Lights, Camera, Lots of Action
- The annual student-run festival of student films, SLCineFest, enlisted more than 30 alumni working in the industry to serve as judges. The two-day fete in April included a screening of all submitted films and an almost-black-tie awards ceremony—complete with red carpet and paparazzi-style photos. Emcees Katy Greskovich ’19 and KG Garlington ’18 entertained the boisterous crowd and announced nominees and winners.
- Students in alumna Heather Winters’ course “The Art and Craft of Development and Pitching for Film and Television” made quite an impression at the inaugural Sarah Lawrence Pitch Event, hosted by members of the Hollywood Radio & TV Society (HRTS) at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. The aspiring creators presented their conference projects and received feedback from the panel of professionals. This rare opportunity was organized by Winters ’84 (filmmaking and moving image arts) with help from screenwriter Frederic Richter ’10. “The students were so amazingly prepared,” Richter says. “I’ve taught pitching and development classes for years, and that day an SLC junior gave one of the best student pitches I’ve ever seen. He was the embodiment of Sarah Lawrence.”
- Launching this year, SLC’s study-away program Cinema Sarah Lawrence will immerse students in feature-length moviemaking. Directed by award-winning independent filmmaker Jay Craven and Frederick Strype (filmmaking and moving image arts), the intensive semester begins with an excursion to the Sundance Film Festival, followed by classes, pre-production, and production work on location with a professional crew.
Seen at Sadie Lou
Week in and week out, SLC hosts insightful, inspiring guests who present lectures, perform concerts, conduct workshops, and engage the community in important conversations. Many of these special campus guests are Sarah Lawrence alumni. Recent returnees have included:
Janine Antoni ’86, Sculptor & Performance Artist
Sydney Chaffee ’05, 2017 National Teacher of the Year
George Cochrane ’95, Graphic Artist & Professor
Alexis Taines Coe MA ’09, Feminist Historian & Author
Noah Hawley ’89, Novelist, TV & Film Creator, Writer, Producer
Joy Ladin ’82, Religion & Transgender Theorist
Tonya Lewis Lee ’88, Attorney, Author, TV & Film Writer & Producer
Neil Minow ’74, Expert on Corporate Governance
Cocktails + Conversations = Connections
A few short weeks before graduating, 35 seniors mixed and mingled with 25 alumni professionals who returned to campus for an intimate event sponsored by the Office of Career Services. Breaking out their business casual attire, students honed networking skills and polished their pitches.
Ten Years of TransAction
When it comes to advocacy and activism, progress can feel painfully slow. But looking back with a little distance often reveals encouraging momentum. Such was the case in April when co-founders of the student organization TransAction returned to campus to reflect on their trailblazing efforts at Sarah Lawrence.
Kit Golan ’08, MA ’09; Jacklyn Lacey ’10; and Tobin Berliner ’08 (above, left to right) recalled that their transgender-centered movement began with brunch discussions about bathrooms—more specifically, the need for gender-neutral bathrooms.
“This was really before [people] were having conversations about trans students at all,” Berliner noted. “A lot of language the trans community has built up around itself didn’t even exist then.”
In the years that followed, group members conducted research, drafted proposals, and rallied the campus around a number of initiatives, such as allowing students to choose the name on their College-issued documents. “Sarah Lawrence has this nice quality of empowering students,” Golan observed. “When you go off into the real world, the professional world, that sticks with you, so you recognize your own power to make change.”
Putting work ahead of drama, they emphasized, was the key to their success. “TransAction very quickly took me from Things could be better,” Lacey said, “to We have to make things better!”
So how did TransAction’s work with College administrators actually go? During the retrospective, Golan, Lacey, and Berliner shared some details about the challenges faced, headway made, and fun shared along the way.
Web Extra: Making Things Better
In the fall of 2006, Kit Golan ’08, MA ’09; Jacklyn Lacey ’10; and Tobin Berliner ’08 began having discussions about the bathrooms at Sarah Lawrence over Saturday morning brunch.
“Because we were really cool,” joked Lacey.
“Well, no, because it was a complicated thing to find a bathroom that was comfortable,” replied Golan. “There were all these bathrooms that were single use, labeled ‘Men and Women.’ So we started talking about experiences of being trans on campus, and of supporting trans people on campus, and we started brainstorming ideas of ways the campus could do a better job of supporting us and our experiences.” The group now known as TransAction formed around these common concerns.
Lacey recalled that one of the group’s first initiatives involved “something very few college students ever have the experience of doing.” They surveyed and collected information about each and every bathroom on campus—a process Lacey referred to as “a scavenger hunt.” Then they plugged the data into a master spreadsheet for easy reference. “It’s such an interesting way to look at your college,” she said.
“This idea of, ‘We want to change all the bathrooms on campus,’ wasn’t [met by the administration with], ‘Okay, we’re going to do this for you,’” Lacey said. “There was this idea of, ‘If you want to get this done, you have to help us do the work.’” To that end, College Archives gave the students access to all of the College’s schematics and architectural plans.
TransAction members would spread the plans and blueprints out on tables in the library and discuss remodeling possibilities at length. For example, could there be a way to build a gender-neutral locker room in the sports center that would give users direct access to the pool?
Lacey said they learned enough about plumbing, engineering, and architecture to have productive conversations with administrators and make concrete suggestions: “Well, there’s a water access line here, so you’d be able to put a toilet here, and a sink and a shower here, and we know that that’s a load-bearing beam. …” She said she often draws on these uniquely Sarah Lawrence experiences in her post-college life “in terms of looking at the tangible aspects of a problem and not assuming that someone you perceive to have a greater degree of expertise will come up with a solution for you.”
The group drafted a multi-pronged proposal and submitted it to Student Senate, Student Affairs, and ultimately to President Michele Tolela Myers. First it addressed the bathrooms TransAction thought would be the easiest to improve: those single use facilities that could be made gender neutral simply with the advent of new signage.
But, their plan went on to stipulate that if the administration agreed to change the signs, they would also talk with TransAction about the other problematic restrooms on campus, namely those in the sports center, library, and science center.
The proposal was approved.
TransAction met with the director of operations, Micheal Rengers, to work on designs for the new bathroom signage, and when they returned to campus in the fall of 2007, the new placards were up.
“It’s pretty cool that we were allowed to do this,” Berliner said. “That we were allowed to sit down and create this proposal and then come up with a way to pitch it to multiple committees and send it directly to the president—who read it and signed off on it. It taught us a lot.”
TransAction’s first cohort went on to conduct pioneering research and propose innovative ideas for expanding gender neutral housing options, allowing students to choose the name on their college-issued documents, and establishing gender safe spaces on campus. Many of their initiatives have borne fruit, though some have taken a decade or more.
At the time, Lacey said they sometimes felt they were struggling to be heard and taken seriously. “But going back to the e-mails [in preparation for this discussion], the thing that struck me was so much productive back-and-forth both with faculty and the administration: the former College president, the dean of students, the registrar. … Everything had a much more professional unfolding than it felt like at the time,” she reflected. “As we educated people, office by office, and stepped up to ask people to meet us where we were, they very rarely let us down. There was a lot of slow action, and confusion, because these were new issues for a lot of people. But there wasn’t a huge amount of active pushback.”
“Being on a campus that really promotes students to run the school in a way that no other campus does—that really allowed us to learn,” Berliner agreed.
“I think we took the student life community for granted in some ways,” Golan added. “Not every school gives students that level of say in what happens on campus.”
Berliner encouraged current students to take advantage of Sarah Lawrence’s commitment to student leadership and continue TransAction’s work. “Sarah Lawrence has such a beautiful history of activism,” he said. “That’s a beautiful thing to keep going.”
Greet a Gryphon: A Catcher’s Balancing Act
Before college, Illinois native Baylie Petit ’19 struggled to reconcile her extracurricular interests. “Cello always wanted me to quit softball, and softball always wanted me to quit cello,” she says. Then SLC’s softball coach Chelsea Sheehan offered a solution.
“Chelsea said, ‘You can do everything you want here; that’s not a problem,’” Petit recalls.
While she received form letters from a number of schools, Petit says Sheehan was the only coach who sent a personal note. “Chelsea took the time to recognize me as an individual,” she says.
Since her first year at the College, Petit has kept her music game strong, playing in a variety of ensembles from chamber and baroque to gamelan. She also started in 27 straight softball games in 2017 alone and set a Gryphons record for runners caught stealing. And upon learning in a psychology class about the therapeutic benefits of music for Alzheimer’s patients, Petit was inspired to spend her pre-senior summer volunteering at Wartburg, an award-winning facility serving older adults in Mount Vernon.
Of all the opportunities Sarah Lawrence has afforded, studying abroad in Austria is one Petit especially appreciates. “If I were in any other softball program, I probably would have been heavily penalized for going,” she says. “But here, they’re adamant that academics come first, and they stand behind that.”
Petit was recognized with a Coaches Award in 2016 but emphasizes that all her teammates worked equally hard that year. “Anyone could have gotten it, and I think that’s why we’ve won so many games,” she says. “We’re flexible and talented in several different areas. Those are definitely Sarah Lawrence characteristics.”
The other secret to the team’s success? “With music, it’s all about listening,” Petit notes. “We do that with softball as well. We listen to each other’s needs. We have each other’s backs.”
Break Out the Balloons
Great events are worth repeating ... again and again and again! In 2017–18, Sarah Lawrence celebrated several champagne-worthy milestones and classic SLC meetings of the minds.
- 15th Annual Poetry Festival
- 20th Women's History Conference
- 30th Science Poster Session
- 20th Pre-College Writer's Week
- 10th Internship & Volunteer Fair
Photos by Dana Maxon, Tony Correa, and Quyen Nguyen