Three hundred and twenty-five students at the University of Maine at Presque Isle have been named to the Dean’s List for the Fall 2010 semester, according to Dr. Michael Sonntag, Vice President for Academic Affairs.
The University of Maine at Presque Isle’s Reed Fine Art Gallery will feature the works of several Aroostook County artists as part of JUST LINE, a juried exhibition connected with a statewide drawing initiative. The JUST LINE exhibition will be on display from Feb. 27 to April 2. JUST LINE is one of many exhibitions that will take place throughout Maine in 2011 as part of Maine’s statewide initiative Where to Draw the Line: The Maine Drawing Project. The Maine Drawing Project was developed through the unique collaboration of Maine arts organizations called the Maine Curators Group. Twenty venues will offer exhibitions that celebrate the medium of drawing throughout the 2011 calendar year and range from drawing directly on gallery walls, to computer algorithms, to sketches of the northern Maine winters. This is the first time a statewide initiative concerned solely with drawing in its many forms and mediums has been undertaken.
– The Maine Community Foundation has announced the Maine Policy Scholars 2010-2011 class. One student from each campus of the University of Maine system has been selected to pursue a year-long program of applied research in the area of Maine public policy.
At the University of Maine at Presque Isle, Keren Morin, a senior Social Work major, is researching how negative portrayals of females in the media impact a female adolescent’s concept of her body image. Morin will be recommending that a media literacy component be added to the health curriculum for students in grades 6-8 in Maine schools. Currently, no such curriculum exists except one offered by Hardy Girls Healthy Women.
TriO Upward Bound at the University of Maine at Presque Isle has been awarded a $45,000 Maine College Access grant by the Finance Authority of Maine. The grant monies will help officials to teach high school students in the Upward Bound program about finances and college savings, as well as provide support for Upward Bound graduates who are now in college. The grant, titled “$uccess! Planning for College and Beyond,” will have two main focuses – finance education for Upward Bound students and parents and retention efforts. The grant may be renewed for another four years and there is the potential for funding to increase from year to year.
University of Maine at Presque Isle Art professor Renee Felini recently took part in a slideshow event that has taken the world by storm. Felini served as one of 10 presenters at the city of Waterville’s first PechaKucha Night held last fall at the Hathaway Creative Center. More than 200 people turned out for the event. PechaKucha, Japanese for chit-chat, was created in 2003 by Tokyo architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. Presenters are allotted 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide, meaning that once 6 minutes and 40 seconds are up, so is their talk. People have embraced this “short slideshow” concept and PechaKucha nights have been held in cities around the world, from Beijing and Paris to San Francisco and Boston.
The Gentile Hall fitness center at the University of Maine at Presque Isle recently installed more than $15,000 in new equipment. The installation is helping to ensure that patrons continue to have high quality equipment for their use in the workout facilities.
The $15,000 allowed for the replacement of the three older and very popular elliptical cross-training machines, as well as the fitness center’s two stepper machines. With other recent equipment upgrades that have been made, this brings the total amount of improvements at Gentile Hall in the last year to over $28,000.
Officials at the University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI) have announced that the hometown premiere of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine, is scheduled for March 18 and 19, at the university’s Wieden Auditorium. The performances reunite the production’s director, Barbara Frick Ladner and Cariani, in director and actor roles, respectively.
Cariani is no stranger to Presque Isle stages with numerous roles in Presque Isle High School (PIHS)productions; Calamity Jane under the direction of Dan Ladner was Cariani’s first high school musical. Other PIHS performances included roles in Grease, Cabaret, The Wizard of Oz, and Juvie. He also performed with university students and community members in Pioneer Playhouse productions of Oklahoma, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, and South Pacific at the university’s Wieden Auditorium.
The Student Activities Office (SAO) at the University of Maine at Presque Isle is encouraging people to “Think Pink” for breast cancer awareness during a special event on Wednesday, Feb. 9.
During the home basketball games between the UMPI Owls and the University of Maine at Machias Clippers at 5:30 p.m. in Wieden Gymnasium, the SAO will host “Think Pink: Breast Cancer Awareness Night” in honor of Cancer Awareness Month in February.
The Northern Maine Museum of Science is looking for your head.
Winter in northern Maine is cold – very cold – but northern Mainers laugh at the weather: in the middle of the coldest month of the year, they shave their heads and have them painted as planets.
This February 19th is the fifth annual Planet Head Day. People from throughout Aroostook County and nearby New Brunswick, Canada, come to the University of Maine at Presque Isle to have heads shaved, or they don elastic caps, so their heads can be painted as planets, dwarf planets, moons and asteroids. And it’s all to support science education and raise money for C-A-N-C-E-R.
A team of professors at the University of Maine at Presque Isle has received $75,000 in National Science Foundation grant monies from the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research [EPSCoR] in order to conduct a wide range of research related to the sustainable development of the Aroostook River Watershed.
The research team will use the grant funding for their project Modeling Evolving Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Systems of the Aroostook River Watershed of Northern Maine for Sustainable Development. The Aroostook River Watershed, which is the most populated region in northern Maine, spans central Aroostook County and encompasses the communities of Presque Isle, Caribou and Fort Fairfield.