The first was Pat Lichtenberg ’90, whose warmth, wisdom, and generosity made my early years at Vassar feel a little less daunting. She was a mentor in every sense of the word.

When Pat retired in 2015, Lisa Tessler took the reins as AAVC ED and Associate Vice President for Engagement. She brought renewed focus to connecting alums through clubs, classes, affinity groups, and careers. Then came COVID. Rather than allowing the pandemic to stall engagement, Lisa and her team reimagined it, creating a remarkable array of virtual programs that continue to thrive today. Most notably, she strengthened the AAVC Board and the Alum Recognition program, and led milestone celebrations, including the Alumnae House Centennial.

Now leadership in those areas passes to Willa Vincitore ’92, who has spent almost 34 years at the College, and appends this new role to her existing Associate Vice President for Engagement portfolio. In many ways, her appointment seems like a culmination. Having arrived as an Exploring Transfer student in the summer of 1989, and transferring to Vassar her junior year, Willa never got to experience four years as a Vassar student. She says, “To be honest, my initial reason for wanting to come to work at Vassar was because I wanted a little more time. I wasn’t done yet.”

She never imagined she would make a career here. “But it’s been a delight to work directly with more than 100 years of the lived experience of Vassar through our alums,” she reports. “I’ve had the privilege of working with volunteers as early as the Class of 1917, all the way up through our current student body. It has been an incredible experience to recognize a throughline over the more than 150 years AAVC has been around. Being restless change-agents and deeply invested people who care about other human beings—that’s the Vassar DNA. And I’m happy to be part of the family.”

These transitions coincide with a changing of the guard among AAVC presidents. Monica Vachher ’77 recently concluded her four-year term as AAVC President and Vassar Trustee, and Anne Green ’93 now steps into those roles. (See Anne’s thoughtful introduction to the community on page 58)

We’ll miss Monica and her steady leadership, though I have no doubt she’ll remain one of the College’s most enthusiastic champions. I look forward to working with Anne as she begins this next chapter of the AAVC. —Elizabeth Randolph

n higher education, we often find ourselves speaking a language of urgency. Our days are painfully punctuated with paper deadlines, exam dates, and distracting social media alerts about the latest shock-value news. In a world that feels increasingly fractured—riven by social, political, and technological upheaval—the instinctual response is to take action.

As an institution dedicated to the liberal arts, however, Vassar posits that growth comes from reflection and restoration, which require something the contemporary world seems least inclined to offer: time.

In this issue, we focus on the unique role of the artist in such fraught times. Through alum-related residencies and fellowships, the Vassar community continues to champion the freedom of the mind. Whether it is through the serene landscape of Catwalk, founded by Purcell Palmer ’62; the storied legacy of Vassar’s W. K. Rose Fellowship; or the breathtaking solitude of Zion Canyon Mesa, directed by Logan Hebner ’78, these programs offer a rare and radical gift: the permission to be unfettered.

While some may view artist residencies as luxuries, such opportunities are essential to our common humanity. The residency can provide a sanctuary for experimentation and the productive failures that often precede transformational breakthroughs. When artists pursue their work, they are not escaping the world’s fractures; they are developing the vision that may help us bridge them and ultimately heal.

The founders and stewards of these programs understand a fundamental truth at the heart of Vassar’s ethos of learning: that the ability to experiment and readjust is not a detour from life’s work—it is life’s work. Such residencies and fellowships help ensure that the next generation of creators has the support to think deeply, to discover new approaches to living together, and to remain free.

This commitment to the arts is a commitment to our shared humanity. It is a recognition that we are capable of profound endurance and creative transformation when given the room to breathe. As you read about the remarkable work emerging from these opportunities, may they remind us of time also shared on campus, where the arts continue to flourish and where experimentation, self-discovery, and growth frame time spent in nature amid the 100-year-old arboretum and meandering walks that take us to new places.

When communities fracture under the weight of injustice or political unrest, art provides a common language to process collective trauma, translates raw pain into meaningful expression, and reminds us of our shared humanity when everything else threatens to pull us apart. The stories that follow remind us how the liberal arts and Vassar continue to animate our lives even decades after graduation. As you read the pages ahead, I hope you feel a sense of pride and promise, as I do.

Vassar Dedicates The Dede Thompson Bartlett Center for Admission and Career Education—a Symbol of “Light” and “Hope” for Students and Graduates Alike

Speaking to an audience of more than 100 that included many of her Vassar classmates, Bartlett ’65 said she was thrilled that the students have nicknamed the building “The Dede.” “I wanted to give Vassar students a full career education experience with counseling and mentoring and support that my classmates in 1965 and many other Vassar grads never had,” she said.

Bartlett recalled the day the building’s architect, Maryann Thompson P’17, asked about her vision for the building. Bartlett pointed to the large windows that grace the structure. She said she told Thompson, “‘I want light.’ Light symbolizes hope and inspiration. Ultimately, this building isn’t just about admission and career education. It’s about creating a fulfilling life.”

Bartlett praised Stacy Bingham, Associate Dean of the College for Career Education, and her staff for the excellent work they had been doing for many years in dark, cramped dorm rooms in Main.

Bartlett also lauded the many donors who contributed to the construction and programming in the new building, including her 1965 classmates and Christopher Dixon, who made a substantial donation in memory of his late wife, Barbara Saslaw Dixon ’69. He spoke at the event about her legacy and the importance of career education.

Dixon’s gift will provide funds for on- and off-campus programs, internship opportunities, professional development, networking, and career advisement, as well as bolstering staffing to support students as they embark on their career journeys. He said he hoped his gift would help students craft their own post-Vassar lives. “Each of us has a unique talent,” Dixon said. “The goal is to recognize what you’re good at and find a career path that fits.”

Chang recalled an evening in 2023 when Bartlett spoke to the Board of Trustees about her vision. “Dede, you didn’t simply inspire us, you galvanized us,” she said. “You spoke with such clarity, energy, conviction, and unmistakable force, reminding us of this fundamental truth—that a liberal arts education must do more than expand minds, it must open doors … And that to do this well, we needed a dedicated, integrated space—a hub where these aspirations could take root and flourish. You encouraged us to partner with you philanthropically, leading us by example and setting in motion the very reality we celebrate today.”

Smith said she and her staff have seen a marked increase in visitors lately. “What is so wonderful is that the new Bartlett Center easily accommodates this volume …. [It] is a beacon, all the while reflecting a tradition of empowerment and change-making for good—that’s the soul of Vassar, right? We are a place ripe with opportunity and where dreams can take flight. Students come in through Admission and then leave with not just a strong academic foundation but also with a community of supporters who believe in them, who uplift them … Yes, people like you who love Vassar and are extending your legacy through them.”

Bingham spoke about the day in 2020 when she and Bartlett first discussed a vision for the new building. Bartlett had asked her, “What are your greatest needs?”

“That simple, powerful question paved the way for a truly transformational moment,” she said. “It solidified an opportunity to invest in two critically important areas for the College: admission and career education … This building is a collective achievement, a tapestry of many hands and hearts, and so I extend my thanks to every individual who supported this project at any level.

“By co-locating Admission and Career Education, we are creating a ‘full circle’ experience for our students,” Bingham continued. “We are sending a clear message, from the very first day a prospective student walks into Admission, that Vassar is already thinking about life beyond these gates.”

Bartlett, who was involved in every step of the planning for the new building, spoke with members of the Vassar Communications staff before the dedication. A wide smile rarely left her face as she spoke about what the celebration would mean to her and her husband, Jim.

Bartlett recalled that when she served as a Visiting Fellow with the Council of Independent Colleges, on 30 college campuses across the country, she saw very few colleges with robust career education programs. She credited President Elizabeth Bradley with highlighting the importance of career education at Vassar. “Under Betsy’s leadership, career education has become first and foremost on our campus, symbolized by this beautiful building. It fulfills a dream I’ve had for decades.”

Bartlett said she was particularly proud of the fact that the building was “inspired by a woman, designed by a woman, and funded by women and the men who care about them. It will benefit all Vassar students for many years to come.” —Larry Hertz

Kudrow, Bucatinsky, and King spoke before a packed house in the Martel Theater in a conversation moderated by Associate Professor of Psychological Science Dara N. Greenwood. Kudrow noted that The Comeback has made some comebacks of its own. After being canceled after Season One in 2005, it had a nine-year hiatus before its second season in 2014. “We realized we were making a show about the evolution of the entertainment industry,” said Kudrow. In the third and final season, which debuted in March, Kudrow’s character, aging B-list film actress Valerie Cherish, accepts a part in an AI-written TV show after taking a break from acting during the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike.

Although billed as a comedy, Greenwood noted that The Comeback has its share of dark moments. “It’s a unique blending of comedy and gravitas,” she said. “Some scenes are funny, and others made me cry.”

Bucatinsky, who won a Primetime Emmy for his guest appearance on the drama series Scandal in 2013 and has a major role in The Comeback, said that though he and Kudrow were at Vassar together for two years, the two didn’t get to know each other until nearly a decade later. They were co-creators of the critically acclaimed Showtime TV series Web Therapy, which debuted in 2011.

King, best known for his writing and directing for Sex and the City, said he first met Kudrow after seeing her perform with a Los Angeles improv sketch group, The Groundlings, long before she landed her role on Friends.

Kudrow and Bucatinsky shared memories of their time at Vassar. Bucatinsky, a drama major, said he surmised that the closest he might have come to interacting with Kudrow, a biology major, was when he performed in a dance troupe on the steps of Olmsted Hall, where she might have been trying to study inside. “I can see Lisa thinking, ‘Who are these people? Can’t they get enough attention?’” he said.

Kudrow said one of her favorite biology professors, Mark Schlessman, had once told her that it didn’t really didn’t matter what her major was, saying during her first year at Vassar, “You’re going to learn to think critically here, and there’s nothing you can’t do with a liberal arts education.” Nevertheless, she said, majoring in science had turned out to be useful in her acting career, “because it’s all about finding things out. It gave me some of the tools I needed, and Phoebe Buffay took me the rest of the way.”—Larry Hertz

he art of dance has been thriving at Vassar for decades, yet the College has never had an actual dance major. That will change this fall.

Vassar’s Dance Department received official approval in June from the New York State Education Department to offer a major, a development that Dance Chair Miriam Mahdaviani said is sure to provide new opportunities for students, the College, and even the community.

“Approval of the dance major signals the excellence of the Vassar dance experience to prospective students, guest artists, and faculty,” Mahdaviani said. “Just as importantly, the dance major provides students with a credential that reflects a distinguished education and profound commitment to the art form, bolstering their applications to graduate programs and future employers.”

The department has recently added new performance opportunities and scholarly inquiry to Vassar’s dance program in anticipation of the new major, Mahdaviani said. “This past year provides a great example of some exciting new additions: a new musical theater technique course, a cross-disciplinary course offered by Dance and Cognitive Science, studying and performing the works of iconic 20th-century choreographers José Limón and George Balanchine, and an array of guest artist interactions,” she said.

Just this past spring, members of the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT), the College’s faculty-led company of student dancers, had the opportunity to work with renowned contemporary choreographer Jon Lehrer, who created a new piece specifically for the VRDT dance concert held in April. “Jon told us that this is only the second time he’s ever choreographed on dancers outside of his own company of professional dancers, because he saw who he had at Vassar,” said Mahdaviani. “And, in fact, he plans to add the piece that he made to his company’s repertoire because he was so delighted with it.”

In future academic years, the department would like to start offering lecture/demonstration performances at the local public schools, Mahdaviani said, and possibly performances in public spaces to ensure that the performing arts remain accessible to the wider local public.

As Vassar awaited state approval of the Dance Department’s application submitted late last year, some students were already eager to declare a dance major. One is Annabelle Fields ’27, an art history major from Los Angeles who has been dancing since age three and plans to double major in dance.

Fields said she had not originally considered Vassar because the College did not offer a dance major. But after meeting John Meehan, Professor of Dance on the Frances D. Fergusson Chair and Director of the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre, at a summer intensive program, she decided to look into attending. What she found really surprised her.

“I think it’s kind of a hidden gem,” Fields said of the Dance Department. “I don’t think a lot of people understand how incredible the Vassar dance faculty is—every one of them in their own right.”

Once she enrolled, Fields knew she had come to the right place. “I’ve never found a dance community that is both as talented and engaged as Vassar’s, but also as kind and welcoming as Vassar’s is,” she said. “If you want a liberal arts experience, and you still want to dance at a really high professional level, I could not find anything nearly as close to Vassar’s standards,” she said.

—Kimberly Schaye

Lisa Brawley

Stephen Rock

Eve D’Ambra

Tom Ellman

Rebecca Edwards

Gwen Broude

Brian Godfrey

—Kimberly Schaye/Larry Hertz

Many Brewer teams had highly successful seasons—six earned berths in national championship tournaments—so competition for the individual awards was closely contested this year, Director of Athletics and Physical Education Michelle Walsh said. “The 2025–2026 season marked another outstanding year for the Brewers, and our Awards Committee had several deserving nominees to select from in each of our award categories,” she said. “We are thrilled to be able to recognize this year’s major award winners and all of our amazing student-athletes.”

Bailey, a scrum-half on the women’s rugby team, led the squad to its 10th consecutive Final Four appearance in the National Collegiate Rugby (NCR) tournament, earning NCR All-American status for the third consecutive year. She graduated from Vassar, ranking second all-time in points with 595, and she broke the school record for tries with 119.

Fiske, a midfielder on the men’s soccer team, finished his career with 28 goals and 12 assists, fifth in points and goals in Vassar history, and was part of two NCAA Tournament teams, including the 2024 Liberty League champions. He was a two-time United Soccer Coaches Association All-American and was named Liberty League Player of the Year and the Male Scholar-Athlete of the Year in his senior year, becoming just the second male Vassar student-athlete to win the award since its inception in 2012-13.

Schoenegge is one of Vassar’s most decorated student-athletes of all time, earning All-American status in cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field in each of the past two years. This year, she won national titles in the indoor mile and outdoor 1,500-meter runs, and also earned All-American status in the 5,000-meter run at the NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships in May 2026. In the fall of 2025, she earned All-American status in cross country with a 15th-place finish at the NCAA Championships, leading her team to a school-best 10th place finish overall. She earned Liberty League titles in the mile, 3,000-meter, and distance medley relay, which earned her Liberty League Most Outstanding Track Performer of the Meet honors.

Desai, a middle blocker on the men’s volleyball team, finished the 2026 season ranked second in the country in blocks per set and tied a single-season record for solo blocks with 29, helping Vassar to a 17-win season, including five wins over nationally ranked opponents. He was named an American Volleyball Coaches Association First Team All-American and was a First Team selection on the United Volleyball Conference squad.

Merchant led the squash team in victories and was named to the All-Liberty League Second Team. He capped the season with a seven-game winning streak, winning all three of his matches in the Liberty League Championship tournament, and won four matches in the Collegiate Squash Association (CSA) Divisional Championships.

Frances D. Fergusson Coaches Awards: Fernando Bauermeister ’26 (men’s tennis) and Catherine Peacock ’26 (women’s lacrosse). Peacock was limited to just 37 games due to injury but won 135 draws in her career and a posted career-high 57 in 2025. She was elected captain of the team but sustained an injury before the season, so she served as an assistant coach. She was named to the Liberty League All-Academic Team. She was cited by the judges for her resilience and determination to motivate her teammates.

Bauermeister, who was a captain of the team for three years, was named to the Liberty League All-Conference team in singles and doubles in each of his three seasons, amassing 74 wins in dual-match competition. Off the court, Bauermeister mentored local youths; served meals at The Lunch Box, a soup kitchen in Poughkeepsie; and processed more than 12,000 items for Dutchess County’s annual Coat Drive.

Iron Brewer Awards: Amanda Hanrahan ’26 (women’s track and field) and Kyle Benson ’26 (men’s squash.) Hanrahan, who earned a berth in the hammer-throw competition at the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships, was cited by Vassar’s sports performance staff for setting several records in weightlifting. Benson was cited by the sports performance staff for his constant pursuit of new movement patterns and routinely completing hundreds of push-ups and deadlifting over 550 pounds.

Kubiak, an economics major, posted 18 wins for the men’s tennis team and was named to the Liberty League All-Academic Team twice. He earned All-Liberty League Singles and Doubles selections twice. He also earned College Sports Communicators Academic All-District distinction.

Vassar Student Worker of the Year: Marcos Medina ’26. He earned the honor for his work as a Facility Monitor and Game and Equipment Assistant in Facilities and Game Operations. Medina trained other students in game-day operations and was the shot-clock operator for Vassar’s intercollegiate basketball games.
—Larry Hertz

“The play happened toward the end of the fencing season, and I knew doing both would be challenging,” McCarthy said. “It was a hectic time, but I had lots of support from Coach [Bruce] Gillman and my drama professor, Amanda Culp, to help me accomplish my goals.”

McCarthy, an international studies and film double major from Dix Hills, NY, has been fencing competitively since he joined a fencing club in fifth grade and has pursued his love of singing and acting for nearly as long. He performed in several musicals at his high school and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute in New York City before enrolling at Vassar. He said he applied to Vassar chiefly for the academic experience but also so he could continue competing in fencing, and because his high school vocal teacher was acquainted with his current vocal instructor, Adjunct Artist in Music Mary Nessinger.

Gillman said he wasn’t surprised McCarthy has been able to juggle the demands of fencing and theater. “Devan has always been a reassuring presence for his teammates, always seeking to aid and challenge them to achieve their best,” the coach said. “His continued good leadership is probably why they have chosen him to be one of our captains.”

Culp said she recognized some of the skill sets McCarthy brought to the stage were also useful in his athletic pursuits. “I’ve never seen Devan fence,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the verbs ‘parrying’ and ‘sparring’ can be used to describe both a fencing bout and a well-paced, well-argued stretch of dialogue. Devan’s work in Dance Like a Man demonstrated the interrelation of these skills beautifully. His work onstage showcased how good he is at perceiving and responding to the movements, provocations, and conversational thrusts of his scene partners.” —Larry Hertz

quick glance at the journalistic pieces Ludolph has published since graduating from Vassar as an English major will confirm her love of the not-so visible. Her New York Times pieces, for example, tend to focus on the forgotten characters of the 20th century whose lives make for such compelling reading that it becomes impossible to imagine their stories have been so seldom told. Her subjects line up with moments in history—WWII, the Cold War, the Space Race—that Ludolph likes to call “moments of rupture.”

The space they create is the real-life cottage industry fueled by the Spiritualism craze that gripped Europe in the aftermath of the Great War and the Spanish Influenza when mediums, channeling, and even publishing posthumous voices became social fixtures.

Ludolph has nothing but enthusiasm for her characters. “They’re playing with the question ‘What is authorship?’ at a time when the idea of women’s authorship, women’s authority, is fraught,” she says. “Historically, the topic of spirit mediums raises the specter of fraud, but I wanted to look at them as experimental, entrepreneurial, scrappy … Also, if we’re going to talk scams, it’s a scam that women were being paid half the wages of men at the time. I’m drawn to the idea that my characters don’t feel the need to follow the unspoken rules of an unfair environment.”

That love for different academic fields crossing paths was something nurtured years ago in Poughkeepsie. Born and raised in Brooklyn Heights (“when that meant the Promenade, the Historical Society, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses”), Ludolph spent a year at Georgetown before transferring to Vassar. There, she discovered an English department that was “so unbelievably interdisciplinary.” She recalled several of her favorite professors, like “Dan Peck, who was doing 1820s and 1920s art and literature. Then there was Miriam Cohen, and Pat Wallace, who were from two different departments, co-teaching a class about lit and history. Everything about how the humanities were taught at Vassar was collaborative, interdisciplinary, clashing all these ideas together.”

Vassar stayed in Ludolph’s heart after she graduated and began an eclectic writing career, ultimately providing the springboard to apply to Catwalk—a decision for which Ludolph is grateful. She speaks with reverence of Catwalk’s founder Purcell Palmer and her mission to nurture creativity. “It was very important to her that she protect artists over the course of their whole careers. So, it’s not just that she would pick people and they would come for two weeks and off they went, but once they were in the family, they were in the family for life.” Ludolph pointed out that the fall and winter months at Catwalk are reserved not for new artists but for alums of the residency. “They want you to come back all the time and feel like you have a place where you can keep making work. It’s a really wonderful thing to become a part of.”

isual artist Spence Holman says, “I thought I would be dead before fifty. How did I get from thinking the future was wide open to having an expiration date?”

His series of postcards, created during a Catwalk residency in 2025, sought to answer that question via a conversation with his younger self. “Between my time at Vassar in the late 1990s and the pandemic in 2020, a lot happened,” he explains.

Looking back, he says returning to the Hudson Valley from Baltimore, where he lives, was a big draw in deciding to apply to Catwalk. He remembers his Vassar days as an “open-ended time full of possibilities,” and part of his process during his residency was to revisit and re-experience the campus.

Holman visited the campus twice during his residency and says he was very intentional about how he spent his time. It was “about remembering and just being in the space, really, not overthinking it,” he reports. “Just seeing what happened, being curious about what came up and then taking that back to Catwalk.”

The seven-by-five-inch ink-and-pencil sketches he produced for the series “Wish I was there / Wish I was here” illustrate glimpses of what Holman calls “hope, healing, resilience, and rebirth.” The pieces are as deeply emotional as they are gracefully rendered. On the front of the cards, he drew trees or flowers. (One of his pieces has the famously large London plane tree on the lawn in front of the library.) On the other side, Holman placed text that often seems to illustrate two sides of the same emotion. In one example, he placed “It’s so beautiful” right above “It’s so overwhelming.” Another of his cards paired “Anything can happen” with a phrase that seems to indicate a slipping locus of control: “Things keep happening.”

Today, he is happy to report he’s entered his Content Period. He is back where he grew up in Maryland. “I’ve got my little house. I’ve got three kids. I’ve got a garden that I love. I’ve got good people in my life. And I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

Holman returns to Catwalk for a second residency this fall.

For more information about the artist and his work, visit jspenceholman.com.

he scene opens in a city on the banks of the Hudson. The protagonist is a professor at a liberal arts school called Waverly College, who’s long been her family’s self-appointed historian. One day, she makes a life-altering discovery that sends her world spiraling. That’s the premise of the pilot that Shona Tucker, Chair of the Drama Department, wrote in a six-week workshop with playwright Chisa Hutchinson ’02.

“I’m calling it What Had Happened Was—that’s the working title, anyway,” explained Tucker. “Waverly College is similar to, but not the same as, Vassar. The protagonist is a fifty-something African-American woman professor, like me, and her discovery is not unlike a recent one of my own.”

Stylistically, Tucker’s vision for the saga is “a cross between The Chair (starring Sandra Oh) and Greenleaf, the HBO show centered around a prominent Black family in the South,” she said.

This wasn’t Tucker’s first Catwalk experience. She first attended in summer 2023.“Catwalk has been very good to me,” she said. “I came back because it gave me the space to write [the first time].”

During her 2023 residency, she spent most of her time working in the long back room of the house; this time, Tucker and Marshall mainly sat at the kitchen table or in the living room. “Dynamics are different with different people,” Tucker reflected. “But you knew you had a limited amount of time in this beautiful setting; you knew that [the people who run Catwalk] understand artists and that they enjoyed having artists there.”

Tucker has been telling pieces of her family’s story ever since Alex Haley’s Roots first aired. “It shook America,” she recalled. “That series gave me both mission and permission. I grew up attending a predominantly Black church and living in a Black neighborhood, but going to an 87 percent White public school in suburban Louisville, Kentucky.” Most television shows centered on White characters, as well. “I had no idea that my family, my little life, held stories anyone else would care about. But [Roots] ignited something in me,” said Tucker.

Though Tucker is often immersed in multiple projects at once, the pieces all fit together. “They’re all very much connected, and they make me joyful,” she said.

Sometimes her academic and cinematic worlds collide in unexpected ways. She just wrapped up work on a movie that’s currently shooting at Vassar. The writer/director and many of the actors are alums. In the movie, Tucker plays a Vassar professor—almost. “They don’t say the name ‘Vassar,’” said Tucker. “But being a small college professor playing a small college professor was really cool.”

She says teaching itself is as important to her as acting or directing. “I want to be a teacher that students are proud to say they had as a professor,” said Tucker. “There are a couple of people working on this film that were my students at one point, and they don’t seem to be like, ‘Oh my God, here she comes.’ So, I feel like, maybe I’m okay in that regard!” she laughed.

Next up? “I wrote my trilogy, Mississippi Mud, and then haven’t touched it for years, because I’ve been working on other things,” she said. “I’d like to finish it and get it published.”

She would love to return to Catwalk, but she also feels a responsibility to give other artists a chance to experience it. “Catwalk is a wonderful resource,” said Tucker. “I pray it continues to be around for artists for a long time.”

Rivkin’s hand-drawn animations are featured in documentary films at the intersection of art, history, and science. These films have screened nationally on PBS’s Great Performances and at the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, NY, and internationally at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, the Factual Animation Film Festival in London, and the National Museum of Australia.

He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Storytelling at Kutztown University (Pennsylvania), where he teaches courses in pre-production for animation and film.

My time at Catwalk continues to inspire my work. Developing a method for making cyanotype animations at the residency has led to a recent project titled The Shape of Seeing. This is an animated short documentary film, made from cyanotypes, poetically exploring the way infants perceive the world in the first year of life.

Bettman, a New York-based choreographer and performance artist, graduated from Vassar with a degree in art history and earned her MFA in experimental choreography at UC Riverside. She went on to present her work around New York City at PAGEANT, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Cathy Weis Projects, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, and at Dripping festival in Sparta, New Jersey.

In her practice, movement serves as a way of filtering information and a means of telling stories that evade language.

She arrived at Catwalk seeking a place to make work that “can feel too playful or risky to attempt elsewhere.” And she found it. Out of that summer came the first draft and the overall contour of a short film, which she continued to develop during her second Catwalk residency in winter 2026.

The intensity of this second residency provided the perfect conditions to move her project forward. “I was there during the first of this past winter’s epic storms,” she says. “It was so cold, and the snow was so relentless.” While Chuck Irwin, the property manager, plowed and shoveled through the night, Bettman baked a loaf of bread for him in the warmth of the Tower. “The drama of frigid temperatures and cascading drifts of snow coincided with a total hush—things became very ‘Overlook Hotel’ quite quickly,” Bettman remarks.

In the midst of the blizzard, she raced to finish a draft and shoot a livestream with multiple cameras. “I ended up in a closed-loop workflow, trudging back and forth wearing this dramatic white coat between the Tower apartment and the Garage Studio, finding an immediacy between composition and production that’s only possible under conditions of total immersion,” she says.

Though the script remains in flux, this state of endless transformation is intrinsic to Bettman’s work. The tension between the impulse to create freely and the responsibility to maintain a consistent practice is ever-present. “Having a reprieve from the fraught formula of daily life,” she explains, gave her space to “measure how the shape, force, and momentum of a story sweeps through my body as it crashes ashore.”

The “slow peacefulness” of Catwalk has allowed her to bring an element of intentionality into her everyday practice. As a maturing artist, Bettman says, she now strives to have the faith to let something generate slowly, “seeking something more subtle that maybe doesn’t have such an urgent need for an audience to witness it.”

This bears fruit in allegory of the cyclorama: TEST: “The room was coming to me as a feeling in my dreams … an intense pressure on all sides looming over a hollow core, a warning that the meticulously studied exoskeleton was wearing thin.”

From that first summer and frigid winter at Catwalk came not just a fleeting respite, but a blueprint for sustained self-discovery.

“At Catwalk, I realized I can find myself even without knowing the way—and perhaps bring you along too,” says Bettman. “I’m putting together a methodology that sustains space for dreaming, and doesn’t insist so emphatically upon resolving itself.”

y the time writer María José Candela ’12 was awarded a Rose Fellowship in 2025, her determination to win the coveted award had started to resemble the type of quest one might read about in an epic poem. “I was super happy to get it because this was my fifth or sixth time trying,” Candela recalls.

Candela, currently a PhD student in Spanish literature at Georgetown University, has shown the same dedication to her writing, which has already benefited from Rose funding. “I’ve used it for traveling, a little bit of research, and also to not teach in the summers,” she says. “Without that teaching load, I have so much time to work on my writing. So that has been amazing, just a relief. When that’s lifted, I can advance so much more quickly.”

Fluent in Spanish, English, and French (with a basic competency in German and Portuguese), Candela is fascinated by language, the written word, and philosophy (her major at Vassar). “I think philosophy adds so much to my writing,” she says. “It teaches you how to read differently. I appreciate writing that is interested in form and voice and lets these elements do their own kind of thinking instead of just telling a story under the guise of objectivity.”

As a college student and developing writer, Candela thought it was more important to inhabit “those spaces that were not necessarily about craft, but about perception, reading deeply, and thinking critically. I think Vassar was amazing for that.”

In her stories, she channels the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, perhaps the most celebrated writer from her native Colombia, and the authors who in turn influenced him: Kafka and Faulkner—“those writers that are just a little more playful with language and who kind of don’t say, ‘This is reality.’ There are always these layers of doubt that undercut their own articulations of the world,” she notes. Candela says her work continues to evolve and that she has already noticed changes in her style since she finished her recent story collection. “I enjoy seeing my writing change in ways that I’m not always conscious of,” she observes. “I’m still figuring it out.”

This passion about perception became apparent during Kroopf’s very first class at Vassar, Cultural Anthropology with Professor Candice Lowe Swift—with whom he would travel to Mauritius as an ethnographic research assistant and later collaborate on Dynamo, a 60-minute documentary about Vassar’s Engaged Pluralism Initiative co-directed with 15 students, five faculty, and five staff members.

It’s clear that Vassar has had a major influence on Kroopf and his work as both an educator and a filmmaker. Kroopf credits former Associate Professor of Africana Studies Kiese Laymon (the first person Kroopf heard suggest that “Jay-Z is just as much a theorist as Karl Marx”) and Associate Professor of English Tyrone Simpson with igniting his interest in multicultural ethics and “giving greater amplification to voices that are systemically marginalized from all forms of canonized, expressive media.”

An independent study with Eve Dunbar, Professor of English on the Jean Webster Chair, familiarized Kroopf with the act and consequence of racial, cultural, and religious passing in America, while Vassar’s Prison Education Program opened his eyes to the conditions behind family separation and workforce discrimination—and restorative justice circle practice, taught by prisoners to college students inside prison gates.

“Finding ways to distill really potent speech acts and really beautiful performative moments of expression of someone’s authentic truth are things Vassar taught me to pay close attention to,” says Kroopf, who returned to his alma mater as an Adjunct Professor in the Film Department during the 2019–2020 academic year. He is now a lecturer in Cinematic Arts at the University of California, San Diego, with an MFA with Distinction from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

In 2022, Kroopf received Vassar’s W. K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts, affording him the time and space to work on two feature films now five years into development.

The nonfiction film The Art of Survival tells the story of Kroopf’s relationship to a Holocaust survivor, acting teacher, and movement artist who hid her Jewish identity for 30 years, even from members of her own family. She died in July 2025 at the age of 97. The film chronicles their failed attempt to stage an original play about her survivorship, teaching, and creative practice, and Kroopf’s continuing attempt to stage it in her absence.

“At the center of both The Art of Survival and Late Bloom,” Kroopf explains, “is the question of whether the most difficult thing a person, family, community, or culture has gone through can be repaired and what the ingredients are for repair, if repair is even possible.”

Kroopf applied nine times in ten years, treating the Rose Fellowship as a yearly review of his creative practice. When he finally received the award, he says, it was “surreal” and “transformative.”

“The space the Rose Fellowship opened up has allowed me to make much slower, richer work and have relationships driven less by urgency and more by curiosity. I want to keep creatively exploring ways that people relate to place and each other throughout the world,” Kroopf says.

Cruz Martínez’s documentary is called Pa, which is both a shortened version of Papá (Dad) and of their own first name. Their relationship and the external forces that have challenged it over the 15 years since the diagnosis are the heart of the film. “It’s a journey and exploration of what life has been like—not just dealing with disorder in our family, but also living in Puerto Rico, choosing to stay here, what that means, and how things are here,” explains Cruz Martínez, who lives in Bayamón, just outside of San Juan. “For example, right now, in all of San Juan, there hasn’t been any water for a month. Things like this happen all the time, and we’re just trying to survive it.”

“I had my eye on the [Rose] fellowship for a while, and I thought it was a great opportunity to have a year of not worrying about where the money for rent came from, or not worrying about sustaining my life, and I think that just opens up a lot of space for sitting down and working,” they say. “Right now, I feel like I’m carving a little bit of my every day to dedicate to my art, and with this fellowship, I could carve out an entire year and just dedicate it to this piece of work, which requires a lot of me.”

Cruz Martínez just debuted their first documentary feature, Nació Simón, at a local film festival. The film, which Cruz Martínez worked on over the course of six years, tells the story of a trans, nonbinary mother of two who performs as a drag king in San Juan. “I was working at a restaurant because I had to make ends meet, and I ended up working with the protagonist and also the cinematographer of the film,” Cruz Martínez explains. “I also went to one of their drag king shows, and I had never seen anything like it.” The film, they say, is “a very intimate portrait of their work, of their life.” At the same time, says Cruz Martínez, “it also fell into my own journey as a trans, non-binary person. I feel like a lot of my filmmaking happens alongside my own personal processes in my life.”

Nació Simón was released on the heels of Casa Laurel, their short documentary about a local karaoke hangout frequented by Puerto Rican elders who have resisted becoming casualties of the neighborhood’s gentrification. This film aired on PBS as part of the series Homegrown: A Part Of/Apart From, featuring the work of filmmakers from U.S. territories. “I used to live around there, and for a few years, I wanted to make a portrait of them,” Cruz Martínez says of the elderly singers. “How they’re resisting in their own way by being there, and the joy of their resistance.”

Right now, Cruz Martínez is looking forward to coming back to the Northeast in September for a one-month residency at MASS MoCA, the contemporary art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. There, they plan to focus on editing some short, experimental films they’ve been working on before they immerse themself in Pa. “I feel like with Pa and these short pieces, I want to delve into a more experimental approach,” Cruz Martínez says. “l want to explore different ways of telling that I haven’t explored before.”

Twenty years later, both Streep and Hathaway have stormed into theaters worldwide in a witty, poignant, and acerbic sequel that has once again set Hollywood afire. Grossing over $433 million in its first 10 days, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has already financially outpaced the original. Set once again in the haute couture environment of print fashion journalism, the sequel updates the action for a changing media landscape of corporate takeovers and digital encroachment.

Critical praise has matched the box office receipts, with The New York Times raving about Streep’s performance as a haughty fashion editor-in-chief: “Meryl Streep’s turn as Miranda was so vivid, so strong and exactingly detailed that the performance stood on its own; it was almost easy to forget that the character could have been inspired by anyone.”

Hathaway, in her reprisal of Andy Sachs, has garnered plaudits of her own. The New Yorker declared that “Hathaway once again shoulders Andy’s mix of steeliness and flightiness with consummate grace.”

Vassar alums who have seen the film likely missed a third, hidden connection to their alma mater: Accomplished vintner Nicole Sierra-Rolet ’84 took to social media to reveal that in one scene featuring Streep and Hathaway, “you can catch a glimpse of a bottle of Chene Bleu, the wine I make in France.” —Greg Costello ’00

Liz Hara ’04, writer and puppeteer, was awarded a Children’s and Family Emmy (CAFE) Award for her writing on the TV show Carl the Collector, the first PBS Kids show centered around autistic characters. The award was for Outstanding Public Service Initiative, and the show won another award for Outstanding Writing for a Preschool Animated Series. Fellow alum Eric Black ’94 was also in attendance and was nominated in the Short Form Animation category for his contributions as a producer on the Apple TV+ program Eva the Owlet.

Ken Lustbader ’83, below, co-founder and co-director of the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project, was honored by the Preservation League of New York State with a Pillar of New York award, which goes to those “who have taken extraordinary steps to protect, preserve, and promote New York’s cultural and architectural heritage.” Lustbader and his colleagues document historic places connected to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in New York City going back as far as the 17th century. “This remarkable team has transformed how New Yorkers and the world understand LGBTQ history through documentation, advocacy, and public engagement,” said the Preservation League. –Section by Nandini Likki ’25

Outstanding Faculty/Staff Award: Marianne Begemann ’79

At the ceremony, President Elizabeth H. Bradley, who worked closely with Begemann, said, “Marianne has embodied the Vassar ethos as much as anyone I know—she dives deep into every facet of every project with thoughtfulness and creativity, and never loses sight of the ‘why.’” She noted that when the College embarked on any number of policy discussions, Begemann was always there to remind colleagues, “First, we should get clear on our values.”

AAVC President Monica Vachher ’77 called Begemann a “marvel,” noting that “while Marianne was demystifying chemistry for generations of students, shepherding complex building projects into fruition, and charting a steady course for Vassar’s future, she also somehow managed to raise five children,” three of whom are also alums. Since Begemann is also the daughter and granddaughter of alums, said Vachher, “for Marianne, service to Vassar is not just a job—it is a lifelong, multigenerational devotion to the community that shaped her.”

Speaking at the award ceremony, Begemann attributed her lengthy affiliation with the College to its special character. “Vassar’s truly a place that values and encourages intellectual exploration. That means recognizing what you don’t know, the freedom to ask questions, discover, and learn—learn about what truly interests and motivates you,” she said. “So I’m deeply grateful for having been able to spend 40 years recognizing what I don’t know and the freedom and support to explore those unknowns, while sometimes appearing to know more than I do.”

Distinguished Achievement Award: Jonathan Karl ’90

Gamarra said Karl was the AAVC’s choice not only because “he is an absolute superstar in his field,” but also because of the way Karl has provided “thoughtful investigation, constructive insights, and balanced perspective in a time of extreme bifurcation in our political discourse.” Gamarra said Karl has also “been able to stand up to attacks on free speech with strength, dignity, and grace.”

Karl told VQ that he considers his selection for this award a “high honor,” adding, “My experience at Vassar was formative; it’s a big part of how I became what I became in my career.” Karl noted that his time at the College included his very first broadcast job: hosting a psychedelic music show on WVKR. “It wasn’t exactly prime time, but I loved it,” he said. Karl also loved spending time reading and writing amidst the stacks of the Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library. “Vassar was an awakening of my intellectual experience,” he said. “I would find the quietest, darkest, most remote places and engage with ideas. It was a real liberal arts experience.” And that, said Karl, is what gave him the grounding he needed to excel in his field. “I never studied journalism,” he said. “I took a couple of classes on politics, but what I learned at Vassar was how to think, and I can’t think of anything that could have prepared me better for a career in journalism.”

Outstanding Service to Vassar Award: Katrine “Cage” Ames ’69 and Katherine “Gig” Babson Jr. ’69

“They’re like Vassar superheroes,” said Gamarra. “They have been extraordinary at not just their fundraising efforts, but their community building. They are hilarious, they are smart, they are dedicated, they are wise. They are the most pro-Vassar people I’ve ever met, and I aspire to be Gig and Cage when I grow up. They are just an extraordinary powerhouse team whose love of Vassar is infectious, and their contributions to community are immeasurable and timeless.” Their years of work for the College have now earned Ames and Babson the Outstanding Service to Vassar Award, presented in recognition of “extraordinary commitment, leadership, and service in promoting the goals and highest interests of Vassar College and the AAVC” made over a number of years.

To hear Ames and Babson tell it, they have an absolute blast rallying alums from all generations and walks of life. “What we have attempted to do, right from the very beginning, is to be very inclusive, so we will look for people that haven’t been involved and aren’t the same people that get asked all the time,” said Babson. “There are not that many people who can tell you at age 70 that they have a whole bunch of new friends. But we do!”

Ames said that having an ever-expanding social circle while approaching age 80 “is actually good for you in every way. It’s good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. It’s good for everything.”

Yet making friends isn’t the main point of the work they do; both say they are “laser-focused” on raising funds for the College. “My Vassar education was phenomenal,” said Ames. “It opened doors for me—it really opens doors in your mind. And especially now, when we look at the devaluation of a college education, which I consider one of the most appalling tidal waves in our country’s history, I want to do what I can to keep people coming to college.”

Spirit of Vassar Award: Eric Marcus ’80

A fearless and generous storyteller who will share his own struggles to aid others, Marcus has authored one book to help gay men navigate coupledom and another to comfort survivors of a family member’s suicide. Making Gay History, which features archival oral histories, also began as a book of the same name, first published in 1992. Since it launched as a podcast in 2016, Making Gay History episodes have been downloaded nearly eight million times in more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Marcus is also a co-producer of Those Who Were There, a podcast drawn from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. And he’s a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum, and a former board member of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

“This is a guy who not only cares but who really puts his life force behind making the world a better place,” said Gamarra, “and he has for an incredibly long time. So we’re super excited to be sharing this award with him at this moment, especially when American culture has been shifting into such negative discourse about queer life.”

The Spirit of Vassar Award is presented to an alum who has “demonstrated extraordinary and distinguished leadership, contribution, and commitment to serving a community in which they effect positive, transformative societal change” and recognizes “the values of service and civic responsibility that are fundamental to a Vassar education.”

Marcus said receiving the award “means the world to me” because his Vassar education was itself transformative. “I arrived at Vassar as a very fresh freshman. I really was unformed,” he recalled, adding that he had lived a very sheltered life in Queens, NY, before arriving on campus. “The academic experience of being at Vassar opened me up to all kinds of possibilities that I didn’t know about when I arrived,” he said. “It’s a place that launched me with a much-expanded worldview, a much better sense of myself.”

Young Alum Achievement or Service Award: Juliany “Loma” Taveras ’16

Taveras is now being recognized with the Young Alum Achievement Award, presented to graduates of the past 10 years for their “exceptional personal and professional achievement(s) within their respective field” who is also “inspirational to their peers and the current student body, while exemplifying the fruits of a successful liberal arts education at Vassar.”

“Juliany has been on this incredible journey of creativity and social impact as a multihyphenate, multidisciplinary artist,” said Gamarra. “They are demonstrating that to be a working professional storyteller, one can find excellence without having to sacrifice who you are or what you are about.”

“It’s an honor to receive this award uplifting my journey since [graduation], given how much of it has been rooted in the learning, growth, and relationships that Vassar made possible for me,” said Taveras. “Vassar helped me to deepen my creative practice by weaving together my lived experience and lineage with thoughtful interrogations of art and history, leading me to the kernel at the heart of my work: the expansion of the imagination beyond colonial restriction.” This common thread binds their disparate ways of working, from animated films and children’s plays to spoken-word poems and solarpunk novels. “I write to alchemize, to expand, to discover, to question—and above all else to insist that, despite the horrors we humans seem so capable of, it is not all we are, and there is so much more we can be.” —Kimberly Schaye

The Alum Recognition Committee seeks nominations throughout the year for its awards program. Community members are encouraged to nominate deserving candidates for any of the awards listed below by filling out a nomination form at go.vassar.edu/AAVC-awards-nominations.

By way of a brief introduction, I am a proud member of the Class of 1993 who lived in Davison and the THs, majored in English with correlates in women’s studies and vocal performance, and fell hard in love with the College from the moment I set foot on campus in 1989. In keeping with the ways of Gen X, I was fiercely committed to my plan of applying ONLY to Vassar in hopes of getting in via early decision. My parents gave up trying to convince me that this was not a smart plan. Luckily for me, it worked out—though like many of us, I question whether I’d get in today.

For the alums reading this letter, you may not know it, but you are a member of the AAVC. This is an extraordinary association with a unique history and structure. It was created in 1871 by alums who could not yet serve as trustees but wanted a voice in Vassar’s present and future. It operates as an independent nonprofit that closely partners with the College through Advancement. Our board members serve as advisors on many familiar initiatives like Vassar clubs, awards, the Vassar Fund, Reunion, this publication, and much more. Notably, the AAVC sends six members of our Board of Directors to serve as Vassar College Trustees. This legacy of shared governance reflects our mutual commitment to Vassar’s mission and impact.

If there is one thing I’ve learned in years of volunteering for Vassar, it’s that our alums are amazing. I’m not referring to specific jobs or awards or accomplishments, though they are often impressive. I’m talking about the joy of interacting with many different types of people from across the decades who are deeply intelligent, passionate, interested, interesting, and committed. People who care about things and who engage in the world. I am rarely bored in the company of Vassar grads.

I often envision our alum network as a Venn diagram. Circle upon circle of overlapping connections that extend ever outward. I see our mission at the AAVC as reaching further out into those circles, to offer more of our peers meaningful points of connection with the College, its students, and with each other.

So, enjoy the connection and insights offered by this issue of the magazine. Its feature on alum-related artist residencies and fellowship programs offers a spark of joy and inspiration as we come into the final weeks of summer.

here is a residual presence in a space marked by absence. Minutes, days, and even weeks were spent holding our communities close before ICE raids woke up the tranquil yet lived-in streets I grew up on. An entire summer of unmarked cars blurring past my house, followed by shouts of a growing crowd and the incessant buzz of my phone with worried texts and Instagram posts to warn the community. Here, I was confronted with the nature of this absence. My closest friends, their parents, classmates, the local gas station clerk, were deported or feared deportation. Their absence lingers. It’s quiet, but it lingers in the soft cries of their family members, in bolted-up doors, in empty streets, and in unfamiliar faces moving into homes that mirror my own.

The impacts of immigration in my life are not limited to the actions of this current administration, however. While the last few years have illuminated the issues associated with government policies restraining immigrant communities, I grew up influenced by two very different immigration stories on each side of my family. I am a third-generation Mexican American from Southern California. I’m also the granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant from Austria. My father’s family came to America illegally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and I was raised within a predominantly Mexican lifestyle. I grew up alongside my siblings, cousins, grandparents, and aunts—thirteen people in one house—learning to cook from my grandma, celebrating friends’ quinceañeras, and remembering family during Día de los Muertos.

These are just the traditions my family kept close generations after immigrating. While I was growing up, I never felt like these traditions were bad or wrong or unpatriotic. We shared in our values and resources, worked hard, appreciated what we had, and celebrated the Fourth of July alongside other immigrants and non-immigrants alike. As I got older, I found that the tremulous journey, cultural expression, and general existence of my Mexican family was looked down upon. It was done the “wrong way.”

On the other side of my family, immigration was treated like an accomplishment. It was prevalent in historical valor, and less prominent in our everyday lives. My great-grandparents escaped their home in Vienna, Austria, days before Hitler’s invasion. Family diaries describe their route in messy red scribbles and newspaper clippings. My grandpa was born once they were safely in the Dominican Republic. Later, he moved to California and became a U.S citizen. My grandparents’ house was adorned with volumes of family diaries and heirlooms, marking a remarkable and brave journey.

Immigrating from Mexico, though, was a hindrance. These contrasts struck me as ICE became an ever-growing, radical presence in my life. It forced me to examine my relationship and proximity to these issues, reflect on my identity and heritage, and grapple with the drastically different reception of my White immigrant grandfather and my Mexican immigrant grandfather.

While neither of my grandfathers are alive today, the years that I had with them kept me close to their journeys and experiences. Today, they keep me grounded in my work to understand these differences and my hope to help families grappling with various methods of persecution under an immigrant status. My connection with immigration is multipronged and unique to my own mixed identity. But as the world seemingly gets smaller, and we get closer and closer to each other, these labels will become superficial, and pride in our heritage alongside respect for the diversity of our communities will take root. I believe so, at least.