This is Vassar...March 2009

Vassar’s Eighth Annual Haitian Art Sale

On Parents Weekend, April 3–5, the Vassar Haiti Project will sponsor its eighth annual Haitian Art Sale and Auction in Main Building’s multipurpose room. Over 300 paintings, sculptures, handcrafts, and hand-painted silk scarves will be on view and for sale. The Vassar Haiti Project, founded in 2001, is a collaborative, all-volunteer organization with over 100 members, including 60 students. Since its founding, the project has raised over $400,000 and has built a seven-room school in Chermaitre, a small village in rural northwest Haiti.

“Our goal is to create sustainability in our adopted Haitian community,” says Andrew Meade, Vassar’s director of international services and co-chair with his wife, Lila, of the Vassar Haiti Project. “Now that the school is completed, we consulted the village leaders and we have four new initiatives for the Haiti Project — planting trees, water purification, regular medical visits, and emergency relief funds.”

The Vassar Haiti Project isn’t just the art sale — it also coordinates donations to Haitian artists of art supplies from local Hudson Valley community members and businesses. Visitors to this year’s art sale will be able to purchase Haitian art created with materials from supplies donated by Catskill Art and Office Supply. “This is the best of our global village,” says project co-chair Lila Meade.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Vassar Haiti Project

Matt Carey ’03 Comedy Night

The Fourth Annual Class of 2003 Comedy Night in honor of the late Matt Carey ’03 will take place on Saturday, March 28, at 8:00 p.m. in the Students Building. A reception for alumnae/i and their guests will be hosted on the east side of ACDC. Alex Fernie ’04 from the Los Angeles-based comedy troupe Convoy, which also features Alex Berg ’04 and Todd Fasen ’03, will be returning to campus for the weekend to honor their former classmate. Convoy will be performing and conducting comedy workshops throughout the day starting at 1:00 p.m. in room 200 of Rockefeller Hall.

Matt Carey ’03 was president of Improv and co-founder of The Limit, both student performance groups. After his death in 2004, Matt’s family and friends established the Matt Carey Fund to continue his mission of bringing comedy to the Vassar campus.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Carey family

A Sampling of March Speakers

Kelly Edwards ’85, Vice President, Talent Development, NBC Universal, will lecture on March 5 at 1:00 p.m. in room 212 of Sanders Hall, chronicling her trek from studying at Vassar College to developing a wide range of television shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Living Single. Edwards has been with NBC Universal as the vice president of talent development since 2007, recruiting diverse creative executives, writers, and directors for the company. Previously, Edwards served as senior vice president for comedy development at UPN, where she developed a number of television series, including Girlfriends; One on One; Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place; The Random Years; Malcolm in the Middle; Dilbert; and The Parkers. Prior to her tenure at UPN, Edwards held several key positions in comedy development at the Fox Broadcasting Company, as manager, director, and executive director. She helped to create the television series Living Single, Clueless, The Wild Thornberrys, and Ned and Stacey. She was also responsible for identifying a number of actors and stand-up comedians for development deals, including Bernie Mac, Chris Rock, D.L. Hughley, and Dave Chappelle.

Adrienne Germain, President of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), will deliver a lecture entitled “A New Global Agenda for Girls’ and Women’s Health and Rights” on March 25. Germain has worked to reshape and revolutionize global policy on women’s health, human rights, and reproductive rights since the 1970s, and continues to do so through IHWC. Under her leadership, the coalition has created international policy innovations and assisted in the creation of local organizations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim Chaplain at Georgetown University, and Professor Yehezkel Landau, Faculty Associate in Interfaith Relations at Hartford Seminary, will lead a discussion entitled “Religion in the Middle East: A Force for Violence or Peace?” on March 26. Hendi, the author of numerous publications on the topics of women and gender relations in Islam and Islam in the United States, also directs the PEACE office of the Muslim American Society. Landau’s work has been focused on the fields of interfaith education and Jewish-Arab peacemaking; he has lectured internationally on Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations and Middle East peace issues. The two will discuss the roles of religion and religious leaders in the Middle East conflict, followed by an interactive question-and-answer session.

Ross Benjamin ’03, translator of German literature and writer, will read and discuss his new translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion on March 30. After graduating from Vassar, Benjamin was a 2003-04 Fulbright Scholar in Berlin and a 2005 Woolrich Writing Fellow at Columbia University. His work has appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Times. His translation of Hyperion was published in 2008, as was his translation of Kevin Vennemann’s Close to Jedenew.

Ed Park, pictured, author of the novel Personal Days, will read on March 31, as part of the English department’s First Proof reading series. First Proof features lectures and readings by young writers, most of whom have just published their first work. Personal Days, praised as “comic and creepy” by The New Yorker and “witty and appealing” by The New York Times Book Review, was one of Time magazine’s ten best fiction titles of 2008. Park is a founding editor of The Believer and a former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement. His reading will be at 5:00 p.m. in the Class of ’51 reading room of the Vassar Library. The English department’s First Proof series, Primary Sources series, and Public Voices series bring a wide variety of readings and lectures to campus, all of which are free and open to the public.

Photo Credit: Sylvia Plachy, courtesy of Random House.

Vassar Winter Market

The Vassar Winter Market, sponsored by Winter Sun Farms, is bringing locally grown produce to the Vassar campus, even in the middle of winter. The monthly event, which, according to a recent article in The Miscellany News, “incorporate[s] a traditional farmers’ market with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)-style food pick-up,” will next take place at the tail end of Vassar’s spring break, on Saturday, March 21, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Aula. The market features produce, bread, eggs, meats, maple syrup, cheese, and more — all from local farms. Ken Oldehoff, director of marketing and sustainability at the Retreat, told the Misc: “Getting people out in the dreaded depths of winter and interacting as a community has a great vibe to it. It is much more exciting than a summer market.”

Photo credit: Courtesy of Winter Sun Farms

Baize Buzan ’10 Reports on Her Return from JYA

It’s been two months since I returned from the land of matryoshki, borscht, and Chekhov. I spent my fall semester as a student of the Moscow Art Theater School, doing something that once seemed totally incomprehensible to me — living in Russia. Sometimes, it seemed too good to be true: my ballet teacher was a retired prima ballerina of the Bolshoi, lunch breaks often consisted of a five-minute walk to Red Square just to stare at the glorious St. Basil’s, and to top it all off, I saw the most theater I’ve ever seen in my life — about 40 shows total during the course of my stay. But then, of course, came the harsher realities of it all — attending class for eight hours a day, six days a week, trying to simultaneously learn the Russian language and the Cyrillic alphabet, and being really, really far away from all things, people, and places familiar. The semester was a fantastic blur of all of these things and more; so much, in fact, that I often had to simply remind myself where I was, what I was doing, and how extraordinarily lucky I was to be able to experience all of it.

Right: Baize Buzan ’10

And before I knew it I was back, back at home in Boston, and then back to school in Poughkeepsie, and I’ve learned that perhaps the best thing about missing people and missing places and missing things is how sweet it feels to reunite. Now I have something new to miss, and her name is Russia. But she is not so far away; she pops up unexpectedly, intermittently, as I go about my life at Vassar. When I sip soup at ACDC, when my body moves as gracefully as I can will it to in ballet class, when I listen to my Russian literature teacher talk about Moscow and my heart swells so much I am nervous the people next to me can sense it — in those moments, I know she’s there.

I’ve been struggling to quantify what my time abroad taught me, but I have found that these little moments are helping. Each time my fall and spring semesters collide, and an experience I had in Russia somehow illuminates one that I am having in Poughkeepsie, I feel I am solving a piece of that mysterious puzzle. And I grow even more secure in the knowledge that I have yet another sweet reunion in store.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Baize Buzan ’10

The Vassar YouTube Contest

Congratulations to Alex Levy ’12 and Kelley Van Dilla ’12, winners of the first-ever Vassar YouTube contest. Sponsored by Computing and Information Services, the Media Cloisters, and College Relations, the contest asked students to produce a two- to five-minute YouTube video “about life at Vassar” that, according to the contest rules, “best exemplifies the spirit and quality of life on the Vassar campus.”

Contest entries were to use soundtracks of non-copyrighted or open-source music and were to be submitted on a CD or DVD to Media Cloisters. All current Vassar students were eligible to enter; the three judges (one student, one administrator, and one professor) were Brian Paccione ’09, president of the Vassar College Filmmakers; Susan DeKrey, vice president, College Relations; and Assistant Professor of Film Kathleen Man.

Levy and Van Dilla won a $600 gift certificate to the Vassar Computer Store. Their video, simply titled “Vassar,” is currently viewable on the Vassar YouTube channel, as are the two honorable-mention videos, “Halloween” (by Charlie Nicholson ’12) and “Life at Vassar” (by Jon Miller, Stephanie Donnelly, Julian Barbosa, and Alice Chang, all ’11).

In next year’s contest, Baynard Bailey ’90, manager of the Media Cloisters, plans to expand the structure of the contest with different categories covering specific topics.