This year’s honorary degree recipients include (above, from left) modern artist Katherine Bradford, ideal-promoting children’s author Raquel Jaramillo (R. J. Palacio) P’18, economist and president of Thomas College Laurie Lachance ’83, P’13, award-successful journalist and social activist Janet Langhart-Cohen, and embellished marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson ’79, P’12.
Katherine Bradford is greatest identified for paintings of swimmers, superheroes, and ships that critics describe as simultaneously representational and abstract, luminous, and richly metaphorical. She began her career as an artist comparatively late in lifetime, obtaining her widest recognition in her seventies.
Bradford commenced portray when she was living in Maine in the 1970s. She moved to New York City in the ’80s, but returns each individual summer time with her wife or husband, Jane O’Wyatt, to her household in Brunswick.
Her perform has been the matter of one-human being demonstrates at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art (2013) and Modern Artwork Museum of Fort Value Texas (2017), and is scheduled for an approaching survey show at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine opening this June, which will journey to a number of venues.
Her do the job is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum (each Maine and Oregon), the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Menil Selection in Houston, Texas. Recent exhibitions involve the New Orleans Biennial, Prospect 4 (2017), a solo present at CANADA in New York (2021), and a team clearly show at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas devoted to photos of Superman and Superwoman (2019). A recent solo exhibition at Tomio Koyama in Tokyo, Japan, runs until March 25, 2022.
Bradford was born in New York Town and attended Bryn Mawr Higher education and Buy College, where by she gained an MFA. In 2011, she obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a yr afterwards, a Joan Mitchell Basis Award. Other awards include things like a Pollock Krasner Grant and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Bowdoin Faculty Museum of Artwork just lately included a Bradford portray, Anxiety of Darkish, to its long-lasting assortment. The painting was made in Brunswick in the summer months of 2020 and was a present to the museum from David and Barbara Roux in honor of museum codirectors Frank and Anne Goodyear.
Raquel Jaramillo (R. J. Palacio) P’18 is the creator of the finest-offering children’s novel Marvel, which was tailored into a 2017 movie starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, and Jacob Tremblay. She has prepared several publications centered on the original Wonder characters a person of those people publications, White Bird: A Surprise Story, has been turned into a film starring Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson, scheduled for launch in October 2022.
Jaramillo is a very first-era American (her moms and dads immigrated from Colombia), born and raised in New York Town. Right after graduating with a BFA in illustration from Parsons College of Style and design, she commenced a occupation as an illustrator and guide-jacket designer and grew to become vice president and imaginative director of Henry Holt grownup trade publications in 1990, and editorial director of children’s publications at Workman Publishing in 2007.
Soon right after the delivery of her older son, Jaramillo commenced illustrating her individual children’s textbooks, including several photo books and a remarkably lauded espresso table edition of Peter Pan. Marvel was Jaramillo’s initial novel, which was revealed in 2012 below the pen identify R. J. Palacio. Marvel has absent on to become an intercontinental bestseller, translated into fifty-5 languages, with fifteen million copies in print worldwide, and more than six a long time on The New York Situations bestseller record. Her story about a boy in need to have of a very little additional kindness from the environment introduced the anti-bullying Pick Variety movement, which in 2015 inspired myFace, an organization devoted to encouraging kids with facial dissimilarities, to get started the Speculate Job. This plan brings the book’s message of kindness into schools nationwide, and has attained more than 60,000 learners in the US to date.
Laurie Gagnon Lachance ’83, P’13, a person of Maine’s main economists, commenced her profession with Central Maine Energy, where she grew to become the company’s company economist. She later on served as the Maine Condition Economist for three governors (1993–2004). From 2004 to 2012, she served as president and CEO of the Maine Enhancement Foundation just before remaining named president of Thomas University in Waterville, Maine, in 2012. In each individual of these four important roles, Lachance was the very first feminine to keep the posture.
Following Bowdoin, she went on to get paid her MBA from Thomas Faculty, and was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters diploma by the College of Maine at Presque Isle.
An writer and recurrent speaker on leadership, schooling, and Maine’s financial system, Lachance was inducted into the Maine Women’s Corridor of Fame in 2014, made the Mainebiz Following checklist as a trailblazer in her business in 2015, was aspect of Maine Magazine’s “Fifty Mainers Charting the State’s Future” record in 2016, and was inducted into the Junior Achievement Maine Organization Corridor of Fame in 2018. Laurie obtained the American Coronary heart Association’s Crystal Coronary heart Award in March 2022.
She serves on the boards of Educare Central Maine, Maine Condition Chamber, and Worthington Scholarship Foundation, and was elected to the boards of Maine Companies Mutual Insurance plan Corporation (MEMIC) in June 2018 and Bangor Discounts Lender in June 2021. In 2020, Governor Janet Mills appointed Lachance cochair of Maine’s Economic Recovery Committee, billed with advising the governor on how to guide Maine’s overall economy by way of the pandemic.
Lachance was born in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, the granddaughter of French-Canadian immigrants, and was a very first-era college college student. She and her husband, David, live in Manchester, Maine.
Janet Langhart-Cohen is a television journalist and creator who started her job as a manner model and turned a broadcast reporter and anchor just after 1st reporting the weather conditions for a Chicago station. She founded the media consulting business Langhart Communications in 2000.
Langhart-Cohen is a native of Indianapolis, in which she grew up in a segregated housing task. She entered the public eye in the 1960s as a model for the Ebony Manner Reasonable. Within a several decades she was breaking racial and gender boundaries by becoming the 1st Black woman in The united states to host a nationally syndicated present, Excellent Working day. Her broadcasting encounter contains do the job for both of those ABC and NBC community television, Enjoyment Tonight, and Wager.
Around the course of her twenty-five years in journalism, she interviewed some of the most influential newsmakers in the world, which include President Bill Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, and Barbara Walters.
In 2004, she wrote her memoir, From Rage to Purpose: My Everyday living in Two Americas, which describes her individual encounters with race in The us. In 2007, she and her husband—former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen ’62, H’75, P’85—wrote Like in Black and White, a memoir about race, religion, and romance, and afterwards edited Race and Reconciliation in The united states. Langhart-Cohen attended Butler College, and she acquired an honorary degree from Emerson College or university in 2011.
In 2009, her one-act play, Anne and Emmett, based on the life of Anne Frank and Emmett Until, premiered at the United States Holocaust Museum. The play is an extension of her life’s do the job to increase recognition and spur dialogue all over race, reconciliation, and equality in The us. She is at the moment functioning on three new performs.
Joan Benoit Samuelson ’79, P’12 is the most recognizable athlete in Bowdoin’s record and a single of the most decorated runners in the entire world. Between other associations, she is a member of the Countrywide Observe and Field Corridor of Fame, the Nationwide Length Functioning Corridor of Fame, the Worldwide Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sporting activities Foundation Hall of Fame, and the Olympic Corridor of Fame.
She gained the Boston Marathon in 1979 and 1983, when she established a course record that stood for eleven decades. In 1984, she won the gold medal in the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. She gained her age group at the 2013 and 2019 Boston marathons. In 1997, Samuelson founded the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race and is chair of its board of directors. The race, established in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, Samuelson’s dwelling town, appeals to the world’s elite runners and has obtained awards for its environmentally sustainable procedure. She is a longtime board member of the Good friends of Casco Bay and cochair of the Managing Business Range Coalition.
Samuelson has served as a mentor at Boston University and has authored two textbooks, Working Tide (coauthor 1987) and Joan Samuelson’s Managing for Females (1995).
Samuelson attained her bachelor’s degree in background and environmental experiments from Bowdoin in 1979. She has been given 8 other honorary degrees and earned her learn gardener certification by way of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension.
Samuelson was elected to Bowdoin’s Board of Overseers in 1995 and grew to become a trustee in 1996. She was awarded the Bowdoin Prize, the College’s maximum honor, in 1985. Her a lot of Bowdoin kinfolk consist of partner Scott Samuelson ’80, father André Benoit ’43, and son Anders ’12. Joan and Scott Samuelson are longtime people of Freeport, Maine.
