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The 41st annual Creativity Awards recognize ten ����ֱ�� students for outstanding achievements in their respective disciplines. The distinguished recipients studied dance, music, theatre, creative writing, and art + design at Salem State. Each winner was nominated by faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences. An awards ceremony will recognize the recipients on May 9 at 7 pm at the Sophia Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts. 

Students receiving awards in Dance are Abriana McCollim and Amanda Edmunds. Music student recipients are Jackson Briggs and Andrea Goncalves Whyte, Theatre students Isaac Goldbaum and Symphony Shea, Creative Writing students Joseph Bova and Mae Fraser, and Art + Design students Erin Melin and Sam Stickney.

Lifetime Achievement Awards will be presented to Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Peter Shumann. Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an award-winning poet having published twenty books of and about poetry. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. Maria Gillan is Bartle Professor and Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University-SUNY. Her most recent book is When the Stars Were Still Visible (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021). Her poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books) was published in 2017. Her collection of poems along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets(Redux Consortium).

Peter Schumann is a German-born American puppeteer, founder and director of Bread and Puppet Theater, based in Glover, VT. With the puppeteers of his Glover company, Schumann has created dozens of significant works performed in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Hundreds of puppeteers and puppet companies have been inspired by their work with Peter Schumann. Peter Schumann has been awarded Holland’s Erasmus Prize (1978) and the Puppeteers of America President’s Award (1979). He is a UNIMA Member of Honour (1996). Schumann is the author of numerous articles, manifestos, and books, including “The Radicality of the Puppet Theater” (1991) and “What, At the End of This Century, Is the Situation of Puppets and Performing Objects?” (2001).

Special recognition will be made of Essex County Community Foundation’s Creative County Initiative for the important work they have accomplished in supporting arts and creativity across our communities. 

For additional information about attending this event please email arts@salemstate.edu. Learn more about the arts at ����ֱ��.