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Board of Directors Listing
Officers
Joanna Jones
Joanna Jones used her professional working life to help individuals and groups develop their leadership and constructive ways of working together. She began by being a public educator, and then moved to business. Her time at Bath Iron Works involved training, leadership/management development, recruitment and hiring, ethics, and industry-wide leadership work. For the last 17 years, until her retirement in 2019, she worked at EDC, a social science applied research not-for-profit working around the world. Here she led the human resources responsibilities and served on the executive team.
Her commitment to formal education is demonstrated by her many years as a board member of the Maine Community College System. She served as board chair as well as chair of various permanent and ad hoc committees. She also served for many years on the board of Mount Holyoke College Alumnae Association. Her own education included Mount Holyoke College, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Simmons School of Library Science. In retirement, she is traveling as much as she can.
Her commitment to the arts is lifelong. She is educated as a musician and taught music and dance. She even learned how to work in a dark room. Being among artists is a joy.
James Dillon
James Dillon is a professional photographer serving the greater Boston and New York areas. After 30 years of pursuing photography as a hobby, James launched his studio, creatively capturing images of people with an eye toward family and senior portraiture, commercial photography, headshots, commercial branding, and sports photography. James’ work has been featured in local magazines and newspapers, college and high school athletic publications, and local and national branding campaigns. James completed his professional photography training at Maine Media Workshops completing the Photo Intensive Program in the Summer of 2019.
Sal Taylor Kydd
Maine-based photographic artist and writer Sal Taylor Kydd uses various photographic media in a personal narrative that explores themes around memory and belonging; combining her poetry with alternative processes of photography and object-making.
Sal’s fine art photographs have been exhibited both domestically and internationally, including the UK, Barcelona, San Miguel De Allende, Portland, Boston and Los Angeles; and she has been featured in numerous publications, including Shots Magazine, Don’t Take Pictures, Lenscratch, Diffusion Annual and The Hand.
Sal has self-published a number of books combining her poetry with her photographs. Her books are in private and museum collections throughout the country including The Getty Museum, MOMA, Bowdoin College, The Peabody Essex Museum and the Maine Women Writer’s Collection at the University of New England. Sal’s latest book “Yesterday”, produced by Datz Press, is a limited edition book of poems and photographs that explores our sense of loss around the pandemic of 2020.
Originally from the UK, Sal earned her BA in Modern Languages from Manchester University in the UK and has an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College in Rockport, where she now lives with her husband and two children.
Ann Ramsay-Jenkins
Ann has served on the board of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art since 2014. Currently, she serves on the Development Committee, the Governance Committee, the Special Windows to the Future Advisory Group and the Windows to the Future Comprehensive Campaign Committee.
Ann is also a member of the board of the Ogunquit Playhouse, as well as an Emeritus member of the 5th Avenue Theatre Board and the Seattle Repertory Theatre. She served on the board of the National Corporate Theatre Fund from 1993-1996.
Among other boards and commissions, Ann has been a member of President Carter’s Advisory Committee for Women and the President’s Commission on White House Fellows. She served as Director of the Office of Budgets at Harvard University, was a member of Washington State’s Higher Education Coordinating Board, the Board of Selectors for the American Institute of Public Service which administers the National Jefferson Awards for Public Service, and Chaired the University of Washington’s Academic Medical Center Board for five years.
Liv Rockefeller
Liv Rockefeller lives in Camden, Maine, and along with her husband, Ken Shure is the founder and principal of fine arts publishing imprint, Two Ponds Press. They curate limited edition book projects with world-renowned artists to create new and exciting works of fine printing. Their hallmark is forging collaborations with some of today’s leading writers, artists, photographers, designers, printers, and book artists to create a wide-ranging catalog of work, collected by a long list of institutions and private collectors. Their projects have also expanded to become museum and gallery exhibitions, such as The Last Ship with lyrics by Sting and woodcuts by Stephen Hannock that was exhibited at the MET in NY along with a concert by the musician; Boundaries by Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco and photographer Jacob Hessler, exhibited at The Coral Gables Museum of Art in FL, CMCA in Rockland, ME and Ogunquit Museum of Art in ME; Nansen’s Pastport by Anneli Skaar at the Norwegian Seaman’s Church Gallery in NY; Jewish Gangsters by Larry Sullivan with etchings by DW Wakefield at the John Jay Criminal Justice College Library in NY. Two Ponds Press won the Best in Show and Best Illustrated Book at the Oxford Fine Press Fair in England for Margaret Wise Brown’s Little River illustrated by Michael Kuch and Judge’s Choice Award at the Manhattan Fine Press Fair in NY for Cig Harvey’s Eat Flowers.
Although rooted in the traditions of fine press publishing, TPP is always stretching to explore new technologies, techniques, materials, and ideas to create extraordinary artists’ books.
When Liv is not teasing out the next eclectic edition, she is gathering her family around a well-laid meal; cruising the waters of Penobscot Bay in her vintage lobster boat; traveling, and adventuring. Personal motto; I’m just getting started!
Directors
Anna Ginn
Anna fell in love with Maine as an exchange student at Bowdoin College during the days before Bowdoin formally went coed! After graduate school, she returned to Maine, raised her two sons in Freeport, and explored the state by boat and bike. During those years she was the publisher of Maine Times and worked for CEI and CEI Ventures. In 2003, Anna’s career brought her to New York City where she managed the Global Philanthropists Circle at Synergos, an initiative of the Rockefeller family to promote effective philanthropy around the world. Since returning to Maine several years ago, she has used her nonprofit experience and commitment to social justice to support organizations that are helping to create opportunity and equity for all Mainers. She also is committed to helping protect access to open space and nature in Portland and currently serves as the chair of the Portland Parks Conservancy.
Sean Alonzo Harris
Séan Alonzo Harris is a professional editorial, commercial and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. Over the past 25 years, Séan’s work is featured in a range of national publications, advertising campaigns, and exhibitions. In these varied contexts, Séan’s work focuses on human experience and identity and examines both how individuals visualize themselves and how they are portrayed. Séan’s images bear witness to often invisible or overlooked members of our communities, and create portraits that provide a counter-image and narrative of self-worth and personal agency. His work has been published in Atlantic Magazine, the Paris Review, Boston Magazine, Maine Home and Design, Photo District News Rising Star feature, Maine Magazine, Harvard University Magazine.
Séan graduated from the Art Institute of Boston and studied photography in Viterbo, Italy and at the Maine Media Workshops in Rockport, Maine.
Lawrence R. Hott
LAWRENCE R. HOTT has been producing documentary films since 1978 when he left the practice of law to join Florentine Films. His awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, a George Foster Peabody Award, the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the Erik Barnouw Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, fourteen CINE Golden Eagles, screenings at Telluride, and first-place awards from the San Francisco, Chicago, National Educational, and New England Film Festivals. Hott was the Fulbright Fellow in Film and Television in the United Kingdom in 1994 and Fulbright Specialist in Vietnam in
2015. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He is on the board of MassHumanities in Massachusetts and MaineMedia in Rockport, ME, and is now producing The Niagara Movement: A Mighty Current of Protest for WNED-TV, Buffalo-Toronto, and national PBS broadcast. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Hott and www.florentinefilms.org.
Rick Hopper
Dr. Richard Hopper retired from Kennebec Valley Community College after eight years as its new president, he was known as a World Bank education specialist and a Fulbright scholar. Hopper is leaving the president’s post at KVCC at the end of this month, after being awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in Ukraine. He will be working with the Ukrainian government to adjust the country’s system for accreditation in higher education.
Robert ToTeras
Philadelphia-born, New York-bred, Los Angeles-based, Robert ToTeras is one of the most versatile composers working in television and feature films.
Recently Robert wrote the music for award-winning director Daniel Adams’ feature film ‘The Walk’, starring Terrence Howard, Malcolm McDowell and Justin Chatwin.
Since 2013 Robert has scored Oxygen’s hit show ‘Cold Justice’ produced by legendary producer Dick Wolf. ‘Cold Justice recently aired its 100th episode in September 2022.
Robert has also scored multiple shows for Netflix including ‘Sugar Rush’ (for which he won a 2020 BMI Award) and its spin-offs ‘Sugar Rush: Christmas’ and ‘Sugar High.’
Other projects have included TV shows for NBC, CBS, TNT, Bravo and TeenNick, documentaries for Showtime, and a series of viral promos for the hit HBO show ‘Girls.’
In 2023 Robert’s music will be heard in the PBS documentary “The Niagara Movement - The Early Battle for Civil Rights” directed by Academy Award Nominee Lawrence Hott, and the STARZ series “Let Us Prey.”
In a previous life outside of Hollywood and music, Robert ToTeras spent three years as professional blackjack gambler, and member of a card-counting team in Las Vegas. He has been politely escorted (by well-dressed security teams with earpieces) out of numerous and well-known gaming establishments. The story of his team’s exploits was chronicled in Josh Axelrad’s acclaimed Penguin Press biography ‘Repeat Until Rich.’
Van Pulley
Van Pulley spent 3 decades working on the economic and social development challenges of countries in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe while at the World Bank. In addition to Country Director assignments, Van held senior corporate executive positions in Washington including as Vice President, Corporate Finance and Budget.
In 2017, he decided to pursue his passion for photography full time. He now lives in Northern Virginia, where he is a juried member of the Multiple Exposures Gallery, a fine art photography gallery in the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria. His work has been shown in many juried shows in the D.C. area and east coast galleries. His focus is on exploring the sublimity of natural landscapes, the diverseness of urban environments, and the assortment of people and cultures that breathe activity and uniqueness into the places they live.
Van has served on multiple non-profit boards including the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, World Bank/IMF Credit Union, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the World Bank Community Connections Fund that provides funding to hundreds of non-profits in the DC area and abroad.
Founding Emeritus Directors
Charles Altschul
Altschul led the transition of Maine Media Workshops + College to non-profit status and served as its President from 2006 – 2011. He continues to teach at the school, both as a member of the M.F.A. faculty as well as workshops in digital photography and book arts. He received his B.A. and M.F.A. from Yale University where he later held a faculty appointment as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art. Altschul founded the New Overbrook Press in 1982 (now Camden Hills Press) to publish handcrafted artist books, most notably an illustrated folio signed by Nobel prizewinning author Samuel Beckett. In 1991, he moved to Camden, Maine to become Director of Education at the Eastman Kodak Center for Creative Imaging, a facility that pioneered the teaching of digital arts. Subsequently, Altschul worked with several art schools, including the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, to integrate digital technologies into their curricula. In 1997, he created the nation’s first B.F.A. program in Multimedia at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has served on the Yale President’s Council, the Board of the Experiment in International Living, and Maine Media Workshops & College. He is currently Vice President of the Board of the Farnsworth Art Museum and is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Working in both 500-year-old as well as cutting-edge technologies, his work as an artist and teacher stems from contemporary as well as historical perspectives. Charles participated in a 1500-mile offshore sailing passage from Portsmouth, Virginia to Tortola in the fall of 2015. He currently resides in Maine and is a father to one daughter.
John Claussen
John Claussen is former Chief Environmental Counsel at GE, President of TRC Environmental and Vice President of CH2MHILL. Across his professional positions, John enjoyed managing multi-disciplinary staff directed at finding the most effective solutions to environmental and energy challenges.
His interest in environmental issues has extended to volunteer positions with The Nature Conservancy and various land trusts. John’s other volunteer interest has been in education leading to public library board positions and board chair of Maine Media Workshops (an educational institution focused on storytelling through photography and filmmaking).
John holds a B.S. in engineering, M.S. in engineering management, and a J.D. in law.
Barbara Goodbody
Barbara Goodbody moved to Maine in 1973 after working on Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s presidential campaign where she met many wonderful people from Maine. Goodbody was immediately embraced by the community in Portland and, while raising three children, she became active in Portland Junior League and helped found Big Brothers Big Sisters. In 1986, in mid-life, she found her personal passion in photography inspired by attending the then Maine Photographic Workshop (now Maine Media Workshops) in Rockport, Maine. Goodbody has exhibited at venues such as Addison Woolley Gallery in Portland, VoxPhotographs in Portland, College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, the Art Gallery at the University of New England in Portland, Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, and at UNESCO in Paris, France for the International Women’s Day celebration. Her work is in the Ernst Haas Memorial Collection at Portland Museum of Art. She is a member of the advisory board at Maine Museum of Photographic Arts.
“I have always been interested in photography, but it wasn’t until I turned 50 that I committed myself to it,” Goodbody says. She attended the Maine Photographic Workshop as a “birthday present to myself.” She found her passion there, and appreciated the guidance and support of the instructors. At one of the workshops, in 1987, she met a fellow photographer who invited her and a small group of others to travel to India’s villages and sacred sites. “I’ve always been interested in comparative religions, particularly those faiths that are earth-based, and the environmental-spiritual connection,” she says. “My travels to India awakened my curiosity to those other faiths.” Relating her images to “spiritual consciousness” is a large part of Goodbody’s art. The images she created on that trip became her first professional exhibition, Images of India: Villages and Sacred Sites, which traveled across the United States from 1996 to 2000. Since then, Goodbody’s art has been exhibited, published, and collected internationally. “I never dreamed my photographs would hang on someone’s wall. I just did it for myself,” she says. “It’s never too late to start!”
Peter Ralston
Peter Ralston grew up in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, where Andrew Wyeth and his wife, Betsy, became “family” and incisive mentors. Peter worked for a decade as a freelance photojournalist and then began photographing the coast of Maine in 1978, drawn especially to the working communities that define the coast’s enduring character. Peter’s Maine work has been widely published as well as exhibited in galleries, collections and museums throughout the United States and abroad. In 2003 he was awarded an Honorary Degree at Colby College for his photography as well as his role as co-founder of the Island Institute. Ralston Gallery in Rockport, just down the hill from MMW+C, can be found at www.ralstongallery.com.
Joyce Tenneson
Haunting, ethereal, mystical, – all of these words describe the photographic style of Joyce Tenneson. Her photos command a complex and intense emotional response from the viewer, which has made Tenneson one of the leading photographers of her generation. Her work is a mysterious alchemy of sensuality and spirituality lit in an almost otherworldly glow.
Internationally lauded as one of the leading photographers of her generation, Joyce Tenneson’s work has been published in books and major magazines and exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. Her portraits have appeared on covers for magazines such as: Time, Life, Newsweek, Premiere, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.
Tenneson is the author of seventeen books including the best-seller, “Wise Women", which was featured in a Today Show series. She is also the recipient of many awards and, in 2021 Tenneson was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame.
Joan Welsh
I came to Maine in 1991 from Colorado (where I worked for Outward Bound for 9 years) to serve as President/CEO of Hurricane Island Outward Bound, serving for 9 years. Then worked for David Lyman for approximately 2 years as Director of Academic and Student Affairs for Rockport College. I was Deputy Director for The Natural Resources Council of Maine (4 years). Lastly, I served in the Maine State House of Representatives (2008-2016). I am currently retired and serve on several local and state boards. I am so happy to see how well Maine Media is thriving after the work we did those years ago to recreate the organization into a non-profit.
David H. Lyman Founder & Director (1973-2007).
Tripod Society Chair/s
The Tripod Society is a growing group of friends who recognize the important role that Maine Media Workshops + College plays in the exploration of imagination and the nurturing of creative lives. Learn more about the Tripod Society and how to join.
Ellen Slotnick
Header Image: Daniel Pearl, ASC teaching Maine Media students how to shoot TV commercials and music videos. Photo by Alaric Beal.