Staff
Peter’s first night in Portland, back in October 2006, was spent at SPACE, where Wolf Eyes melted his face and destroyed his ears. He remarkably still had enough hearing to join the event staff as a sound engineer in August 2010. He joined the staff upstairs in the office as music programmer in 2014. As a drummer, he has played more than 600 shows across North America, Europe, and Asia over the the past decade, with bands such as Family Planning, Mehetable, Woodpainting, Villages of Spaces, Names Divine, Ora Cogan, Lina Tullgren, Jacob Augustine, Lisa/Liza, Lady Lamb, The Casco Bay Tummlers, and many more. He runs a small record label, Pretty Purgatory. His favorite color is purple.
Jocelyn Leighton is a queer human who uses she/her pronouns. As an INFJ, she uses her intuitive and feeling powers as a way to intrinsically navigate the world. Originally from Downeast Maine, land belonging to the Passamaquoddy Tribe, Jocelyn loves to travel and has been to many different places that have stirred her soul. She is an artist, performer, writer and is currently working on her Master’s degree in Gender and Cultural Studies at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. Jocelyn wrote and performed a piece titled The Unkindest Cut which was in PortFringe 2019 and she authors/manages the website Getting to Know Jane Doe. Along with being a fastidious office manager at SPACE, Jocelyn’s work also includes normalizing gender pronouns in professional spaces, as was part of her previous role as Visitor and Member Experience Supervisor at the Portland Museum of Art. Jocelyn lives in South Portland with her two kitties, Mere and Pippen.
Kelsey (she/they) is a cultural organizational strategist, interdisciplinary curator, artist, and writer from Philadelphia who is deeply invested in underrepresented voices and alternative art histories. She has worked previously as a museum curator and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania and Interlochen Center for the Arts, in addition to being a visiting artist and critic at colleges nationwide. As an artist, she still prefers photographs the old fashioned way, in addition to archives and Arduinos. Her writing was most recently commissioned for the Common Field Field Perspectives 2019 by Title Magazine.
Prior to Portland, Kelsey was an on-again-off again community radio DJ, curator, and art collective member living in West Philadelphia for a decade. She was awarded a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in support of her independent curatorial project Making/Breaking the Binary: Women, Art & Technology (1968-85). Her 2014 project, Thomas Chimes: The Body in Spirals was nominated for Best Exhibition in a Commercial Space Nationally by the International Association of Art Critics. In 2017, Kelsey was a Fellow at the Flaherty Film Seminar FUTURE REMAINS programmed by Nuno Lisboa. In 2019, she was a part of the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts and Cultural Strategy at the University of Pennsylvania.
When not reading books or getting outside, Kelsey is passionate about volunteering for queer and reproductive justice, and serves on the Executive Committee of Sierra Club Maine, the Collections Committee of the Portland Museum of Art, and the Cultural Steering Committee for the City of Portland. She actively identifies as an ambivert and has been known to be quite taken with novelty office stationary.
Ian P. Hundt is an engineer, producer and musician with a varied background in studio, live and compositional sound. He moved to Portland in 2014 and quickly found his way to SPACE. On his first shift, he had one of the most powerful musical experiences of his life working with Tal National, and he has loved SPACE deeply ever since. Ian began his engineering career with a degree in Electroacoustics at Concordia University in Montreal, and has since worked in Nashville, TN, for several years with a focus on analog recording. He became SPACE’s Production Manager in 2017, and is thrilled to be working in Portland’s music scene. He is married to visual artist Amelia Garretson-Persans with whom he frequently collaborates. When not working at live shows, Ian can be found tinkering in his basement studio, playing piano or making dinner.
Lia Wilson is an arts writer and arts administrator. A Chicago native, she moved to Maine in 2015 to plant roots after years living in Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Santa Fe. Wilson has a background managing academic departments in art schools, first for California College of the Arts’ Architecture Division and later for Pratt Institute’s Art and Design Education Department. More recently she was the Communications Manager at the Portland Museum of Art during the institution’s Your Museum, Reimagined initiative, a multi-year revamp project dedicated to expanding access to the museum’s campus and collection. Wilson’s writing practice is focused on elevating contemporary artists that examine the complexities of identity, visibility, and representation. Her research interests include the expanded field of Outsider Art and Self-Taught Art and the evolution of critical discourse surrounding artists with mental illnesses. She has a MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a BFA in Printmaking from College of Santa Fe. She currently lives in Portland with her partner and young son.
Jonathan Downs is the building superintendent at SPACE. When not conquering the depths and mysteries of our building, he works as musician, guitar teacher, nanny, and organizer at New Fruit artist collective located in so-called Portland, ME.
Carolyn Wachnicki is a habitual non-profit employee that also identifies as a graphic designer, painter, athlete, music aficionado, documentary photographer, educator, and now, exhibition coordinator. Carolyn comes to SPACE from The Long Now Foundation, an organization in San Francisco established to inspire long-term thinking.
New to Portland, but not New England, Carolyn was raised in the Mount Washington Valley. There, amongst people that wore many hats (literally and figuratively), she learned early the virtues of being a generalist. This led her to study liberal arts at Wesleyan University with the intention of also playing Division III ice hockey. However, she quickly traded in her goalie gear for a paintbrush and double-majored in Studio Arts and Art History (with an unofficial minor in community radio–WESU 88.1FM).
After college Carolyn set out on her hero’s journey, stomping the trails as AMC ‘hut croo’ before heading to NYC for a curatorial internship at the Whitney’s Altria Space (RIP–’the corporation giveth and taketh away’). After putting in her 10,000 hours on freelance exhibition and collateral design, Carolyn joined the New Museum as their first female in-house graphic designer. The New Museum’s proximity to the lower east side inspired her to moonlight as a documentary concert photographer (note: she did not sleep much those years).
Carolyn climbed out of her creative rabbit hole briefly to work as a packaging designer for beverage companies and as an album art print production specialist for record labels (whilst slowly migrating west to California). After taking a brief sabbatical to write and illustrate a children’s book (Olin The Greyhound), Carolyn rejoined the non-profit world at the Museum of Sonoma County–just in time to celebrate the 40th year anniversary of Christo & Jeanne Claude’s Running Fence.
Carolyn‘s curatorial interests at present are found at the intersection of monuments, sites, and memories. She is particularly drawn to work that activates historic spaces and landscapes in new and transformative ways.
Catherine Buxton is a non-profit professional and performance artist. She spends most of her time speaking about sex and consent, and the rest of her time gluing trash to other trash. Sometimes she does stand-up comedy. (Photo by Julia Whyel)
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Megan (she/her, they/them) is currently pursuing a clinically-focused Master’s in Social Work at Smith College. She has worked as a sexual consent educator, outdoor educator, and wilderness therapy guide. Megan lives in Portland with her partner, two cats, and a 90-pound yellow lab named Walter.
Greg Jamie is a partner and programmer of the Apohadion Theater in Portland, Maine. He is a singer and songwriter for the bands O’Death and Blood Warrior and has released several albums. He is also a visual artist and has had work shown recently at Border Patrol and Able Baker Gallery.
Elisabeth Fuchsia (she/her or they/them) is an artist in search of a medium, currently working primarily in photography, metals, and fiber on usually small but sometimes installation-size scale. She has close artistic ties to music festivals The Thing in the Spring (Peterborough, NH) and Cropped Out (Louisville, KY) and drag collective Switch ‘n’ Play (Brooklyn, NY). Also a classically-trained violinist and violist, she frequently performs as part of a revolving lineup in Footings (Peterborough, NH) and with Mehetable (Portland, ME), in addition to session/arranging work and continuously adding to her own collection of perpetually-unfinished ambient and not-so-ambient sounds. Aside from working at SPACE events, she is a tax advisor with Brass Taxes, working primarily with freelancers, artists, and other nice people, so you won’t see too much of her between February and April.
Quinn Farwell is a musician, electrical engineer, and sound engineer born and raised in Maine. They spend their free time taking pictures of their cat and plays drums, guitar, or bass between 6 bands or so.
After studying avant-garde jazz and improvisation with jazz legend Anthony Braxton, Nat Baldwin started writing songs featuring double bass and vocals. In 2005 he joined Dirty Projectors. In addition to his work with Dirty Projectors, he has performed on Grizzly Bear’s Sheilds, Vampire Weekend’s Contra, and Department of Eagles’ In Ear Park. In between touring and recording with Dirty Projectors, Nat has also recorded several solo records including 2014’s In the Hollows (out on Western Vinyl) and published a collection of short stories, The Red Barn (Calamari Press). He is an active literary arts programmer in Portland and also served as SPACE’s interim music programmer in 2019 while Peter McLaughlin was on sabbatical.
Julia Whyel is an Independent Media Producer, archivist and visual artist. She came to Portland, Maine for a three month visit and nine years later, here she still is. Most of her production works centers on documentary approaches to addiction and recovery, fashion, and concepts of community. Julia holds a BA in Media Studies from University of Southern Maine and is rounding the bend on her MA in Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University. When she isn’t feasting on the SPACE archives you can find her cartwheeling around the city, state, country, and globe.
Geneviève (GV) Beaudoin is a musician, writer, and arts administrator. Raised in a bilingual household in Maine, she went on to study at New York University and The Conservatory van Amsterdam. She returned to Portland in 2016 where she quickly found herself among audiences at SPACE (… the rest is history). Driven by the Didion belief that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” her freelance career has varied from curating music series and pop-up performances to magazine writing and developing new media in the health and sciences. With her band, Dead Gowns, GV released the 2018 EP, new spine, and regularly tours around the northeast.
Board of Directors
A graduate of Northeastern University with a degree in Business Administration, Oliver Watson represents the recent overflow of Boston’s startup tech community into Southern Maine. Born in CT and raised in the greater Boston area, Watson now works as part of a new health-tech business venture started by his brother in a former mill building in Westbrook. zFlo is a software and systems distributor primarily working with European healthcare focused companies, and Hawkin Dynamics is their new venture that develops metrics based fitness devices and software for sports medicine and physical therapy applications. Watson is a young arts collector in Portland and has actively supported and advocated for the growing community of experimental young contemporaries in the greater Portland area.
A native of Farmington, Maine, Desi Van Til studied English Literature at Princeton University, enjoyed a post-graduate cinema-intensive fellowship in Paris, then moved to Los Angeles to work as a producer. She learned the ropes assisting her mentor Greg Silverman at Revolution Studios and Warner Brothers. She went on to spend five years as VP of Development for Donna Roth and Susan Arnold at Roth/Arnold Productions where she associate-produced 13 Going on 30, and the Judd Apatow-produced comedy Drillbit Taylor. Van Til adapted and produced the short film Last Night, starring Frances McDormand, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Tumbledown was her first feature, a love letter to her hometown, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and is available on most streaming outlets.
Van Til just adapted Julie Orringer’s celebrated novel The Invisible Bridge for Wiip as a limited series pilot, and is working on a Portland-based play. She currently serves as chair of SPACE’s marketing committee.
A double graduate of New York University, Kavookjian received her BA in psychology with a research focus on youth development, and a MSW with a clinical focus on individual and group work with adolescents. In New York City, she worked as both a social worker with Big Brothers/Big Sisters and as a manager of the Volunteer Department of St. Vincent’s Hospital, before taking a break from full-time work to raise her family in Portland, Maine. She currently serves on the boards of Maine Academy of Modern Music and The Telling Room, is a part of the Contemporaries Council at the Portland Museum of Art, and is one of the most recent additions to our board officers. Passionate about music as both a parent to young musicians and personally, Kavookjian is a regular at SPACE’s diverse music events and has a growing collection of silkscreened concert posters in her home.
Catherine Besteman teaches Anthropology at Colby College. Her research focuses on racism, immigration/mobility, inequality, and social transformation, topics she has studied in South Africa, Somalia, and the US. A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, she has also received recent fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. A curator as part of her professional practice, Besteman served on the Colby College Museum of Art Board of Governors and most recently co-curated the expansive Making Migrations Visible project, funded by an NEA Artworks grant, that brought together over 75 partners to stage events and exhibitions about global migration.
Robinson is a financial advisor based in Falmouth, Maine who currently works for Ameriprise, after twenty years with Morgan Stanley. Passionate about art history, music, and sailing, Robinson is on the board of the Portland Museum of Art and is a founding board member and serving as the current Chair of the community sailing, waterfront education, and adaptive ADA boating organization SailMaine. In his spare time, Robinson spends time with his family and travels to music festivals in a restored vintage VW “Magic Van.”
Lesley MacVane is a Portlander by birth and is the longtime development coordinator for Portland Media Center, formerly Community Television Network. MacVane is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and an independent filmmaker and media artist who is currently making work exploring adoption in Maine. Portland Media Center is also the umbrella home to the Union of Maine Visual Artists, Hour Exchange Portland (an ongoing community time exchange) and CoCo (The Congolese Community Association of Maine). Originally a documentary and portrait photographer, MacVane became interested in video while filming backstage at a drag show. Since then, she has done numerous videos for public access including pieces for MVAN and Portland Profiles. Since returning to Portland after thirty years living “away” (ranging everywhere from Boston to Nigeria, Jamaia, and Nova Scotia), she helped found the now defunct local newspaper, The Portland Pigeon, and has deep board experience serving on the board of Maine Charitable Mechanics, The Salt Institute, and Learning Works, among others.
Cyrus Hagge is an influential Portland developer, arts philanthropist, and the President of the board of the Portland Museum of Art. His vision in the 1970s to transform the scrappy, “Old Port” and revitalize the classic pre-war storefronts has undoubtedly changed the course of Portland’s history for the past five decades. From a neighborhood peppered with abandoned storefronts next to a working waterfront, to a thriving local business and restaurant community that attracts visitors from throughout the nation, Hagge’s work revitalizing the community in Portland is deeply significant. He is passionate about music and art, and through his dedication to SPACE and likeminded organizations in Portland has solidified the role of cultural institutions and genre-defying contemporary art in a thriving vital community in Maine. His board work includes the University of Maine Foundation, SailMaine, the Crewe Foundation, and his current leadership role at the Portland Museum of Art, among others.
Gordon is a retired computer programmer who worked on early compilers and algorithms at the computer center at CalTech from 1967-70 with applications ranging from NASA to home computing. Much of his programming contributions were later done as a part of the private firm Caine, Farber & Gordon, Inc including contributions to Intel and for seismic data processing. In the 1990s, Gordon moved to Portland from California with his now late wife Beatrice, a painter who had spent time working in Maine and chose to settle there to focus on her work. Gordon’s passion about Portland’s thriving night life and the community it fosters has led to his deep involvement in organization’s like SPACE and passion for local businesses and concert halls. He was involved with the Timekeeper program for the Time Dollar Network and most recently has been involved with The International Artist Manifest, a new nonprofit dedicated to sustaining the legacy and archives of under-represented late-career or deceased artists.
Emily Bruce is the Vice President of Creative at L.L.Bean. She has held various roles within Marketing in her 10 plus years there, an extension of her previous decade-plus experience leading Digital Marketing and Ecommerce efforts within the Estée Lauder Companies in New York and at several innovative start ups.
Bruce came to board leadership through her visionary volunteerism as chair of the SPACE Marketing Committee. She helped lead organizational visioning on SPACE’s brand and mission, has shored up our nonprofit business model, and developed a survey method to better understand our audience and marketing of SPACE’s cultural offerings.
Bruce comes to her volunteerism with alternative nonprofit visual arts spaces with deep ties to her own creative passions and family legacy. She majored in fine arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder with a focus on ceramic sculpture and photography.
Sarah Schindler is the Associate Dean of MaineLaw and is nationally recognized for her law scholarship, which focuses on property, land use, local government, and sustainable development. Four of her recent articles – “The ‘Publicization’ of Private Space” (Iowa Law Review), “Architectural Exclusion” (Yale Law Journal), “Banning Lawns” (George Washington Law Review), and “Of Backyard Chickens and Front-yard Gardens: The Conflict Between Local Governments and Locavores” (Tulane Law Review) –have been selected to be reprinted in the prestigious Land Use and Environmental Law Review, an annual, peer-selected compendium of the ten best articles of the year. Schindler was awarded a prestigious Law and Public Affairs (LAPA) Fellowship from Princeton University, where she spent the 2016-17 academic year. She was also named as Pace Environmental Law Center’s Distinguished Young Scholar of 2013. At Maine Law, she received the Professor of the Year award in 2013. Previously, she clerked for Judge Will Garwood of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas, practiced privately, and served as a White House intern under Bill Clinton. Schindler is a musician skilled at playing multiple instruments, a vegan, a mountain climbing enthusiast, and an avid urban cyclist.
Winky Lewis is a Portland, Maine based photographer who studied with Emmet Gowin at Princeton University in the late 1980s and later worked in Boston and New York. Stop Here. This is the Place is a recent photograph/short story publication collaboration with best-selling author Susan Conley, which documents a year in “Motherland” by the two neighbors. She was a 2015 PDN Photo Annual Winner and her work has recently been featured in Slate, PDN, and American Photography in addition to the many periodicals (Maine Magazine, the Boston Globe, Popular Photography, Maine Home & Design) that have featured her commercial work. Her signature portraiture, as written about by the Portland Press Herald’s art critic Bob Keyes, “ …usually gets you with the eyes.” Lewis recently established a new studio in the Bayside neighborhood at the Public Works.
Phillips is the Vice President for College Advancement at Colby College and was formerly the leader of The Foundation for Maine’s Community Colleges. Having earned a BA from Colby and an MA from NYU, Phillips is leading the ambitious and innovative Dare Northward campaign seeking to raise $750 million to support the college and culturally revitalize Waterville, a former milltown. Previously, she served as director of development for the Yale School of Art working alongside Dean Robert Storr. Prior to her appointment at Yale, she was director of development for New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and a development officer at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan.
