2025 ALUMNI AWARD RECIPIENTS

Seven Antiochians are honored for accomplishments in a range of fields, from healthcare to film.

The Alumni Association Board of Directors has announced the recipients of the 2025 awards bestowed by the Alumni Association. Nominations were received from the entire Antiochian community. The nominations were reviewed by the Alumni Board Nominations Committee, which presented candidates to the full Board for discussion and ratification.

The recipients are: Susan Barkan '78, Cyndie Bellen-Bérthezène '75, Victor Nunez '68, Paula Treichler '65, Barrie Grenell '65, P. Qasimah Boston '90, and Caitlin Breedlove '03

Horace Mann Award: Susan Barkan '78

The Horace Mann Award recognizes contributions by alumni of Antioch College who have “won some victory for humanity," following Horace Mann’s advice to the graduating class of 1859. Recipients are persons, or groups of persons, whose personal or professional activities have had a profound effect on the present or future human condition. Mann was the first president of Antioch College.

Susan Barkan dedicated her career to eliminating racial and economic disparities in health and wellness with a particular focus on children, youth, and families. Her research, scholarship, and service roles have included social determinants of health, elimination of disparities in health and wellness, child welfare, HIV/AIDS, and community-based collaborative intervention research and evaluation. For 20 years, she was a clinical assistant professor with the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health.

Susan served as Director of Research at the UW School of Social Work’s Partners for Our Children (P4C), until she retired in May 2023. At P4C, she was principal investigator on the Strive Supervised Visitation Program (Strive). Strive is a parent-support and education program designed for families involved with the child welfare system. Susan won a UW CoMotion Innovation Gap award and an Antioch Winning Victories for Humanity grant to adapt Strive into an online training program to increase statewide access. She also worked with a Pacific Northwest tribal health organization to adapt Strive for Native families. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when in-person parent-child visits were prohibited, Susan was part of the team that created online training to support parents until in-person visits could safely resume.

Adolescents in foster care are at the highest risk for a host of adverse outcomes, and few tools exist to reduce the risks that these youth face. Through collaboration with colleagues at UW and the public child welfare system, and funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Susan helped adapt, develop, and test a preventive parenting intervention to assist these youth and their foster and relative caregivers in reducing the chances of the youth engaging in risky sexual behavior and substance use. The team also developed a program to train foster and relative caregivers about the unique needs and support that LGBTQ+ children and youth require for optimum healthy growth and development.

Susan received a BA in psychology and biology from Antioch, a PhD in epidemiology from Yale University, and a post doc focused on family violence from Harvard Medical School’s Children’s Hospital. Active in anti-racist initiatives throughout her career, Susan was a longtime member of the King County Racial Disproportionality Coalition and the Washington State Racial Disproportionality Advisory Committee. Prior to joining the University of Washington, she held positions with Public Health - Seattle King County, and New England Research Institutes, in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Susan is very proud of her Antioch education and the perspectives and values that were nurtured during her time at Antioch, which she says have been a driving force during her entire professional career. She found that her experience at Antioch gave her the courage to follow her conviction to use her education and training to work to examine and ameliorate disparities in health and well-being and to follow that commitment wherever it led.

Arthur Morgan Award: Cyndie Bellen-Bérthezène '75

The Arthur Morgan Award recognizes contributions by alumni or friends of the College which exemplify the concept of “community” advocated by Arthur Morgan. The nominees for this award should be persons, or groups of persons, who have contributed to their community—either local, national or world—in a manner which brings members of the community together in order to work toward common goals. Morgan served as President of Antioch College for 16 years.

True to her Antiochian roots as a Basic Explorations student, Cyndie Bellen-Berthézène’s life has been a series of wild adventures. Graduating with a degree in Dance – after running the Dance Department at Windham College in Vermont and forming her own dance company there during her second year at Antioch - Cyndie moved to New York City to build a dance studio with fellow alums John Bernd and Burling MacAllister. Meanwhile, she perfected her French in preparation for her next pursuit: studying literature and psychoanalysis in Paris.

In Paris, Cyndie began working as a fashion stylist, which in turn led her back to New York to launch a product line for a leading hair salon. Her public relations work there led her to form her own agency with a roster of internationally known fashion photographers. Her clients included Chanel, Revlon, Vogue, Oscar de la Renta, among others, which gave her the funds to pursue the voice lessons that she had always wanted.

After studies with extraordinary teachers and opera coaches and a doctoral fellowship in Russian at the University of Pennsylvania, Cyndie became a Fellow in Slavics at Columbia, and a FLASS fellow at the Moscow Institute of World Literature. She received numerous awards and fellowships in both disciplines. She was an Opera Fellow at Aspen, taught Russian at the University of Pennsylvania, studied extensively in the former Soviet Union, wrote and presented musico-literary scholarship at conferences in the US and the USSR, and received a Diplôme de Langue from the Alliance Française-Paris.

To support her opera career, Cyndie founded HiArt! in the late 90s. It quickly became a sought-after private children's arts program; her clients included David Bowie, Hugh Jackman, Gina MacArthur, Wendy Deng, Mort Zuckerman, Annie Liebowitz, and other celebrated NY families. Feeling the need to address social disparities beyond the Upper West Side, Cyndie re-cast HiArt! as The TimeIn Children’s Arts Initiative. Over the next two decades, TimeIn provided life-changing arts programming to thousands of the city’s youngest and most vulnerable public school children of color in Harlem, the South Bronx, East Flatbush and Queensbridge, as part of their normal school day.

Receiving an Equal Justice Artist’s Residency at the Santa Festival Art Institute, Cyndie developed a personal project, "I Sleep in a Garden of 100 Dresses," inspired by a 1944 children’s book, Evelyn Estes’ The Hundred Dresses. In 2019, she began working in film with her daughter and long-time collaborator, Zoë Greenbaum. Working together as Poodle Owl Productions, the mother and daughter pair has produced three award-winning short films, Inevitability (2021), We Are Bleach (2022) and Please Be Kind (2024). Their newest film, Feel Nothing Inc., was just completed in March 2025. Cyndie is co-producing three of Zoë’s screenplays, Hanging Gardens of the Sea and Sky, The Weather Just Got Sexy, and My World At Night. The pair is co-writing and directing The Art of Change, a documentary on TimeIn’s work to address systemic racism in public education.

Rebecca Rice Award: Victor Nunez '68

The Rebecca Rice Award recognizes alumni of Antioch College who by their actions, achievements, and leadership have distinguished themselves and their alma mater. The recipients of this award are persons who have excelled in their vocation or field of study. The award is named for the first female trustee - and longtime faculty member - of Antioch College.

At the top of his fame, Rod Serling spoke to an awed crowd of Tallahassee, Florida high school kids as a favor to a friend whose daughter was a student there. That was the first time Victor Nunez heard of Antioch. Inspired, he showed up in Yellow Springs in the summer of 1963. He recalls that the students appeared to be "50 percent East Coast, 50 percent West Coast, with a few extras who had slipped in because someone left the door open."

Victor had no idea what he wanted to study or be. The test scores said math and science, but Victor found himself gravitating toward the humanities and the arts. And then film. Not the LA kind, but the kind from Japan, India, and Europe. While there were no courses in film-making at Antioch, it seemed that everyone was making them. Think Peter Adair/”The Holy Ghost People” and John Korty/”Crazy Quilt.”

Nolan Miller agreed to an independent study in screen writing. Victor took the results, found a job at the PBS station back home, shot the film, and that was it. Same with his Senior Project, which won a National Student Film Festival prize: “a portrait of a struggling farm couple, with no dialogue and lots of fades to black.”

After a year continuing work at a co-op job, Victor went on to UCLA. It had a great history program and a new group of film fanatics, but of course he went back to Florida to film his thesis. It was clear where this was heading. On his final trip back to Florida, a great friend who did remain in LA challenged him: "If you have to be a southern filmmaker, make an adaptation of a southern writer." Which led to the Flannery O'Connor short story, "A Circle in the Fire," in 1974. Teaching film in the Art Department and shooting on weekends was an exciting leap and informed everything Victor did after that.

Fifty-plus years and six feature films later, Victor is still at it. His latest film, "Rachel Hendrix," earned best narrative feature at Woodstock in 2023 and, like many indie films these days, continues its journey in the wilderness. Ahead of his American Cinematheque retrospective in 2023, Indie Wire described Victor as "the best director most people never heard of." His response? "The films do exist and even get seen from time to time."

Victor sees the director's job as creating spaces for others to work in. "One of the great joys of getting to make a few films has been working with wonderful actors, some known, some not, but all of them grand. That and the team."

Victor was a member of the founding boards of the Independent Feature Project and the Sundance Film Institute and is a member of AMPAS. He has just retired after 18 years of teaching writing and directing at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts.

This is Victor's first Reunion, although he admits that "some part of me never left.”

J.D. Dawson Award: Barrie Grenell '65 and Paula Treichler '65

The J.D. Dawson Award recognizes significant contributions to Antioch College by alumni or friends of Antioch. The recipients of this award are persons who have contributed in a significant way to Antioch College or a program of Antioch College. Perhaps best-known for his involvement with the Co-op department, J.D. Dawson was dedicated to Antioch College his entire career.

Barrie Dallas Grenell moved to Yellow Springs at the age of two. She attended The Antioch School, graduated from Bryan High School, and entered Antioch College in 1960.

While Barrie dropped out of Antioch before graduating, something about the nomadic co-op experience clearly stuck. After leaving in 1962, she moved to Boston, where she met and married Peter Grenell, class of ’61. They moved to India (Bhubaneswar and Calcutta - think from "Hard Day's Night" to "Sgt. Pepper") and then back to Boston, where she earned a BA in Philosophy and Government from BU. Then on to San Francisco, India again (New Delhi), and finally back in San Francisco, where she held a variety of jobs.

In 1977, Barrie helped incorporate and was chief administrator for Deaf Self-Help, an agency that secured employment for hundreds of deaf people throughout the Bay Area. She continued to work with nonprofit organizations and established her own company, Questions Beget Answers. Under contract to the City and County of San Francisco, her proposals secured many millions of dollars for housing and homeless services, including hundreds of housing units for homeless veterans and families on the decommissioned military bases of Treasure Island and the Presidio.

In 2007, Barrie "caught the fever" and became involved in "saving Antioch College." She served on the Alumni Board for six years and played a key role in creating the SF Bay Area Antioch Alumni Chapter. In 2022, together with her childhood friend and fellow alum Paula Treichler, she established the Theater and Performance Alumni Chapter and its monthly showcase of theater alumni, Backstage.

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Born in Dayton and raised in Yellow Springs, Paula Treichler began her academic adventures at the Antioch School (academic nirvana #1!), followed by Bryan High School. Antioch College was the logical next step - Paula recalls that 10 kids out of 55 in her Bryan graduating class chose Antioch, and several others transferred to Antioch after a year or two at other schools.

The co-ops: New York ad agencies; the What Cheer Patriot-Chronicle, a newspaper in the middle of Iowa owned by two very, very earnest graduates of Earlham; and Macy's in San Francisco. A year in India studying Indian philosophy at Madras Christian College in Madras (now Chennai), where she didn’t hear about the Cuban Missile Crisis till it was all over. As she prepared to graduate from Antioch with a degree in philosophy, Professor George Geiger told her "You must go to graduate school - but not, I think, in philosophy. Linguistics might be a better fit."

Then on to New York to work at an institute for higher education and bang out editing and typing for a number of Marxists and former Marxists (Max Eastman, for one) on a portable typewriter while living in a fifth floor walk-up in a tenement on the Lower East Side: five rooms for $55 a month. In 1966, Paula met Cary Nelson, an Antioch student who had a fellowship to study alchemy; they have been together ever since.

Paula and Cary decamped for the University of Rochester, where she earned a Ph.D. in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Then on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she and Cary spent their professional lives as faculty members. Paula held a range of positions, including Dean of Students in the medical school and head of the Institute of Communications Research (academic nirvana #2). Paula is known for developing the field of cultural studies of medicine, exemplified by her widely-reviewed book on HIV/AIDS, How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS. Now retired as Professor Emerita in the College of Media, she is working on a book on the cultural and material history of condoms since 1850.

Walter F. Anderson Award: P. Qasimah Boston '90

The Walter F. Anderson Award recognizes contributions by alumni and friends who have advanced Antioch College's ideals by breaking down racial and ethnic barriers. The award is named for Antioch's longtime music department chair, the first African-American department head at a historically non-black institution of higher education. Recipients have shown fortitude and effectiveness in promoting diversity within the Antioch community and beyond.

P. Qasimah Boston's innovative community engagement and participatory practices have addressed global challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and race for three decades. They fuse public health, policy development, program planning, evaluation, and art, and stretch from local communities in Florida to the Ministry of Health in Ghana. She is an ambitious leader, innately humble, respectful, and accessible.

Boston grew up with an appreciation, instilled by her parents, of the connection between environment and health. She credits Antioch's mixture of academics, co-op, and other supports and opportunities with providing the secret sauce to catapult her into her destiny. At Antioch, she learned how to write proposals, make a budget, galvanize diverse audiences, plan and implement programs, connect community and academic environments, work in partnership and collaborate, craft an action agenda, connect globally, and make visions come to life. As a student, she organized several statewide African Dance conferences, taught for-credit African Dance classes, and choreographed African Dance stories.

After graduating from Antioch, Boston dove into community and public policy activities using data, art, culture, and tradition to uplift the spirit, increase community knowledge of the intersections of environment and health outcomes, and help inspire community-led solutions to better the human condition. She co-founded Ballet Abaraka, a traditional African dance group that traveled the southeast US highlighting Gullah Geechee connections to African origins (a project envisioned with Antioch classmate John Sims). She capitalized on President Clinton's 1994 executive order to address environmental justice to craft environmental impact statements and support public comment hearings involving storage of spent nuclear fuel and diesel fuel pollution from rail yards, marine shipping, and trucking - and wrote a play about the storage of spent nuclear fuel and its dangers.

Boston co-founded the Tallahassee Food Network and started the Youth Symposium on Food & Hunger. She co-chairs the steering committee of Building Equity and Alliance, which supports grassroots community non-profits across the US and the Federated States of Micronesia. She serves on the executive board of the Moving Forward Network and co-chairs its Solidarity, Support, & Solutions committee, which provides technical support and funding to environmental justice organizations. She is a member of community advisory boards at Rutgers University and Florida State University concerned with the intersection of health equity and climate issues and advancing transformative policy, systems, and environmental change. Boston has trained hundreds of mental health practitioners and students in cultural humility, and developed the Teranga Experience to address burnout; it emphasizes integration of wellbeing practice and personal legacy as part of social justice work. She is a graduated fellow of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Tishman Environment and Design Center of The New School in New York. In 2023, she was a finalist for the Catalyst Award from Rachel's Network, named in honor of Rachel Carson. Her published writings on food security, community engagement, racism, and participatory practices highlight her life-long commitment to foster a balanced relationship among people, the environment, culture, and health.

Eleanor Holmes Norton Award: Caitlin Breedlove '03

The Eleanor Holmes Norton Award, established in 2024, recognizes contributions by Antioch College alumni or friends who have demonstrated significant advancement in fields of policy or politics. The nominees for this award should be persons, or groups of persons, who have made positive changes through advocacy and political action, in either local, national, or global arenas, or have served in political office. The award is named for Antioch alumna Eleanor Holmes Norton ’60, who has served as the Washington, DC Delegate to Congress since 1991.

Caitlin Breedlove has been organizing and writing in red states since graduating from Antioch. She credits the college with providing a place where she was able to discover her passion for community organizing and radical social inquiry and change.

Caitlin's work spans race, class, culture, gender, sexuality and faith. Following graduation in 2003 with a Bachelor's degree in Women's Studies and Communications, she moved to the south for popular education and organizer training at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. As Co-Director of Southerners On New Ground (SONG) for almost a decade, she co-led innovative intersectional movement-building for LGBTQ liberation. She served as Deputy Director of Women's March, which in 2017 put together the largest single-day march in US history; the experience taught her the power of decentralized and digital organizing.

Caitlin is a former Campaign Director of Standing on the Side of Love at the Unitarian Universalist Association, where she provided a bridge between grassroots social movements and the denomination and hosted the podcast “Fortification,” which interviewed movement leaders and organizers about their spiritual lives. Caitlin is also a former Vice President of Movement Strategy at Auburn Seminary and former Board President of Equality Arizona.

Caitlin is the author of All In: Cancer, Near Death, New Life published by AK Press in 2024. She currently lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her two children.