CLASS OF 2005 | 2015 | ISSUE 2
Our class has now made it through 10 years outside of Wes and there is much to report!
Brielle Rey is still working as a lawyer and living in the Philadelphia area with her husband and two daughters (and is expecting a third daughter in September!). She recently visited Cape Cod, where she hung out on a beach making sand castles with Ruth Chaffee and both of their 3-year-old daughters, who, despite living six hours apart, are best friends, just like their moms. Brielle also traveled to Chicago to see Anna Talman and Samantha Schwartz for a long-awaited girls weekend. In February, Brielle ran into Liz Eisenberg at a University of Pennsylvania Law School event (they are both alums) and it was great to catch up! If anyone is ever in the Philly area and needs a place to stay, just let her know!
Matt Lewis is also an attorney practicing labor and employment law in San Francisco, and is happily still living in Marin County with his wife, Jessica, and their now 2-year-old son, Jack. Matt was sad to miss Reunion but enjoyed seeing the various photos that friends posted on social media.
Greg Morril and Catesby Holmes are getting married in New York in September, with lots of Wes folks in attendance. They both attended the 10-year Reunion and had a blast (though nothing compared to the five-year!).
Sivan Cotel and Sas Stewart, his wife and business partner, opened the tasting room at Stonecutter Spirits in July. Their Single Barrel Gin is currently available throughout Vermont, and should be hitting shelves in New York and Boston soon after you read this.
Kim Stolz is a director of equity derivative sales at Bank of America Merrill Lynch after leaving Citi last year. She is celebrating her third year of marriage to Lexi Stolz, who runs her own catering and event planning business in New York City and the Hamptons.
Dan Bobkoff completed a Columbia University fellowship that sends reporters to business school for a year. He’s now working on documentaries and podcasts at Business Insider and living in Brooklyn.
Matthew Montesano finished his master’s in public health and works for the Minnesota Department of Health, where he manages a Web system for communicating public health data, and develops creative and effective data visualization and communication tools. He also races bikes all over the country and is preparing to race among the best in the country at the Elite Track Cycling National Championships this summer.
Anay Shah is coming up on two years in lovely Seattle. After finishing up business school at Stanford, he moved to the “PNW” to join a mobile payments startup and is now helping it expand to new countries. Outside of that he spends some time on the board of a charter school and is trying to start a side business officiating at weddings. He gets to see Sarah Connell around town and enjoyed a mini-Wes reunion at Robert Judson’s wedding last year.
Adrien Weibgen pursued a career in racial justice work after Wesleyan, first as a paralegal in the Racial Justice Program of the ACLU and later at the Center for Social Inclusion, a racial justice policy nonprofit. Adrien enrolled in Yale Law School in the fall of 2011, where they co-chaired a conference on critical race theory and took part in a capital punishment clinic, among other activities. Adrien graduated from Yale in the spring of 2014 and is now a staff attorney at the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center, which works to support organizing in low-income communities in New York. Adrien represents community groups around issues related to land use, development, and neighborhood change, helping to ensure that longtime residents have a say in the future of their neighborhoods. Adrien recently published a piece in the Yale Law Journal, “The Right to be Rescued: Disability Justice in an Age of Disaster,” which describes the lawsuit that established that New York City’s emergency plans violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Adrien lives in Brooklyn with sister Lara and partner iele paloumpis, a dance artist and healer.
Ada Pinkston is living and working in Baltimore, where she teaches at ConneXions Community Leadership Academy (csfta.org/) and is the co-founder of LabBodies (labbodies.com/) Performance Art Lab. LabBodies’ upcoming performance art review is called Borders, Boundaries and Barricades (baltimoreborders.com/). After the Baltimore Borders performance art festival, she will be commissioned by the Baltimore Office of Promotion and Arts to create a large scale installation within a lazy river, curated by Maggie Villegas and Melissa M. Webb.
We still have alums abroad, and Welela Dawit just relocated to Lagos, Nigeria, from Nairobi, Kenya, where she had been the last four years. Still with GE, she’s taken on the new role as the CFO of GE’s power generation business for Sub-Saharan Africa to help play her role in infrastructure and power development across the region. Unfortunately the Reunion was at the same time as her relocation, which forced her to stay in the region, but she enjoyed seeing all the updates from friends and social media!
Sad to inform our class that Timothy Patrick Murphy passed away on May 7, 2015. He was a graduate of Longmeadow High School, the Loomis Chaffee School and Wesleyan. He is survived by his parents, Timothy James Murphy and Kathleen (Moriarty) Murphy, as well as his siblings Ryan James and Kate De Lisi, and her husband Michael. He enjoyed all forms of sports and spending time with his niece, Abigail, and nephew, Keegan. He will be sadly missed by all who knew him. There was a memorial Mass at St. Catherine of Sienna Church in Springfield, Mass., on Friday May 15. Donations were sent to the Wesleyan University Athletic Department in his memory.