that she would want to be a famous writer. What emerged was a central fictional character around which the collaborative genre-bending film took shape.

As soon as the fictional writer emerged as a character that Beatriz played, her mother spoke more freely and truthfully to her daughter. “That fiction allowed us to be more honest,” González Valencia said.

González Valencia likely already knew that this film was going to push against boundaries. Documentary is a complicated genre that sometimes poses as simple or straightforward.

“I was really interested in pushing what we can do as a documentary. It’s a form that needs to be questioned because it comes from a legacy of a very colonial way of looking at the ‘other.’” González Valencia was not traveling to a new land to represent another culture, but she knew that she could still fall into the patterns of misrepresentation if her mother was not empowered as a collaborator.

González Valencia notes that other artists have blurred genres — drawing from fiction to access the truth. Author Claudia Rankine, for example, is creating a sort of “collage” in her writing, which has served as a model for González Valencia in her art. She also cites two Belgian filmmakers as influences: Chantal Akerman, who explored her own relationship with her mother in genre-blurring documentary films, and Agnès Varda, who blurred fiction and fact in her documentary films. Models like these allowed González Valencia to collaboratively create a documentary about her mother as a domestic worker, who is playing the role of a famous writer in parts of the film.

As the semester wrapped up, González Valencia traveled to Splendor Omnia just outside of Mexico City, which she described as a dream studio. This is her first feature-length film, so the experience at Splendor Omnia will not only allow her to finish the film in a very high-end way, but it is also offering González Valencia an education. “It’s kind of like a school to me,” she said.

Beatriz Valencia featured in the musical sequence of How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps. (Courtesy of Carolina González Valencia)

How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps is the result of what happened when González Valencia and her mother dared to let go of the factual in favor of the truth. Of course deciding upon an approach for the film was only the very beginning. González Valencia’s project has received a slew of grant support. The production of the film has been made possible by support from sources that include the Sundance Film Festival, Abundant Futures Fund, and the LEF fund. The most recent $50,000 grant from Unbound Philanthropy enabled the film to move into post-production.

González Valencia has high hopes for the impact that her film can make. Primarily, she wants to contribute to ongoing conversations about narrative structure, domestic work, and immigrant rights.

“I don’t believe in the single story,” González Valencia said. And when you are part of a group that gets represented by a superficial, single story, the stakes are higher. “I’m interested in being part of the conversation that complicates it, that shows that there is not one story.”

González Valencia and her mother are certainly pushing back against a single narrative created “from the perspective of pain and trauma.” González Valencia hopes that this film can show that “when we talk about immigrants, when we talk about domestic workers — we are people full of joy and laughter.” Especially now, she hopes the creativity and joy of the film — which includes a musical sequence — will “help people to feel closer.”

Everybody in the pool: The making of Metamorphoses

Mary Pols — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:09:09 +0000

Shortly after Courtney Smith joined �ֲ��ý in the fall of 2024 as an associate professor of theater, he floated an idea for a production that was both over-the-top ambitious and absolute catnip to his colleague Sally Wood, a visiting lecturer in theater who was trying to decide what play to direct in the fall of 2025.

His suggestion would require help from an unprecedented number of campus partners and doing due diligence to be compliant with local, state and federal regulations — and test Schaeffer Theatre like nothing else in its 65-year history. What Smith had said to Wood was: “You know what would be really awesome? Metamorphoses.”

Wood is used to pulling things off. When she’s not in the classroom or in one of �ֲ��ý performance spaces, she’s working with professional theaters and actors all over the region, including Portland Stage Company and the Theater at Monmouth. But the 1998 play, an omnibus interpretation of Ovid’s Greek mythology written by MacArthur Award winner Mary Zimmerman, has one foundational issue that makes it seriously complex to pull off. There’s just one set. But it’s a swimming pool. As much as Wood was thrilled that Smith was game for this project, she said would not have suggested it.

“Just because it’s too much to ask,” she said, sitting on the stage this fall as the dress rehearsal was about to get started for what would be a sold-out run of Metamorphoses encompassing Halloween weekend. “It’s so big.”

To do it right, you need to build a pool on a stage that can handle, say, 22,000 extra pounds in the form of water, as well as performers who don’t mind getting wet. That means lots of laundry. Major technical challenges. Because of all Metamorphoses requires to bring it to life, Wood said the play is rarely produced except in academic settings. It can be done without the full soaking experience, say with kiddie pools or some sort of reflective surface, she said.

“And I think it still works. But there’s magic in the water. Real magic. When people see it, it’s like, they always remember it. And I don’t know of any other play that has that kind of stamp.”

In one of the late acts in the �ֲ��ý production of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, the sun god, Apollo (Jack Hagan ’27 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine), sings to his son Phaeton (Graham Austin ’28 of Basalt, Colo., center in the pool) as Phaeton laments over their difficult, limited relationship to the Therapist, played by Isabel Fronzaglia ’26 of York, Maine. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

+Click here to learn more about what Graham Austin was thinking during this scene

Graham Austin ’28, on providing some levity after the intense, dramatic tale his castmates Liu and Hagan had just performed, and what was motivating his character.

“I love comic roles. I think the play sort of heightens [the comedy] a little more by having that absolutely horrible, evil, dark tale right before it. And then it sort of just goes dark. They clean things up, and then you have Isabel in her office suit in the rolly chair, and then this guy comes up with a gold chain on his neck, flashy sunglasses, the pool floaty. I think the contrasting natures of the [two scenes] are really highlighted.

At that point, I’m trying to impress my father. It’s like when a little kid goes and writes all over their father’s paperwork on his desk or something, or messes up his work life. I’m really trying to get him to notice me and get him to say, ‘Oh, that’s my son right there. I’m proud of him.’ So I’m projecting myself onto that. And it’s just falling a little flat.”

The actors are in and out of the pool throughout the play, with one character drowning in a shipwreck, along with his crew (�ֲ��ý dancers in this case), another conducting a seduction in the water, King Midas hanging out poolside with a drunken Bacchus, and even a god’s offspring undergoing modern therapy while spinning across its surface in a round pool toy.

The first time Wood saw Metamorphoses was in New York at the Circle in the Square, with Zimmerman directing (the writer/director would go on to win a Tony for that production in 2002). “I remember just not breathing,” Wood said. “I’ll never forget just not breathing, for like an hour and a half, and being so sad when it was over.”

“I’m convinced it’s the water,” Wood added. “The play on the page is beautiful and really good, but there’s a trance. It’s crazy. There’s a literal transformation that happens once you get in there.”

And it happens for the actors. “I loved getting in that swimming pool,” said Graham Austin ’28 of Basalt, Colo., a likely theater major, who like the more than a dozen student cast members played multiple roles. As Phaeton, son of Apollo, he is the character getting therapy in the pool, and Austin played the part with the gusto of Sean Penn as the iconic Spicoli of 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. “It was a highlight of every time I did that play. Just overall, fantastic time in that thing.”

Engineering the pool into being was a major feat that started in August, about a week after another theater and production veteran, Mike Quinn, started his new role at �ֲ��ý as technical director. He and Smith, who served as production manager, lighting and projections designer, and faculty advisor for students on the technical side of the production, are splitting some of the duties formerly performed by longtime �ֲ��ý theater leader Michael Reidy before his recent retirement from his position as senior lecturer in theater and managing director of Theater and Dance.

A Maine native who spent 14 years in scenery construction and technical design in New York, Quinn had been working in Portland since 2023 with various venues and organizations. At the dress rehearsal, Wood joked that Quinn might not have taken the job if he’d known what his first month would be like, but Quinn said he’d been warned. “He [Smith] said, you’re going to have to build a pool if you take the job.”

Getting the specifications right — no one wanted to capsize the Schaeffer stage — was key. In the end, the depth of the empty pool was 24 inches, but the water itself couldn’t be that deep.

“It is not a 16th over 16 inches,” Quinn said. “As prescribed by the structural engineer.”

“We had to task a fairly wide group of people to make sure that as an institution we were checking boxes and crossing our ‘t’s and dotting our ‘i’ s,” said Chris Streifel, �ֲ��ý’ director of capital planning and construction. “There were all kinds of different codes and building ramifications that we had to work through structurally.”

Because the audience needed to be able to see into the pool, Schaeffer also had to be reimagined as a venue. Risers were constructed in the wings of the stage in lieu of the regular seating . This limited the audience size somewhat, but made for an intimate experience; during particularly splashy scenes, audience members in the front row might have gotten a little damp (although crew members whisked through between scenes, wielding mops to put the water back into the pool).

Grace LaFountain ’26, knee deep in the shallow pool on the stage at Schaeffer Theatre, the main set for Metamorphoses while Sarah McOsker ’28, next to the hose, looks on as the pool fills, very slowly. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

Getting the chemistry of the water just right kept Quinn busy as well. At first the team hoped to keep it fresh with herbal and natural remedies, but after draining it over October break, they opted to add chlorine, since there were many bodies moving in and out of it during rehearsals. But not too much. “We did not want it smelling like the Y,” Wood said. At ABC Pool and Spa Center on Lisbon St., one of the workers groaned when Quinn stopped by; queries from �ֲ��ý had apparently become that much of a regular thing. “I think they were like, ‘Oh my God, why don’t you guys just get it together?’” said Wood.

Eirene Furr ’28 of Washington, D.C., in the role of Alcyone, leaves the stage, after being reunited with her lost husband, King Ceyx, played by Mohamed (Mo) Al-jabry ’28 of Shinyanga, Tanzania. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

+Click here to learn more about what was going through Eirene Furr’s mind as she acted in this scene

Eirene Furr ’28 on this scene, where Alcyone and Ceyx are reunited for eternity. Ceyx had gone to sea against Alcyone’s wishes, and he was drowned during a terrible storm. Alcyone collapsed on the shore, looking for him, but here, in this deeply emotional scene, the gods have decided to allow them to be together, but not as humans. Instead they are transformed from their human forms and exit the stage on wings, as seabirds.

“That definitely was the most daunting moment of the play for me because I think it’s very easy for it to feel stupid, you know? And for it to not feel in the world because you’re playing this pretty much like a metaphor of being free and letting life change you in whatever way that may be.

For me, that moment, it was less about being made into birds and more the fact that he came back. It was this hope, because I think Alcyone is a character who is terrified of change. And so to see this moment where Ceyx comes back and he’s different, but she doesn’t care and she gets to be free, and they both get to be free together. That’s something that I thought about, like the love and the happiness and the hope in that moment. And I think once you lead with that, everything else kind of becomes clear in a way.”

The pool was both a weird quirk and an inspiration for Eirene Furr ’28, a rhetoric, film, and screen studies major from Washington, D.C., who plans to focus on playwriting. She came to �ֲ��ý after four years at the Chicago Academy of the Arts and has been in many productions, but none like this. “It’s not like an August Wilson play where it’s very much grounded in reality,” Furr said. “You have to live in this world where there’s gods and there’s love, and there’s betrayal, and there’s curses, and it makes for a very challenging experience.”

Like most of the cast, she played multiple roles, most prominently the role of Alcyone, whose husband, King Ceyx, is lost at sea. “I’m lucky because I only had to go about knee deep in the pool,” Furr said. “But I know people who fully dived in and in each scene had to be completely wet.”

Included among them was Jenny Liu ’29 of Suzhou, China, who plays Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras, cursed by Aphrodite into falling in love with her own father. She’s tossed around the pool in a particularly intense scene. “I was so excited when I heard that we were actually going to be in the water,” Liu said. “And I actually enjoyed it. It was warm.”

The everybody-in-the-pool experience brought the cast closer together, Furr said. “Because when 15 people are running around the stage with towels and having to dry off and change, and there’s a whole laundry system going on, it makes it chaotic but it also makes it really, really fun.”

Jenny Liu ’29 of Suzhou, China, in the role of Myrrha, daughter of King Cinyras (Jack Hagan ’27 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine). Aphrodite curses Myrrha, forcing her to fall in love with her father and, with the help of her nursemaid, tricks him into an incestuous relationship with her. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

+Click here to learn more about what was happening for Jenny Liu in this scene

Jenny Liu ’29 on performing in what is the most intense scene in the play. Cinyras, blindfolded, and Myrrha are passionately entwined, but her character is in agony, torn between getting what she wanted but what she knows is terribly wrong:

“It’s a very, very personal moment. So many things are going on and it varies from show to show. Sometimes I can get into the character, sometimes I cannot. That moment with Jack is a pretty strong moment where we had that connection and trust.

It’s complicated, especially for my character, I think, because she’s the one who’s struggling within herself. She has her pride, and the strong desire, so we see the fight, and it’s beautiful. Three nights out of six I’m locked in and it just depends [on the performance]. But the last night, it felt different because it’s the very last time I played this character. It felt like saying goodbye to the character when I was walking off stage. And I felt this character more for the last time.”

For Smith, seeing this kind of student experience is a large part of what drew him to �ֲ��ý during the hiring process. “What I think that the department really does well is creating the space for students to learn the craft and do their thing.” That might be a common enough sounding goal in the liberal arts, but at �ֲ��ý it felt like a reality. “I really felt it. It was really obvious to me,” Smith said.

Though when Smith arrived at �ֲ��ý last fall, he did develop a wish list of things he wanted to improve. Reidy had been a master of keeping old resources and materials going but it was time for upgrades. “Some instrumentation was dated back as early as the ’70s,” Smith said. It was held together by tape, or worse. “It had, oh gosh, it had asbestos wiring. I think most of it was probably from the ’80s, and that’s just not equipment that we use anymore.”

Associate Professor of Theater Courtney Smith on stage at the Schaeffer Theatre during the first run through of filling the water feature that served as the main set for the fall play, Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman, directed by Sally Wood, visiting lecturer. (Sammy Weidenthal ’27 for �ֲ��ý College)

Rachel Wray, senior director of corporate and foundation relations at �ֲ��ý, worked with the George I. Alden Trust, based in Worcester, Mass., which generously provided a $175,000 grant for the necessary theater tech upgrades. �ֲ��ý contributed more funds, and now all three theaters — Schaeffer, Gannett Theater, and the Martin Andrucki Black Box Theatre — have new and improved equipment, including four big moving lights that were vital to making Metamorphoses glow, and a central control board (an ETC Ion Xe lighting control console) that can function as a true teaching tool. Some describe it as the guts of the whole operation.

For Smith, it was essential that �ֲ��ý graduates who want to work as professionals in the world of stage, lighting, and theater, be trained on current equipment. “Students in my classes, including Introduction to Digital Media, and in lighting projection design related courses, are learning on the tools they’ll see in the real world,” Smith said. “That was a huge lift to the program to be able to do that, and it was all because of that award.”

Furr’s first �ֲ��ý production left her with a deep appreciation for her new community. That includes the responsive audience.

“It’s easy to kind of compartmentalize your work as an actor, and kind of separate it from yourself,” Furr said. “Part of that is healthy and it’s good, but it can sometimes make you unaware of the amount of work that you put in. So it is definitely very rewarding to hear people come up and say how much they liked the show. It makes me very proud of all the work that the entire ensemble put in and the directors and then each and every stage hand and the theater directors and the sound designers. Really, everybody put their maximum amount of effort in.”

Sew sustainable: Student, faculty designers stun at annual Trashion Show

Alexandra DeMarco — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:44:08 +0000

From inside of her dorm room, Grace Thomas ’26 of Bethesda, Md., heard a clinking outside of her door. She peeked into the hallway to find a trash bag dumped on her doorstep. A fragrance drifted up from the bag, which was full of empty metal cans.

They were exactly what she needed.

For months, Thomas and Annie Robinson ’26 of Atlanta, Ga., had been campaigning friends — and friends of friends — across campus for their leftover cans and metal bottle caps. This latest delivery comprised leftovers from a birthday party for a friend’s boyfriend’s football teammate.

After meticulously washing out each can in an Olin Arts Center sink, Robinson and Thomas combined the cans with several other kinds of waste to form their winning design for the 20th annual Trashion Show, held on Nov. 19 in Alumni Gymnasium. The show takes place annually after Dining, Conferences, and Campus Events’ Harvest Dinner, a fall-themed meal in Commons open to the public and featuring live music and horse-drawn carriage rides across campus.

Trashion invites �ֲ��ý students, faculty, and staff to construct runway pieces out of trash with the goal of bringing awareness to the amount of waste produced on a college campus — even one that prides itself on having achieved a carbon neutral standard of sustainability in 2019, when �ֲ��ý was only one of seven colleges in the country to have achieved that standard.

Trashion models and designers take the stage to celebrate at the end of the show. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The �ֲ��ý student EcoReps organize the show. All designers provide a brief description of and backstory for their pieces, which student emcees read aloud to the audience during the show. A panel of judges — this year made up of Associate Director of Culinary & Retail Operations and Executive Chef Michael Staffenski, Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki, Campus Safety Supervisor Mark Cayer, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Christine Martinez, and Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese from Global Education — generate some light competition among entrants.

Thomas and Robinson went into the event as defending champions, having won last year with a ballgown made of rolled-up paper from academic readings, co-designed by both students and modeled by Thomas.

“Now there’s expectations for ourselves,” Thomas said two days before the competition, as the two were crushing cans and cutting strips of cardboard for this year’s design. “The pressure is on.”

The designers started thinking about this year’s entry the day after last year’s Trashion Show. They wanted to make something completely different from last year’s ballgown, which was monochromatic and chic, so they spent hours scrolling Pinterest and sketching possible designs. Thomas suggested incorporating metal bottle caps, and the outline of the outfit formed around that medium.

On the Trashion runway, Grace Thomas ’26 of Bethesda, Md., models the outfit she co-designed with Annie Robinson ’26 of Atlanta, Ga. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

The final design featured a denim skirt made of old blue jeans, overlaid with ribbons of paper and strips of turquoise hammock fabric strung through about one hundred crushed cans, all held up by a belt also made from the hammock. The top was made from multicolor cardboard, plastic, and fabric woven together and adorned with bottle caps. They completed the look with a wig made from strips of cardboard and hammock fabric and a necklace of bottle caps. The plan was that Thomas would model, but they made Robinson a pair of matching bottle cap earrings to wear backstage.

Each material tells the story of a relationship: a friend’s torn jeans in the skirt, fabric pulled from another friend’s ripped hammock that hung outside Page Hall their freshman year, cans from the football team, and more.

“We’ve had so many people’s trash and help,” Robinson said. “I’ll get texts like, ‘Oh, do you still need bottle caps from people?’ I don’t remember talking to them about this, but they’re happy to help.”

Many of the bottle caps came from a surprising secret stash. Robinson was visiting a craft-loving friend who lives in Turner Hall and happened to ask if she had any spare caps sitting around. The friend pointed Robinson to the crevice between the heater and the wall, where a collection of bottle caps had apparently been growing for years. Previous occupants had created the cache, Robinson’s friend said, for no apparent reason except amusement.

“What is this pile for, if not for Trashion?” Robinson thought to herself. She grabbed chopsticks and scissors to get into the space, which was too small for her hand, and dug out every bottle cap.

Annie Robinson ’26 of Atlanta, Ga., third from left, and Grace Thomas ’26 of Bethesda, Md., grin onstage after winning the Trashion Show for the second year. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Thomas and Robinson constructed their design in Olin Arts Center’s room 321, the same number, coincidentally, as the duo’s freshman year dorm room in Parker Hall. As new �ֲ��ýies, they bonded over making arts and crafts and had a shared wall between their beds that they decorated with art and ephemera from “anything that happened together,” Robinson said.

When Robinson, who is a double major in economics and gender and sexuality studies, learned about the Trashion Show, she knew that she and Thomas, a studio art major, would make a great team.

This year, even though they’re both swamped with thesis projects, they still made time to meet in Olin to craft, their miscellaneous cardboard and fabric scraps spread out across the studio floor as they transformed trash into �ֲ��ý couture.

“Do I look like a little kid playing dress up?” Thomas asked as she tried on the cardboard base she had constructed for the wig. She was engineering a way to create bangs that would hold their shape and not fall in her face. She landed on little strips of cardboard that curled upward so that she could safely see the Trashion stage.

“Visibility is crucial,” Thomas said.

Two days later, against the backdrop of colorful lights, Thomas modeled the outfit to a cheering crowd of Trashion attendees. The clink of the dozens of cans adorning her skirt complemented the music played by student DJ Djibril Diaw ’27 of Mount Hernon, Mass. For the second year in a row, Thomas and Robinson won first place for their design, earning a $75 gift card to Forage Market in Lewiston.

Erik Lindholm ’27 of Bethesda, Md., at center and and Finn Merrick ’29 of Easton, Md., at right strut their stuff on the Trashion runway. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Students from Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read’s first-year seminar “Family Stories” earned third place honors at the Trashion Show for their design featuring paper birds, fans, snowflakes, and airplanes, constructed with recycled paper from paper mills in central Maine and modeled by Finn Merrick ’29 of Easton, Md.

In second place was Read himself, who modeled an academic gown made from an antique table cloth and adorned with fallen yellow leaves from the beloved ginkgo tree outside of Carnegie Science Hall. Read and his longtime partner in Trashion creations, Kerry O’Brien, retired assistant dean in the Dean of the Faculty office, co-designed the piece. As he walked, Read threw ginkgo leaves into the air and around the runway.

Among the other elaborate designs was another leafy piece by seniors Elle Stogel, Caroline Mayer, Vyshu Viju, and Ellie Millard, and modeled by Millard. That dress was constructed from shredded paper, tissues, and real maple leaves. The designers aimed to draw awareness to key environmental issues in Maine, including recycling bottles and cans, but most crucial to the dress itself, the ways in which climate change is already threatening the state’s maple sugar industry.

From left, seniors Caroline Mayer, Vyshu Viju, Elle Stogel, and Ellie Millard put the final touches on the outfit they co-designed before Millard hits the runway. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

“We knew that this is something big that’s going on in Maine right now, and we wanted to advertise it,” Millard said.

After most of the audience had left, ginkgo leaves from Read’s costume lingered on the stage. They fit in nicely with the autumn decor around Alumni Gym, including a fall-themed photo backdrop behind pumpkins and a stationary four-wheeler — where a few students sat to watch the show — and tables laden with desserts like Baked Alaska and red velvet cupcakes.

Gazing across the ginkgo leaves after the show, Robinson reflected on her final fall at �ֲ��ý.

“It’s fall confetti,” Robinson said. “It’s a great final celebration of the last time I’m going to see that ginkgo tree outside of Carnegie.”

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read throws ginkgo leaves across the Trashion runway while modeling his academia-inspired look. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ��ý College)

Additional student designers and models comprised:

Mary Parker ’27, Hazel Krinsky ’27, Arnav Panigrahi ’27, and Surta Shah ’28, who modeled pieces crafted from surgical blue wrap by Partners for World Health
Shay Campolongo ’26, who designed and modeled a skirt and shirt made with over 200 film slides
Campbell MacDonald ’27 who modeled and designed a cardboard suit
Ava Teleki ’29 who modeled and designed an outfit from yogurt and milk containers
Alessandra Williams ’29, who co-designed and modeled the �ֲ��ý Environmental Coalition’s design made from a Halloween costume and candy wrappers
Sophia Lebeau Toung ’28, who modeled an outfit fashioned from candy and snack wrappers, co-designed with Ella Albright ’28
Daisy O’Dwyer ’26, who modeled and designed an outfit featuring a shirt of Dum Dum lollipop wrappers and a skirt from a trash bag
Mikayla Ferguson ’28, who designed and modeled a dress from scraps of old t-shirts
Erik Lindholm ’27, who modeled and co-designed an outfit by the �ֲ��ý EcoReps, made of materials including compost bags, newspapers, and a bike tube

Watch the full Trashion video below:

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