Citation Awards for Achievement
Joanne Furio ’84, is an award-winning journalist, writer of creative nonfiction, and writing teacher. Over the course of her 40-year career, she has held virtually every position in publishing, from fact checker to editor and freelance writer, and never stopped working, even while raising two sons and attending graduate school.
Joanne got her start at the Bronxville Review-Press Reporter as a student at SLC, where she studied creative nonfiction under her don, Dale Harris. Over the years she’s written regularly for publications such as The New York Times, New York Newsday, The Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has also held staff positions at The East Hampton Star and The Journal News in Westchester County, where she began specializing in design writing.
Since creative writing and teaching were lifelong ambitions, she returned to Sarah Lawrence 20 years after graduating to get her MFA in creative nonfiction. A year into the program, she and her family moved to the Bay Area of California. She became a contributing writer at San Francisco Magazine for a decade, where she covered topics ranging from the rise of internet fashion to how Lighthouse for the Blind collaborated with tech companies to improve the lives of blind people all over the world.
Joanne continued her graduate studies at Saint Mary’s College of California, where she was awarded a teaching fellowship and received her MFA in creative writing in 2016. Her work has appeared in such literary journals as Juked, Panoply, and The Believer, where she interviewed the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. She has taught remedial writing to marginalized students at Holy Names University in Oakland and creative writing at Saint Mary’s.
In 2021, her career came full circle when she returned to community journalism at Berkeleyside, the online news platform for Berkeley, California. There, she writes feature stories and does the quarterly books coverage.
According to her husband, Vince Caro, who nominated her, Joanne is a journalistic survivor “whose talent, resourcefulness, and integrity have kept her vital.”
Lynn Gilbert ’59, is a documentary photographer who has used her camera for the past 50 years to bring attention to areas of society that no one has recorded before. She learned her craft by taking candid pictures of children in their schools for almost a decade. In the 1970s, Lynn turned to environmental portraits of children from over 100 families in New York City with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.
Her next body of work was portraits of women. She was the first to identify the key women from the second wave of the feminist movement, who pioneered in fields traditionally dominated by men.
Her book Particular Passions: Talks with Women Who Have Shaped our Times contains these portraits, with each woman’s story in her own words. Combining oral history and creativity, this body of work helped showcase how these women defied the odds of a gendered society in terms of passion and success. A harsh reality of women in the workplace that many fail to realize. For almost a decade, she turned her eye to the interiors of the traditional Turkish houses, an essential part of the country’s cultural heritage. Her book The Silk Road: Then and Now contains a collection of these photos. More recently, she has been documenting one of the great private gardens of the world through all seasons.
Lynn has had many exhibitions around the world. Her work has appeared in numerous books, newspapers, and magazines, and her portraits are in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the New-York Historical Society. One of her most recognized portraits of Billie Jean King is featured in the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and her portrait of Louise Nevelson was featured prominently at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Jen Simonds ’89, is a thought leader in the field of academic integrity. The policies she works on are being adopted by colleges and universities nationwide. At the heart of her work is the desire to give non-traditional students the best chance of success in higher education.
Like many Sarah Lawrence graduates, Jen's career took multiple directions. After deciding against law school, she worked in social services and earned an MA in Education with a focus on community counseling from Seattle University. She spent several years as a child therapist before being drawn to research. Jen pursued a Ph.D. in personality and developmental psychology at the University of Oregon.
Following her doctorate, Jen became a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she chaired the psychology department and mentored students in the McNair Scholars program, which supports students from underrepresented backgrounds in higher education aiming to become professors.
After she achieved the rank of full professor, her career took an unexpected turn when she moved to Maryland to serve as the Assistant Vice President for Academic Integrity & Accountability at the University of Maryland Global Campus, a large, predominantly online and Minority-Serving Institution. In this role, she was tasked with establishing a new Office of Academic Integrity & Accountability, founded on a learning-focused philosophy. Jen advocates for an educational approach to handling academic misconduct, as opposed to the traditional punitive measures still prevalent at many institutions.
Citation Award for Service to the College
Nancy Montgomery ’64, was a member of the Board of Trustees for 15 years, retiring in 2022 and is now a Trustee Emerita. During her time, Nancy served on the Advancement, Campaign Steering, and Campaign Planning Committees and was instrumental in bringing the vision for the Barbara Walters Campus Center to life. Nancy has played a significant role in helping to build the Sarah Lawrence alumni community in the Bay Area by hosting events and being an active advocate for the College in the region. In addition to her service to Sarah Lawrence, Nancy has also served as board chair of the Environmental Defense Fund and on the boards of the California Academy of Sciences, the Ross School, the Madeira School, the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, and Chanticleer — a choral ensemble based in San Francisco.
Nancie Schnur ’74, is an enthusiastic volunteer for Sarah Lawrence. In 2020 she was named an honorary member of the Alumni Council after completing her service on the Council. She has been a reunion volunteer, serving on her 50th Reunion committee, has participated on alumni panels, has mentored students, and has served as a judge for SLCeeds, Sarah Lawrence’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Immersion Program. Nancie created Kiddie Kabaret, a one-woman interactive musical puppet show for children featuring juggling, magic, songs, and colorful props to make the music come alive, which she has been performing for over thirty years. She has also worked musically with children with special needs and adults in hospice care. Prior to that, Nancie was senior product and package designer for Avon Products, as well as a decorative accessories designer for Sigma Marketing Systems. She began her design career working for the architects Nadler and Philopena, who designed the Andrews Court dorms while she was a senior at Sarah Lawrence. Nancie and her husband Steven, also a member of the Class of 1974, are longtime generous supporters of the College across many areas, including the Ilja Wachs Chair in Outstanding Teaching & Donning.