From the Alumni Office:

Jennifer Hamlin Church, Associate VP for Advancement & Director of Alumni Relations

Curtain Up! Light the Lights!

Great Theater at (and Beyond) the Heights

If you’ve been to Siena recently, you know the arts are alive and well. At this year’s Homecoming, you heard lots of music (marching band at halftime, Acapelicans at Alumni Awards, choir at Mass) and saw lots of art (John Wittersheim and Lois DeMots retrospectives in Studio Angelico, alumni art in McLaughlin, six alumni sculptures in the new Wittersheim Memorial Sculpture Park). And there’s a good chance you were humming “Day by Day” from the Theater Siena production of Godspell directed by theater program chair Doug Miller ’74. All of the arts are vital to the life and legacy of Siena Heights—enough so that Joni Warner ’83 now works officially connecting our campus with the Lenawee community through the arts.

Today, I’d like to spotlight Siena’s theater program.

For the past decade, one of our most popular alumni events (outside of Homecoming) has been the annual spring Dinner & Theater gathering. About 100 people come to campus—from as far as Detroit, Lansing, Battle Creek and many parts of Ohio—for dinner and the final production of the Theater Siena season. Some people come every year and it’s not uncommon to hear things like “Wow, I saw this once in Boston/New York/Toledo—but this was better!”

That sentiment was definitely buzzing around the Croswell Opera House in Adrian this past summer, when Siena’s Mark DiPietro ’83 directed a full-scale production of Les Miserables with a cast and crew almost half made up of Siena Heights alumni, students and faculty. “We had 300+ people audition,” said DiPietro, chair of SHU’s Fine and Performing Arts division. “They came out of the woodwork for the chance to be in the full, adult version of the show.”

From the Heights—Fall 2014 Campus News

Siena Heights Spanish Students Featured in Chicago Tribune

A group of SHU Spanish students and “Maestro” (A.K.A. Associate Professor of Spanish) Nick Kaplan (below) were featured last spring in the Chicago Tribune after completing the Fox River Taco Challenge. Maestro Kaplan and Siena alumnus Lee Rincon invented the challenge based on an article written by Tribune writer Kevin Pang. Following a map of taquerías (taco restaurants) along the Fox River (west of Chicago), the students ate one taco at each of the 11 restaurants before returning to Siena.

Siena Serves Group Travels to Jamaica

A group of five students and two advisors from Siena Serves traveled to St. John Bosco Home for boys in Jamaica in May. Bosco is a home for orphaned and homeless boys. Karin Barbee Has Two Poems Published Assistant Professor of English Karin Wraley Barbee recently published two poems, “The Young Pictographer” and “Diving Lessons,” in the Spring 2014 issue of “Natural Bridge: A Journal of Contemporary Literature.” Natural Bridge is a publication of the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Rickinger Named New Director of Residence Life

SHU named Rachel Rickinger as its new director of Residence Life. Rachel previously served as a residential learning coordinator at Valparaiso University. She began at SHU June 16.

Torch Bearers

Heritage Project Has Plan to Keep the Siena Heights Mission Going through Future Generations

Siena Heights University President Sister Peg Albert, OP, PhD, knows that one day there may not be an Adrian
Dominican Sister on the SHU campus.

Thankfully, that day won’t be soon. However, President Albert and the SHU administration recently put a plan in place to help preserve SHU’s mission and heritage. Thanks to private funding from a SHU benefactor, in January 2014 Sister Mary Jones, OP, (below) was hired as the director of Mission Education and the Heritage Project. Her charge is to create a program that will help carry on the mission and heritage of Siena Heights—as well as the Adrian Dominican Sisters.

“When I got the call from Sister Peg, I was actually involved in discerning my next step in ministry,” said Jones, who had an “eclectic” career as a teacher and in the automotive industry before becoming an Adrian Dominican 10 years ago. “It was a delight, because when I read through what her desire for the position was, it really allowed me to use a lot of the gifts and skills I had created and learned over the years.”

Jones, a Detroit-area native, was a former high school math teacher before she was eventually hired by the Ford Motor Co. as a program planner/trainer. One of her tasks was helping experienced line workers make the transition to using technology in the workplace. She designed a program “from where they were to where they needed to be.”