Media love for the upcoming Bates Dance Festival from The Boston Globe, Portland Press Herald, and WBUR
From July 10 through 31, campus will be buzzing with activity from the Bates Dance Festival — a yearly dance experience that offers dance training and performances from renowned artists and draws audiences from Maine and beyond.
In May, the Portland Press Herald described the Bates Dance Festival as a “not-to-miss” cultural event happening in Maine this summer. Also that month, The Boston Globe featured BDF on their list of 80 fun concerts, festivals, shows, and more to check out around Boston this summer
Then in June, WBUR sang BDF’s praises — “bracing for a bold program” — in a piece headlined 9 dance events to attend this summer. They highlighted “The Marthaodyssey,” which former Martha Graham Dance Company member Jesse Factor will present on the Schaeffer Theatre stage. The mishmash of drag performance and Graham technique imagines what might have happened if Graham had choreographed Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition tour. “A trip to Maine may be in order for those who enjoy contemporary dance,” writes WBUR’s Shira Laucharoen.
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Members of the Bates College Youth Community Action and Transformation Lab urge adults to talk politics with young people in the Portland Press Herald
Nathaniel Zuckerberg ’26 and Linnaea Herring, a senior at Yarmouth High School, authored a piece for the Portland Press Herald advocating for the engagement of political dialogue with young people. Both Herring and Zuckerberg are members of the Youth Community Action and Transformation Lab led by Bates Assistant Professor of Psychology Elena Maker Castro. This lab conducts research for the Can We? Project — an initiative that provides Maine high schoolers with the communication tools needed to participate as engaged citizens in a democracy. Zuckerberg and Herring “ask every adult with a young person in their life to start that political conversation you may have avoided” because they have found that teenagers are “ready and eager to practice dialogue.”
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Bates Film Festival covered by News Center Maine, WGME
News Center Maine interviewed Bates Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jon Cavallero and students Shelter Gimbel-Sherr ’27 of Seattle and Nate Shore ’27 of Kennebunkport, Maine, about the 2026 Bates Film Festival. The festival, which ran from May 12 to 17 and was entirely organized by Bates students, featured over 45 films as well as panels of filmmakers, professors, and students.
Gimbel-Sherr and Shore highlighted how the festival has a special interest in promoting work from filmmakers and actors from Maine, including a Maine filmmakers panel that featured distinguished guests such as screenwriter Desi Van Til, and actors Dustin Tucker, Matthew Delamater, and Xander Berkeley. Shore talked about focusing on bringing together student filmmakers from Maine schools such as Southern Maine Community College, Colby College, and Bates College. He said, “it should make a really great collaboration between the colleges.”
On WGME, students Samantha Manogue ’26 and Parker Huynh Benningfield ’26 discussed how the festival hopes to bring film to the larger Maine community. One way they do this is by making the festival completely free and open to the public. Manogue said that the festival board wants to “make film more accessible to all of our community members,” and Benningfield added that accessibility is “one of the driving factors in our mission.”
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The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education covers appointment of Victoria Neason Wallace
In a story headlined “New Appointments for Three Black Administrators in Higher Education”, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education features Victoria Neason Wallace, who was just named vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid.
“She comes to her new role from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she has been serving as executive director of strategic initiatives within the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid,” the paper writes. “Before Colby, Neason Wallace was senior assistant director for student volunteers in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.”
Neason Wallace will join Bates on July 1.
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Portland Press Herald and Maine Public highlight Phyllis Graber Jensen’s career retrospective at the Bates College Museum of Art
Phyllis Graber Jensen — director of photography and video for the college — is the subject of a career retrospective on display at the Bates College Museum of Art from June 12 to Sept. 19 called Phyllis Graber Jensen: Picture Stories.
The Portland Press Herald highlighted this exhibit among others on display at Maine art museums this summer. This retrospective features photos from throughout Jensen’s career, and the Herald notes that “throughout, what emerges is her commitment to the medium as a critical mode of communication and historical preservation.”
Maine Public’s State of the Art featured Graber Jensen in a show that aired on June 7. Titled “Picture Stories,” host Heather McDougall leads Graber Jensen through a 28-minute interview about her life (including her groundbreaking advocacy for women in sport as a teenager) and her career. McDougall asked about Graber Jensen’s transition in 1995 from a hard news environment in Boston, working for the Boston Herald and shooting breaking news and icons such as Leonard Bernstein, to communications and marketing work at Bates in 1995: “Was it something you were seeking out or did it just sort of happen and then you just leaned into it?”
“I was skeptical that I could make the transition from being a journalist to being a marketing photographer,” Graber Jensen said. “But in the end I think the people that I work with, some of whom had journalism backgrounds, and the place that Bates is, allowed us to realize that we’re not journalists, but we use the tools of journalism in terms of storytelling. And I think that’s where the exhibition title came from in terms of ‘Picture Stories.’
“I also believe that Bates understood the value of using images to tell the story of Bates. And at one point I worked with a colleague who was also a talented photographer, Mark Glass. And so we were producing a lot of photography and that became part of the storytelling tradition and we had an editorial director who was very supportive — Jay Burns — of visual storytelling. It became easier and easier for me to be who I was and pursue my interests and way of telling the story.”
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Commencement in the Sun Journal: Regalia and reveling
In a picture story in Lewiston’s Sun Journal, photographer Russ Dillingham captured moments of joy, hilarity, bystanders playing hacky sack, and the classic moment of “check the mirror” before walking across the stage at Coram to receive a diploma. Not to mention speakers Sebenele G. Lukhele ’26 and bestselling author and honorand Deborah E. Harkness.
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Mara Tieken talks about the challenges faced by rural students once they land at elite colleges, to Inside Higher Education and Education Week.
In an article, headlined “Rural Students Made It to Campus. Now What?,” Inside Higher Education Editor-in-Chief Sara Custer draws on Professor of Education Mara Tieken’s work as inspiration for an opinion piece.
Custer references a conversation Tieken had on IHE’s podcast The Key throughout her piece, including the way Tieken advocates for colleges to rethink how they support rural students once they arrive on campuses far from their homes, not just in terms of miles, but in cultural markers.
Tieken argues that colleges need a vocabulary around the rural experience, not unlike the way they approach the influence of race and class on students’ access and experience of higher ed. “We don’t have that vocabulary for how geography matters,” Tieken told The Key on “The Hidden Challenges Rural Students Face, With Mara Tieken.”
Through her research, Tieken also found that identifying as rural can help students see the benefits of their background that may be hidden by negative stereotypes about rural communities in pop culture and the media. “Whether or not it’s a part of your identity, you’re still facing the same barriers that are tied to those identity markers. And so, if you don’t see it as such you internalize it [and think], ‘It’s about me. It’s my fault. I’m not right. I’m just not good enough,’” she said. “They need to hear these messages where their rurality is actually celebrated and they can see how it is an asset in their life.”
Tieken was also quoted in a June 11 story in Education Week headlined “Closing a School? Don’t Expect to Save Money, a New Study Warns.” Tieken is an expert on the pitfalls of school closures, which are often perceived as a way to save money.
“The assumption is just so baked into the logic of closure decisions that it’s assumed closures will save money, so it can be really hard for leaders to combat that thinking,” Tieken told Education Week. “This is a really important piece of evidence as districts navigate these conversations and decisions.”
Faculty Featured
Mara C. Tieken
Professor of Education
Jonathan J. Cavallero
Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies
Elena G. Maker Castro
Assistant Professor of Psychology
