Contributors

Emily Ambeliotis

Emily Ambeliotis is a member of Colby College’s class of 2020 from Gloucester, Massachusetts. At Colby, she studies Geology and is a member of the women’s rugby team. When not looking for outcrops or at the gym, she enjoys cooking, dancing, and making people laugh. Emily has previously interned in collections at the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard. Although she is deeply passionate about rocks and minerals, Emily was excited to explore the eclectic collections of the L.C. Bates Museum and hopes to return in the future.

Katie Carlson

Katie is a member of the class of 2020, originally from Jamestown, Rhode Island. As an Education Studies major, she has especially loved discovering the abundant learning and teaching opportunities at the L.C. Bates Museum. Katie also has a passion for organic farming, and she spent a year after high school working on small-scale vegetable, livestock, and maple sugaring operations around the country. After traveling up the coast to the wonderful state of Maine nearly four years ago, Katie has hardly looked back. She invested herself into the rich community of Waterville’s activists working to make local food more accessible. Teaching lessons on gardening and composting to a range of ages, Katie has come to appreciate the vital roles of wonder, curiosity, and in multi-sensory experiences in learning.

Sunny Dangui

Sunny was born and raised in Shenzhen, China. She is a double major in Spanish and Theater & Dance, and a member of Colby College’s class of 2020. She studied abroad in Spain during the 2018–2019 academic year with PRESHCO and the Colby in Salamanca program. At Colby, she was an active member of the Center for the Arts and Humanities. In her free time, she enjoys dancing, singing, and making and watching videos. Although the future is uncertain due to COVID-19, she is looking forward to starting her Master’s in Entertainment Industry Management Program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Colbey Derwin

Colbey enjoys spending his time at home in the mountains of Edwards, Colorado. Making the move to Colby College in 2018, he has brought his passion with him across the country. Colbey currently skis on the alpine ski team and continues to explore the Maine outdoors. At Colby, he is a Biology major and an Art minor; he is also an athlete representative on the Student-Athletic Advisory Committee (SAAC). For the last two JanPlans, he has interned at the L.C. Bates Museum and worked closely with Deborah Staber on several projects, photographing the collection, and creating handouts and brochures. Colbey plans to do this again on his final year at Colby.

Anna Ffrench

Anna Ffrench is an Art History Major in the class of 2021 at Colby College. Born and raised in New York City, she loves to frequent museums and now works at the Colby College Museum of Art as a front desk attendant and is a co-chair of the Museum Student Advisory Board. For the past few summers, she has been working in the fashion industry and hopes to continue after graduation.

Nancy Lu

Nancy is a member of Colby College’s class of 2023. Born and raised in Beijing, China, Nancy came to study in Providence, Rhode Island, in 2015 and then found her way to Colby. Nancy recently declared a major in Psychology and a minor in Art, but she might change her mind as she explores other fields of study. At Colby, Nancy is a member of the Museum Student Advisory Board and a student mentor for Colby Cares About Kids. Outside of school, she enjoys drawing, traveling, binge-watching TV shows, and visiting museums. It’s been a pleasure for Nancy to work with her classmates on this website and to learn and explore the rich history and collections of the L.C. Bates Museum.

Hannah Marino

Hannah Marino hails from Peabody, Massachusetts, and is a rising senior at Colby College. She is majoring in History and minoring in Economics. At Colby, she is a member of the women’s lacrosse team. When she is not studying in the library or playing on the lacrosse field, she is an avid hiker and also loves binge-watching shows on Netflix. For the past few summers, Hannah has been working with a Massachusetts private collector of American artifacts in order to turn his collection into a public museum. This summer, she will be interning at the Vaughan Woods and Historic Homestead in Hallowell, Maine.  

Marissa Pitter

Marissa Pitter is a Sociology major and Cinema Studies minor from Queens, New York. She is a member of Colby College’s class of 2020. At Colby, she was a Colby Cares About Kids mentor and a member of Hardy Girls Healthy Women. She loves video editing and contributed that passion for storytelling by helping interview and film Deborah Staber, the director of the L.C. Bates Museum, for this website.

Caroline Scarola

Caroline Scarola ‘22 is a Government and Art History double major from Mountain Lakes, New Jersey. Caroline spent her first semester abroad in Dijon, France, through Colby’s Global Entry Semester program. At Colby, she has devoted many hours to mentoring a student at Benton Elementary School through Colby Cares About Kids, she serves on CCAK’s Student Advisory Board, and is an active member of the Club Alpine Ski Team. In her spare time, you can find Caroline at Sugarloaf or exploring Portland and the greater Waterville area.

Helen Sears

Helen Sears is originally from Maryland, and is a recent graduate of Colby College, where she majored in Geology and Environmental Science. Last summer, she completed her own research on magnetotactic bacteria at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in D.C. while also assisting post-doctoral and doctoral students with their research. She is hoping to continue working on geological research when we can leave the house.

Ari Trueba

Ari Trueba is a Las Vegas, Nevada, native, and a member of Colby College’s class of 2023. Ari plans to double major in Neurobiology and Studio Art, and is a proud member of the Colby Women’s Rugby Team and of the Sirens, an a cappella group. They work as a research student with the Colby Science Collections, specifically with the wet collections, and is also a barista at the Mary Low Coffee House. When not participating in the various roles they play on Colby’s campus, Ari loves to hang with friends and on a hammock in nature. Ari was ecstatic to work with the L.C. Bates Museum’s collections and learn more about habitat dioramas.

Véronique Plesch

Véronique Plesch is Professor of Art History at Colby College. Born in Argentina and raised in Switzerland, she holds advanced degrees from the University of Geneva in Art History and French Literature and from Princeton University, where she received her Ph.D. in Art History in 1994, the year she joined Colby faculty. She is the author of several books, edited volumes, and articles in English, French, Italian, and Spanish, on subjects that include Passion iconography, narrative fresco cycles, art in the Duchy of Savoy, late-medieval Passion plays, early modern graffiti, contemporary art and book arts, with a steady focus on word and image studies. Véronique was President of the International Association of Word and Image Studies from 2008 to 2017 and is currently one of the editors of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly.

Mark Wardecker

Mark Wardecker joined Colby in August 2015 as an Instructional Technologist. As a member of the Academic Information Technology Services group, he consults with faculty on the wide spectrum of educational technologies available to them and helps them manage effective technology environments for instruction in support of specific curricular goals. He also serves as a key liaison to other curricular support groups at the College. He has worked in higher education since 2004. First, as Dickinson College’s Digital Services Librarian, and more recently, as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Library Administration and Acting Classics Librarian at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He has contributed (with Emilia Marcyk and Angela Stangl) to E-Learning and the Academic Library (McFarland, 2016) and (with Ed Webb) to Doctor Who and Philosophy (Open Court, 2010), as well as having written other nonfiction and short fiction.

Ellen Freeman

Ellen Freeman holds a M.Ed. degree in Instructional Technology from the University of Maine. She was an Instructional Technologist with Academic ITS at Colby College from 2008-2013 and collaborated with the Colby Libraries and Marilyn R. Pukkila on two ethnographic research studies at Colby that were supported and published by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Ellen maintains a deep enjoyment of and belief in ethnographic research as a means to deepen perspectives. She was an Instructional Designer for Red Hat, Inc from 2013-2014 and returned to Colby in her current role as Teaching and Learning Applications Coordinator in June of 2015. Ellen lives in Mid-Coast Maine with her family.

Kara Kugelmeyer

Kara Kugelmeyer came to Colby in 2016 to work full-time as the Science and Data librarian. Currently, Kara is also interim Arts Librarian and Head of Research and Instruction. As a teaching librarian, she collaborates with faculty to teach students about the research process, information and digital literacies, and related tools. She also provides faculty and students with a range of research materials and support. As an information and data scientist, she also teaches her own courses on big data use and misuse, as well as a history of information technologies and how they shape our experience and understanding of information. Before coming to Colby, Kara was Product Strategy Manager at Cengage Learning, where she had a wide-range of duties from content acquisition to database design and development. She also held positions in Technical Product Management and programming at Lycos.com (one of the first search engines) and was Director of Information Technology and Front End Systems at Whole Foods Market. Kara holds advanced degrees in Information and Data Science.

John Meader