Board of Trustees
Shelby Chestnut ’05
Chair
Shelby Chestnut, is a mixed race Assiniboine and Norwegian, queer and trans community organizer with roots from Montana and Minnesota. Shelby is the director of policy and programs at the Transgender Law Center (TLC), the countries largest trans led organization. Shelby’s work focuses on supporting the leadership of transgender people of color around the U.S., to ensure they are alive and thriving. Prior to TLC, Shelby served as the director of community organizing and public advocacy at the New York City Anti-Violence Project for six years. Shelby holds a B.A. from Antioch College and an M.S. in Public Policy from the New School. Shelby has dedicated their career to organizing and mobilizing LGBTQ people, people of color, and low income communities to ensure policies are informed by the people directly impacted by economic inequality and violence.
Susan Jean Mayer ‘79
Vice Chair
Susan Jean (Shay) Mayer is a developmental learning and curricular theorist who writes on a range of issues related to democratic K-12 practice, social science method, and the study of learning within schools. Mayer draws on contemporary understandings of the work of psychologists Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky and on the philosophy of pragmatism as explicated by John Dewey. Her 2012 book, Classroom Discourse and Democracy: Making Meanings Together, employs classroom discourse analysis in order to characterize and theorize distinctively democratic features of secondary literature discussions. Mayer has taught in teacher education programs at Brandeis and Northeastern Universities and worked in secondary textbook production for five years. She is editor-in-chief of the online Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies and was a founding member of Critical Explorers, a non-profit that conducts curricular research and design residencies (criticalexplorers.org). An edited book on the use of the teaching approach Critical Exploration in the Classroom within teacher education programs is in review.
Sharon Merriman ’55
Treasurer
Sharon Merriman is a graduate of the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. She is of counsel in the law firm of Voyles Zahn Paul, a member of the Indianapolis Bar Association and the Indiana State Bar Association, and an arbitrator for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. She served on the Antioch University Board of Trustees from 2006 to 2012. In the past, Sharon worked with Planned Parenthood of Central Indiana, Big Sisters (before they merged), and currently serves on several committees at All Souls Unitarian Church. Additionally, she is a reader for IRIS an organization which works with our public radio/television station to read for the visually impaired. Sharon is an active member of the Travelers Century Club, having visited over one hundred countries and all continents.
Shalini Deo
Secretary
Shalini Deo is the principal law clerk to the Honorable Rita Mella, in New York County Surrogate’s Court, where she has worked since 2013. Shalini earned a Bachelor of Science in a Self-Designed Major titled “Botany, Environment, and Culture” from Antioch College. She is a 2008 graduate of CUNY School of Law, where she was a student practitioner in the International Women’s Human Rights Clinic during her third year. Upon graduating from law school she clerked for the Honorable Ronald L. Ellis, U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of New York. She also serves as an adjunct professor at CUNY School of Law. Shalini lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her spouse and their awesome kid, Meena.
Shannon TL Isom
Governance Chair
Shannon TL Isom is the President and CEO of YWCA Dayton. Isom is responsible for the executive and administrative leadership of the YWCA Dayton, which strives to eliminate racism and empower women. Likewise, she is responsible to ensure high quality outcomes, financial sustainability, organizational viability, and exceptional program service delivery. The YWCA Dayton has played a pivotal role in shaping the Dayton region; Isom’s priority is to carry the mission and to ensure it is both a catalyst and a disrupter for issues that affect women, especially those most acutely felt through the lens of intersectionality. She served as a YWCA Dayton board member, as well as Board Chair before taking the helm and ushering the YWCA Dayton into a $17+M renovation and capital campaign project.
John K. Jacobs Jr. ‘76
John K. Jacobs (not to be confused with John L. Jacobs ’76) has many Antioch connections. He met his wife Mary (class of ’74) when he entered in 1972, his father John K. Jacobs Sr. graduated in 1940, and his first cousin Evelyn Lamers ’69 and her husband Tom (class of ’69) are, or were, all proud Antioch alumni. After graduating from Antioch with a focus on the fine arts, sculpture in particular, John continued his studies in the MFA program at Hunter College in New York. While there he began working part time in galleries and museums in New York and after leaving Hunter in 1980 he joined the staff of The New Museum where he took the job of registrar, managing the exhibitions and collections of the museum. After spending six years at the museum and seeing it grow into the most cutting edge contemporary art museum in New York he left to join the fledgling art services company, Crozier Fine Arts. This company specialized in the storage, shipping, crating and packing and installation of fine art all over the world and provided the commercial experience that he would need to found his own company. In 1989, with his wife Mary and their three small children, he left New York for Washington, D.C. to establish ARTEX Fine Art Services in the former post office building of Takoma Park Maryland. The company quickly grew and established offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Chicago and Fort Lauderdale, and today is the largest art service provider in the United States, specializing in working with museums, galleries, private collectors and auction houses.
Maureen A. Lynch
Maureen Lynch is an active community leader who has volunteered for more than 35 years in support of women’s rights, civil liberties and access to health care in Dayton and Yellow Springs, where she resides. A native of Akron, Ohio, Lynch currently serves on the Board of Trustees for The Dayton Foundation. She previously has served as a board member or officer for a number of local organizations, including Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Planned Parenthood of the Greater Miami Valley, NARAL Ohio, Think TV, Dayton YWCA, Friends Care Community and Lion Apparel, among others. She was recognized in 2003 as one of the Dayton YWCA Women of Influence.
Sharen Swartz Neuhardt
Sharen Swartz Neuhardt is a partner at Thompson Hine LLP in Dayton, Ohio, specializing in corporate law, mergers and acquisitions, and technology law. She was the head of the firm’s corporate transactions and securities practice group from 2005-2008. Neuhardt was also the Vice President and General Counsel of Mead Data Central, Inc. (now known as LexisNexis) from 1987-1990. In addition to her work with the Ohio Democratic Party, Neuhardt has been active in Planned Parenthood for decades. She earned a BA from Northwestern University in 1973 and holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
Karen Mulhauser ‘65
President, Alumni Association Board of Directors
Karen Mulhauser has been providing consulting services to nonprofit organizations, grantmakers and political candidates since 1988 (including the Obama for America campaign). She coordinates a network of over 930 Washington, DC-area self-employed women. She is founder and coordinator of Trusted Sources, a nonpartisan voter engagement organization. She serves on the D.C. Human Rights Commission and the Advisory Council of Women’s Information Network, which each year presents a DC woman with The Karen Mulhauser Award for service to support the advancement of young professional women. Before consulting, Mulhauser was the Director of the Center for Education on Nuclear War and an affiliated lobbying coalition, Citizens Against Nuclear War (CAN), and was Executive Director of the National Abortion Rights Action League during most of the ‘70s and through 1981.
Michael Casselli '87
Faculty Trustee
Michael Casselli has been interested in the hybridization of forms and media since he received his undergraduate degree in visual arts/performance theory from Antioch College in 1987. While at the college, he staged large-scale outdoor mixed media performance installations, whose primary focus was an attempt to clarify issues of sense-based perception and the physicality inherent in performative work. After Antioch, he was accepted into the Masters Program in Sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). While at RISD his worked started to move away from the performative context, while maintaining a vested interest in sense of physicality, choosing to focus on the role that the spectator plays as a necessary figurative element of a completed work. It was at RISD that he started to define the contextual framework through which his work was to be experienced. By eliminating physical boundaries between the viewer and the work, he provided the spectator with a choice as to how they would interact with it. While these concerns still remain active in the work he produces today, his vocabulary has expanded to include more subtle ways of asking the same questions, and has allowed him to consider a broader palate of contemporary media in the creation of his work, utilizing video, robotics, and homegrown technologies. Michael spent twenty years in New York City within the underground art and performance scene, fully integrating his early concerns with performance and the visual arts. While continuing to create large-scale installations, he found himself able to apply many of the same concerns within the performance arena, creating scenic and video design for dance and theater, earning him a Bessie Award for Scenic Design in 1987. Michael relocated to Yellow Springs in 2009 to establish the Manic Design Studio, a place for hybrid experimentation in all media.
Shane Creepingbear '08
Staff Trustee
Shane Creepingbear belongs to the Cáuigù people and is a citizen of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, where he is a federally enrolled tribal member. Shane is currently the Associate Director of Admission at Antioch College. He is in the process of completing a master’s degree in organizational leadership with a focus in higher education. As an alumnus of Antioch, Shane espouses the importance of shared and community governance and deeply understands the value through which our unique community delivers education by providing practical real-world experience and community engagement to our students. After graduating from Antioch in 2008, Shane volunteered for Nonstop Antioch and the Antioch Continuation Corporation. In 2010, he accepted a position in the admission office and over the course of 10 years has been a consistent, hard-working, dedicated community member. He is currently the Associate Director of Admission and has served on the Board of Directors of the Yellow Springs Credit Union for nine years.
Student Trustee
Elections held in September each year
Honorary Members of the Board
Kay Drey
Atis Folkmanis ’62, Trustee Emeritus
David Goodman ’69, Trustee Emeritus
Terry O. Herndon ’57
Frances Degen Horowitz ’54, Trustee Emerita
Hon. Eleanor Holmes Norton ’60
Joyce Idema ’57, Trustee Emerita
Jay W. Lorsch ’55, Trustee Emeritus
Lee Morgan ’66, Trustee Emeritus
Edward Richard ’66, Trustee Emeritus
Barbara Slaner Winslow ’68, Trustee Emerita
Malte von Matthiessen ’66, Trustee Emeritus