Carlos Yescas ’00 has a job most people only dream about. He’s a scholar of cheese, an expert in all things cheese, and a cheese advocate who fights to preserve traditional recipes and methods of cheesemaking that are being pushed out by big cheese operations. Just this fall, Yescas, who lives with his wife in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, led a delegation of cheesemakers from the Global South on a tour across the U.K.’s cheese country, learning how British cheeses are manufactured...

Midway through his Bachelor of Architecture degree at The Boston Architectural College (BAC), Hossein Abdavies, B.Arch'24, chose to enlist in the U.S. Military Reserves. Covid numbers were soaring, and people needed help. Hossein says, “Personally, it just felt like something I had to do, and I knew that it was right for me.” He took a semester off from the BAC to complete Basic Training in Great Lakes, Illinois, then returned to the BAC full-time while juggling weekend service with the United...

Catherine Hale completed her five-year contract in the United States military and began her studies towards a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree at The Boston Architectural College (BAC) just a few days later in January 2022. She shakes her head. “It’s crazy. I grew up in Maine in a town so rural that we had to drive an hour just to get to the movies. Now I live in Boston and take the subway to school every day.” The exciting new location wasn’t the only difference in Catherine’s new life...

You can find David Wilkins, B.Arch'11, MDS-SD'13, elbow deep in dirt. He’s hunched over a raised gardening bed and pulling carrots up by their leafy tops outside the Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts. As the founder and executive director at the November 11th Foundation, David works alongside other volunteers to grow more than 480 pounds of fresh produce annually. These crops are donated to support hundreds of local veterans and their families...

To say that Ines Latorre, M.Arch'24, is busy is an understatement—but she thrives on the wavelength of determination and hustle. The t-shirt she’s wearing in her Instagram profile reads, “I CAN & I WILL.” That’s pure Ines. The founder and principal of Latorre Architecture decided to go back to school in 2020 to get her Master of Architecture at The Boston Architectural College. Between raising three school aged kids in Manhattan, working on her firm’s major residential projects taking place in

The sounds of construction buzz in the background as Faries (above left) and Taj (above right) McCree sit shoulder-to-shoulder at an outdoor table in Arlington, Virginia. They are wearing T-shirts emblazoned with giant lobster claws, an insignia for the Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls franchise they are opening there. “I’ve always wanted to start a business of some kind,” says Taj, JD ’01. “I spent years researching different opportunities.” He and Faries, MEd ’97, settled on the Annapolis, Maryland–based lobster company as one that would be a hit with local diners (and require minimal cooking, since the lobster arrives freshly prepared)... Image: Kelvin Bullock

Peter Jenner knows a thing or two about pivoting. Long before the pandemic upended the hospitality industry, Jenner, now Chair of Endicott’s Hospitality Management Program, made a life-changing decision: He went back to school. At age 42. And he chose Endicott. “I was absolutely petrified to go back to the classroom with much younger peers,” he said. “But they were the most accepting bunch of people. They were very supportive of me, and we shared a lot, I had the industry skills to help them...

“What are you really interested in?” Gabriel Sosa remembers the SMFA faculty asking him this question over and over back when he was a graduate student. “One of the things I walked away with was the idea of focusing your work around the answer to that question. That’s something I now teach my own students at MassArt,” he says. “The SMFA faculty were enormous influences on me.” Gabriel’s starting point has always been broadening and building community. It’s what he’s “really interested in.”

Richard “Dick” Eckaus, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, emeritus, in the Department of Economics, died on Sept. 11 in Boston. He was 96 years old. Eckaus was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 30, 1926, the youngest of three children to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania. His father, Julius Eckaus, was a tailor, and his mother, Bessie (Finkelstein) Eckaus helped run the business. The family struggled to make ends meet financially but academic success offered Eckau

A few years ago, Juan Travieso stopped painting under his own name. He and his fiancée, Katerina Santos, joined up under the tag of TRATOS, which translates to “a deal or an agreement,” in Spanish and is also a clever combination of their two last names. When SMFA called TRATOS for an interview, both members were high up on scaffolding rigged inside the Frost Museum of Art at Florida International University. Image: Courtesy of TRATOS

At lunchtime on October 14, Gail Cantor, Endicott’s Director of Belonging and Spiritual Life, will lead a contemplative walk across the College’s 235-acre oceanfront campus. Silently drinking in the sea air and the sound of bees buzzing in Endicott’s own hives, participants will be asked to move their bodies without the typical modern demands of trying to solve a particular problem or hit a fitness goal. “On contemplative walks you allow thoughts to come up and you see if you can let them floa

When Emil Cohen first arrived at SMFA for a post-baccalaureate year, his goal was to become an established portrait photographer, but he only had one model. “When I thought of professional photographers, my mind went to someone commissioned by National Geographic to photograph children on the streets of a war-torn country,” he says from his studio in New York City. After watching him pushing to define his practice, Emil’s professor offered advice that still guides him today. “She reminded

Rachel Sydlowski has invented an elaborate pulley system to hoist her large-scale installations up and down the walls of her industrial studio based in an old carpet mill in Yonkers, New York. During the school year she teaches art at a public high school in Eastchester, often getting up at 5 am to fit an hour in at the studio before classes start. At the moment, she’s deep in preparations for an installation for the new Bronx Children’s Museum opening in late 2022. Image: Courtesy of Rachel Sydlowski

“I take more than 500,000 photos a year,” Kyle Klein says. If you’re based in the Boston area, you might see his drone flying over the Seaport at sunset, circling until he gets the money shot with the clouds and light just right. To legally capture these aerial vistas, he became certified part 107 drone operator in the state of Massachusetts, because he had a feeling that drone photography was “the next big thing.” And he was right. Images: Kyle Klein

Scrolls of white paper are lined up against the walls of JooLee Kang’s compact studio in Seoul, Korea. One canvas leans suggestively behind her, taking center stage. “That’s my inspiration,” she says, nodding to the delicate work in progress. “Victorian-style wallpaper patterns with animals in utopian nature.” Just underneath JooLee’s soothing, decorative symmetry lies a shrewd examination of the hierarchy, power imbalance, and sometimes cruel dynamics between the human and natural realms.

In the past three years, Azita Moradkhani has completed fourteen back-to-back artist residencies around the United States. “I was a nomad,” she says during an interview with SMFA. Raised in Iran, Azita chose to emigrate to the United States in conjunction with pursuing her MFA at SMFA. When Trump was elected in 2016, she felt a deep need to understand how Americans lived and thought. “I'm a very political person. After election night, I just needed to see a different version of Americans than the one I was watching on social media."

Marlon Forrester is sitting at a long table in the SMFA library where he used to study as an undergraduate. When he leans in to answer a question, he pulls the sunglasses off his face and really connects. His presence is as electric as the fast-paced games of sidewalk chess he likes to play in the Fenway outside Blick Art Materials, setting down bags of supplies and risking parking tickets to claim checkmate. “As artists, we’re all giving birth to something,” he believes. And at the

“I just went where I was needed,” Bernie Goba* says dismissively, thumbing through an archival stack of Boston Architectural College publications from the 1980’s and 90’s on a recent visit to the College. Bernie is a force— one of the most longstanding, impactful, and recognizable alumni the BAC community has known. But his genuine humility is what is most admirable. He goes on to point out black and white photos of a younger version of himself in his signature bow tie, grinning with his arms f

As a child, Chike Aguh’s mother, an immigrant from rural Nigeria, cut dress fabric for minimum wage at a shop outside New York City. “My parents came to America because they saw an economy where their kids would not have it as hard as they did,” says Aguh, A05. “The America that they came to was built by the American worker.” Because of his own family’s success, it became Aguh’s personal mission to help others rise, too. He has worked as a second-grade teacher, a lecturer at Columbia University

Jonathan C. Garland, President, and Founder of his rapidly growing Boston-based architecture & real estate development firm, J. Garland Enterprises (JGE), studied at the BAC for more than eight years before graduating with a Bachelor of Architecture in 2009. Despite the endurance needed to complete his education, he says, “I will never forget when I put on that robe for graduation day. I didn’t want the experience to end.” And for Jonathan, it never has. He has been a generous and loyal donor