Gretchen Babcock is currently the Director of Government Relations for the University of Vermont. She is an attorney and has worked in the Vermont Attorney General’s Office, where one of her first cases was the investigation of an art investment scam involving Picasso prints. She held a number of positions in state government, including Commissioner of Banking, Insurance, and Securities, before moving to Washington, D.C., where she was in charge of state government relations for the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association for ten years. Gretchen is a former trustee of the Wood Art Gallery in Montpelier and is doing graduate work in historic preservation. She is also a print collector (no Picassos!).

"I strive to be a steward of the artistic landscape of Vermont. I hope to nurture budding artists, protect and preserve the best cultural stock, and propagate innovative and colorful expression."

David Carris lives in Marshfield and is a Senior Financial Advisor and Vice-President with a national financial services firm. His professional career has spanned the arts, community, and economic development.

In the 1980’s he worked with historic preservation organizations in Vermont, Philadelphia, and Connecticut. He returned to Vermont in the late-80’s to develop community design and planning programs as a Council staff member and also taught in UVM’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. At the VAC he founded the Vermont Design Institute, directed the initial Art in State Buildings projects, and worked to help start the Vermont Crafts Council. He has been either on the board of or employed by nonprofit community organizations since high-school. He holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. in Historic Preservation from the University of Vermont.

“This is an exciting time to be a VAC Trustee. The Council is uniquely positioned to help grow the bonds between artists and the places where they live and practice, between teachers and students, between visitors and residents, and between neighbors. Arts are unmistakably economic drivers as well as a deeper ingredient in thriving communities.”

James Clubb is a partner with a large professional services firm working primarily with global wealth managers.  He grew up in rural Colorado and has since lived in three countries outside the United States (Luxembourg, Switzerland and the United Kingdom).   Additionally, for the past ten years he has traveled on a regular basis to over 20 countries giving him the opportunity to develop a wider appreciation of the diversity of art and artistic pursuits.   Jim's interests include both the visual and performing arts.   He also has a keen interest in architecture and historic preservation. Jim holds degrees from the University of Denver and the London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London).

"I am very interested in the role of art in the community beyond the economic impact and the way it helps to define our state.   This includes the objects, designs and performances that enrich our lives on a daily basis.    It also includes the diversity of perspective that artists bring as residents of our communities."

Brian Cosgrove is manager of government relations at Entergy Vermont Yankee Nuclear in Brattleboro. His career has spanned journalism, teaching, marketing and political campaign management.

"As a journeyman writer and photographer, I have some appreciation for these endeavors. During the 1970s I spent five years working full-time in an arts-based Title One teaching project with juvenile delinquents in Boston, so I have some first-hand experience with the educational aspect of the VAC mission. I also believe that the private sector has a responsibility to support the arts. Mostly though, I regard being a VAC trustee as a learning opportunity.

Jay Hathaway studied art and architecture at Paier College of Art in New Haven Connecticut. After a 30 year “leave of absence” Jay has re-entered the world of art. He is most intrigued with two mediums, steel fabrication and watercolor painting. Four years ago, while continuing to work as an independent retail businessman, he strongly believed that he had to return to his passion, metal sculpting. Many of his art pieces are showing up in, and on homes throughout this area. He recently purchased an old hay barn from Hampton, New York. It was dismantled and rebuilt on his property in the village of Dorset. In it is his studio/workshop and gallery.

“Though my art has had to take a back seat to providing a living for our family, it feels as though I have never left. I am very excited about my return to what feels extremely natural to me.”

Marie has spent more than 30 years developing and honing her strategic planning and business management skills for one of the world's largest corporations - IBM. Most recently her work has focused on corporate social responsibility and philanthropy. Marie recently completed three years of service with the board of directors of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education and currently serves on the board of the VT Association of Business, Industry & Rehabilitation. Her committee memberships include the United Way of Chittenden County, the VT Chamber of Commerce Business EXPO Committee, and the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce Government Affairs Committee.

Marie has always enjoyed the arts. In her youth, she produced many small plays for her family and friends. She also worked hard (she thought) at learning the piano and the saxophone, participated in both band and orchestra, but was unable to earn a spot with a local teen rock and roll band. Throughout her school days, Marie was very active in theatre arts, mostly as an actor. Today, her interest in and enjoyment of the dramatic arts continues, primarily as a member of the audience.

"Along with working to help the Vermont Arts Council in any way that I can, I am particularly interested in arts education, making the arts more accessible in all ways, and the impact the arts have on Vermont's economy."

Margaret Lampe Kannenstine is an artist whose landscapes and paintings of performing musicians are centered on the expressive use of color. Her paintings and works on paper have been shown extensively for decades, and are held in the permanent collections of museums, hospitals, academic institutions and corporate collections, as well as numerous private collections.

Margaret (Peggy) is a former Secretary of the Board of Directors of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies. Peggy served at the White House Mini-Conference on Aging. In 2004 she co-Chaired the Arts Council 40th Anniversary celebrations, and rejoined the Vermont Arts Council Board of Trustees. In 2007, Peggy was called to Washington DC to serve on the NEA conference on the "Museum and Artist Partnership Act," which is a piece of legislation proposed by Sen. Leahy. She presently serves in her second year of Chairing the Arts Council. Peggy also served on the Vermont Council on Culture and Innovation (VCCI) which studied policy issues of the Creative Economy for our state. She is a past Board member of New England Foundation for the Arts, and was twice President of her local arts council, Pentangle. Peggy also served as Chair of the Board of Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, and is now on the founding Board of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Jct. VT.

The popularity of Warren's contemporary folk art images has helped to position him among the country's most beloved contemporary artists and successful home furnishing designers. Consumers everywhere admire his stylized landscapes, seascapes, animals, and other subjects. His designs are licensed to major names such as Sakura, Springs Industries, and C. R. Gibson, to name a few.

Warren received his formal art training from Syracuse University, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1957. After an early career in advertising, he taught art in the public schools and later joined the art faculty at Castleton [Vermont] State College. He left the college in 1983 to pursue his passion for painting full time.

In addition to serving on the board of The Vermont Arts Council, Warren is a trustee of the Vermont Folklife Center, Green Mountain College, and Syracuse University.

“I have been fortunate to live in Vermont for many years, a place that nurtures the artistic spirit. Living here has provided me the opportunity to become part of a real Vermont community as well as a working artist, both teacher and painter.

I joined the Board of the Vermont Arts Council because I embrace its mission of fostering the arts for all; in communities where it enhances economic development and enriches lives; in schools; and through arts organizations. Through Palettes of Vermont the Council is able to touch a huge number of artists and make a difference.”

Margaret Lawrence is Director of Programming at the Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, one of the original prototypes of campus-based performing arts centers in North America. There, she curates a program of over 50 annual visiting artist events, including the commissioning of new works and approximately 500 arts education activities each year. She is a board member of the national Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP), and has served on panels for the Connecticut, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Vermont arts commissions. Former hub-site advisor for the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Dance Project, she has represented New England in Australia, Japan, Cambodia, China, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia; and has taught professional workshops in Russia and throughout the United States.

Lawrence's double BA is from the University of California, Berkeley in Anthropology and Humanities. She has worked in presenting, education, and marketing for the Hult Center (Eugene, OR), Life on the Water (San Francisco), and the Marlboro Music Festival (VT). She is currently co-producing the first North American tour of multiple ethnic minority performers from Yunnan, China, and leads a series of arts management workshops in Central Asia in May 2005.

 Barbara Morrow has had a rich, lesson-filled career as an administrator in many kinds of nonprofits, including hospitals, higher education, and economic development. She is a former commissioner with the Vermont Commission on Women, an organization she continues to champion. Barbara is currently the development officer for Sterling College, where her values for environmental stewardship, education, and philanthropy converge nicely. While not an artist (although she comes from a long-line of writers and can spew out a few cogent sentences herself sometimes), she understands the power of the arts for Vermont’s economy, families and individuals, and disenfranchised populations. Barbara has a Master’s degree in Education, and has taken a turn or two at teaching on the college level in addition to having a small consulting practice, Equilibrium.

“Beyond their intrinsic value, I respect the arts for the voices they strengthen and the transformation they inspire. (I adore “outsider” art!) A life or a healthy society is not possible without them. From a practical perspective, participation in the arts challenges and sharpens so many parts of our brain, our thinking ability. They are essential to us as fully functioning humans dealing with complex social, economic, scientific and interpersonal issues.”
 

Melinda Moulton was drawn to serve on the Vermont Arts Council Board after participating in the Stompin’ with the Stars Event and serving on the Advisory Committee for the Art of Action Project.  For many years Main Street Landing, of which she is the CEO, has been exhibiting art in both rotating and permanent exhibits.  They have a comprehensive collection of local contemporary art located throughout our buildings. In 2005 they opened a Performing Arts Center that houses a Black Box Theater, a Film House, and a visual arts exhibit on the history of the waterfront.  For years, her mother was president of our local civic theater and theater classes and performing were a big part of my childhood.  Melinda and her husband, a film maker, directed high school musicals when their children were in school.

"I am a poet and composer, and I truly believe that art in its varied forms is the true measure and historic record of the strength and endurance of a civilization."

Gayle Ottman is a Vermonter, born in the Northeast Kingdom.  After high school, she attended Boston University and Hesser Business College. She has been Executive Director of the Quechee Chamber of Commerce for 19 years; completing 11 years on the Hartford Board of Selectmen; served five years on the Hartford Zoning Board as Chair; Hartford Development Corporation Board, CCV Citizens Advisory Board.  She also serves on the Upper Valley Food & Farm Steering and Outreach Committee, the Connecticut Rivers Joint Commission as a Vermont Commissioner and Connecticut River Scenic Byway Steering and Marketing  Committees, and sits on the newly-organized Upper Valley Regional VSO Advisory Board. She also sits on the Steering Committee of the Upper Valley Arts Alliance (an organization that came out of the Creative Economy Initiative

She is a 2000 graduate of the Snelling Leadership Institute; I received the Vermont Travel Person of the Year Award in 2005 as well as the Rotary Club’s Citizen of the Year Award in 2006 and 2008.

She likes to spend her “down time” in the garden, entertaining, being a grandmother, reading, golfing, walking, enjoying performing arts and all forms of music.

“The most exciting economic development to come to Vermont in many years is the creative economy initiative.  Its diversity covers the widest range of entrepreneurship and is bringing, for the first, an awareness to the general public of the value of Art in all its forms.  Vermont is the perfect setting for the Artist – whether on its mountain tops or valleys, its small villages or urban communities, its farms or historic sites, its galleries or its classrooms.  Art creates a sense of place for this generation and those to come.”

GERALD W. "GARY" REIS of St. Johnsbury, Caledonia County, Republican, born in Brooklyn, NY, on October 4, 1935 moved to St. Johnsbury in 1976 to work for EHV-Weidmann Industries In 1999, he became Director of the local Welfare-to- Work program. Retired since 2003, Gary received his education in the New York area and his B.S.in Industrial Management from Adelphi University on Long Island in 1964. He has two sons; a daughter, five grandchildren and a Black Lab. Gary’s past and present memberships have included St. Johnsbury Select board (vice chairman) and Planning Commission, St. Johnsbury Kiwanis Club (past President) Northeast Kingdom Chamber of Commerce ( past President), Northeast Kingdom Youth Services (past President) Lyndon State College Foundation (past Treasurer), Town, County, and State Republican Committees and the St. Johnsbury Development Fund. Religious preference: Catholic. Member of the House: 2009-2010. Home phone: 748 8132, E-mail: greis2kingcon.com. Post Office Address: 1640B Main Street, St. Johnsbury, VT 05819-1851.

"God is a showoff! First He creats all this beauty around us, then He endows people with special talents to interpret His beauty. It will be a privelege to do whatever I can to help the Vermont Arts Council make all forms of the arts available to all Vermonters, and to promote the creative economy."

Gerianne Smart is owner/president of Smart Communication, Inc. which is an advertising sales and marketing firm located in the greater Vergennes Area. Her main client is Vermont Life magazine where she serves as the publication's director of advertising. Her firm also represents Middlebury College's alumni magazine and they also provide marketing, PR and advertising services to a variety of clients throughout Vermont. Gerianne was the President of the Vergennes Opera House during the theater's most intensive restoration phase (1994 through 2000) and is pleased that today the theaters has an executive director and plays host to a myriad of performances both local and national as well as serve as a venue for weddings and special occasions. Gerianne is also producing a full length feature film, "The Summer of Walter Hacks" with George Woodard of Waterbury (the film's director). The duo plan to release the film to the film festival circuit this summer.

"I believe the arts, in all its forms, touches people's lives in a non discriminating way and in a way that can resonate for a lifetime. I am delighted to be part of an organization that supports and nurtures the arts and encourages creativity to be a part of our every day lives. In Vermont, true wealth lives in the heart of the artist."

Steve Swayne teaches courses in art music from 1700 to the present day, opera, American musical theater, Russian music, and American music. He has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His articles have appeared in The Sondheim Review, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, American Music, Studies in Musical Theatre, the Indiana Theory Review, and The Musical Quarterly. He has contributed to commentaries on Sondheim developed by the Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C., and the Chicago Lyric Opera. His first book, How Sondheim Found His Sound, was published in 2005, and he is currently at work on a study of the life, times, and music of William Schuman. He is an accomplished concert pianist, with four nationally distributed recordings currently in release and a performance with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas to his credit. In addition to his work at Dartmouth, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and at UC Berkeley.

"My days as a composer and concert pianist appear to be mostly in the past, but I remain keenly interested in the roles that performing artists play in the life of their communities. I look forward in expressing that interest as I serve on the Vermont Arts Council."

Caro Thompson’s creative life extends well before and beyond her work as a documentary filmmaker and television producer:

• a singer and performer since childhood, with 2 years of voice lessons at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York
• a dancer beginning in high school, with performances in college and 2 extraordinary years studying with the Garth Fagan Dance Company and 1 year with   the Jose Limon Dance Company
• a degree in Art History from the University of Rochester, Special Studies in Dance Film & Video
• a member of the Helen Day Art Center Visual Arts Committee for the past 4 ½  years.

Caro’s media career began in 1981 in New York City as Production Assistant and Videographer for Video D, a company that documented all performances at Dance Theater Workshop and worked with many of the major dance companies there. She went on to initiate and direct the video documentation project at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Lee, Massachusetts for four full seasons, adding an internship program in video production.

Starting as a Videographer/Editor in broadcast television in 1985, her experience includes: News, Sports, Public Affairs, The Arts, History

In Vermont since 1988, Caro spent a year at Catamount Arts in St. Johnsbury, doing marketing, production coordination and also producing “High Water: Behind the Scenes,” a documentary about Jay Craven’s first narrative film based on a Howard Frank Mosher story.

From 1989 – 1994, as a Site Coordinator and Marketing Assistant for Vermont Interactive Television, the regional diversity of my adopted home state was reinforced over and over. 

Since 1994, Caro has been capturing the spirit, history and rural activities of Vermont as an independent producer and filmmaker. Her programs are broadcast on Vermont Public Television.  Documentaries include In Days Gone By and Barns: Legacy of Wood & Stone received Boston/New England Emmy nominations.  Her most recent project was Noble Hearts: Civil War Vermont.

Paul Ugalde is the Director of Development for Population Media Center based in Shelburne. PMC is an international NGO specializing in the use of serial dramas (yes, soap operas) on radio and television in developing nations around the globe. Armed with a passport and various visas, Paul pursues funding from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Bamako, Mali to San Francisco and Seattle on behalf of PMC's projects. Our concerns are with the rapid growth of the human population and its effect on the environment. Paul's career path has included the commercial broadcast industry (WCAX-TV, WEZF radio) and non-profit fundraising (Vermont Public Television, Burlington City Arts). He is a graduate of the University of Vermont. As an actor, he has appeared with Vermont Stage Company, Lyric Theatre Company and other troupes. Paul is trained in the techniques of stage combat and has staged numerous scenes of mayhem and destruction for many Vermont theatre companies, especially Lost Nation Theater. When not wielding a rapier and dagger, he attempts to play classical guitar.

"I am an active participant in the arts in Vermont and have been an ardent and long-term supporter. Any activity that unlocks imagination and creativity benefits us all in very tangible ways. I believe in the power of Vermont's creative sector to enrich lives, broaden understanding and fuel our economy. Each individual, each state and each nation flourishes when it has a vibrant soul. That is the nature and gift of the arts."

A Vermonter (since she was 2), Ruth has enjoyed a lifetime of participation in and appreciation of the arts. Educated in Burlington schools and at Barnard College, she graduated from Yale School of Drama with an MFA in Acting. Ruth spent eight years in New York acting and producing, during the early, heady years of “off-off” Broadway. She taught acting at Jersey City State College, and ran Children’s Theatre Unlimited in Princeton, NJ. Since returning to Vermont in the early 1980’s Ruth has worked in radio, represented the University of Vermont at the legislature, run First Night Burlington for two years, and is currently the Executive Director of the Lake Champlain Islands Chamber of Commerce. In her “spare” time Ruth has performed with many Vermont theater companies. She also serves on the boards of FlynnArts, Vermont Stage Company and Trinity Children’s Center.

"Participating in the making of theater, as an actor, producer, board member, teacher and fan, has provided much enjoyment throughout my life. The arts are a medium through which we interpret our world, never more important than at this present time. Now we find that we have been contributing to the creative economy, which provides added value to the well-being of our communities. As a member of the Vermont Arts Council I look forward to continuing and increasing the vitality of the arts and artists."

For the past 20 years, Greg has provided a place for hundreds of craftspeople and artists to show and sell their works. He and his wife, Susan, own and operate Vermont Artisan Designs & Gallery 2 on Brattleboro’s Main Street. Additionally, Greg has been active in community affairs. He recently stepped down from the Brattleboro Selectboard after serving for 12 years, two as chair.

Greg was a founding member of Brattleboro’s Gallery Walk, a monthly celebration of the arts which has grown to include more than 50 venues that feature art-related openings around town on the first Friday of each month. He also helped found Building a Better Brattleboro and the Creative Communities Council of Windham County, organizations that have helped stimulate the town’s economic and aesthetic activities. He has been an active member of the Vermont Crafts Council, the Vermont State Craft Center Overview Commission and CRAFT (Craft Retailers Association for Tomorrow), organizations promoting American-made craft and artistry.

Before owning Vermont Artisan Designs & Gallery 2, Greg worked as reporter, photographer and assistant managing editor of the Brattleboro Reformer. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, the Defense Information School and the University of Vermont’s Snelling Leadership Institute. He enjoys photography, reading, motorcycling and finding art.

“Throughout my years in our state, it is increasingly apparent t