CLASS OF 2003 | 2017 | ISSUE 1
Alison Criscitiello, back from the Indian Himalaya, is now director of Canada’s national ice core lab, based at University of Alberta.
After completing his M.F.A. in filmmaking from Columbia University, Jesse Soursourian will travel to Nagorno-Karabakh this spring to direct a documentary about an all-women team of land-mine-removal specialists.
Katie Nordine has taken on new challenges working in communications for Baker Demonstration School in Wilmette, Ill. She also runs her own small event planning business, Nordine Events, and dabbles in teaching yoga, having received her 200-Hour Yoga Alliance Teaching Certificate last year. She enjoys binge-watching and binge-reading (which with her two children, Nils Heltibrand and Vallely Nordine, around really means reading a page or two of a book and, at most, one whole episode of a show). She and her husband, Dave Heltibrand, live in Evanston and look forward to longer stretches of uninterrupted silence.
Matt Sienkiewic ’03 explores America’s efforts to employ “soft-psy” media to generate pro-American sentiment in the Middle East in The Other Air Force: U.S. Efforts to Reshape Middle Eastern Media since 9/11 (Rutgers University Press).
Jeremy Cluchey was elected to the Select Board in his town of Bowdoinham, Maine, where he lives with his wife, Sally, and kids, Rose and Fred. He works as communications director at Maine Audubon, a wildlife conservation group.
Rikkia Ben Yehudah, a long time resident of New Haven, Conn., is the founder of Xpressive Arts Creative Solutions for Everyday Living. She is an expressive arts therapist and consultant, as well as a wife and mommy. She keeps in contact with longtime Wesleyan friend Sherry-Ann Brown, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, and Chaya Braxton ’02, a branding and marketing consultant who helps her with the business. Connect with Rikkia if you are in New Haven.
Alison Plenge, Colin Aitken, and their daughter, Nora, were excited to welcome Lucas into their family on June 2. Nora is a great big sister, and Alison and Colin are happy to be the parents of two wonderful little kids, despite being completely exhausted. In July, the family will pack up and move from D.C. to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where Colin is joining the faculty of the biology department at Vassar. Needless to say, the timing of getting out of D.C. couldn’t be better, and everyone is looking forward to being closer to friends in the NYC region!
George Obulutsa is still going strong and growing grey knee hairs working for Reuters News in Nairobi. He had the pleasure of meeting with Sunho Hwang ’05 when he visited Kenya in July.
Jesse P. Karlsberg and his wife, Lauren Bock, are living in Atlanta and expecting their first child in February. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow, Jesse accepted a new job as senior digital scholarship strategist at the Emory University Center for Digital Scholarship where he oversees the center’s project process and edits Sounding Spirit (soundingspirit.org), a series of digital critical editions of the American southern sacred music diaspora using a new platform developed at the center. Jesse also manages Atlanta Studies (atlantastudies.org), a multi-modal scholarly magazine on the Atlanta metropolitan region.
Pete Harvey is taking a sabbatical in 2017 to travel and would love to meet any Wes grads living in Nepal, Vietnam, Laos, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, Norway, Sweden, or Iceland. Say hi at peteharvey@gmail.com. Advice and tips very welcome.
Arcelie Reyes and Evan Newell ’02 recently moved to Evan’s hometown in Vermont. Sledding and snowboarding down the driveway with the kids (Kingston, 7, Phoenix, 5, and Cassius, 1) is their current favorite pastime.
Roberta Pereira is currently the producing director of The Playwrights Realm, an off-Broadway theater company dedicated to early-career playwrights. Their production of Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves recently completed two sold-out runs and was lauded by Forbes as “a milestone for women in entertainment.” and made it on The New York Times list of the Best Theater of 2016.
Amra Turalic and her husband, Jimmy Maynard, had a little girl in July. Her name is Marilyn Zada, and she is a happy little baby who likes to explore NYC, listen to songs and stories, communicate, and smile. She brings her family so much joy.
Meredith Barrett and Aaron Stoertz have an 18-month-old daughter, Winslow Elizabeth Stoertz (Wes ’37). She enjoys chalking with offspring from Wes alums in the Bay Area.
Amy Tannenbaum | atannenbaum@wesleyan.edu