Honorary Degrees

Portrait of Michele Cyr sitting in front of a fireplace

Dr. Michele Cyr, a member of the Class of 1976 and former chair of the Bowdoin College Board of Trustees (2016–2019), is senior associate dean for academic affairs, biology, and medicine at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. Cyr oversees the offices of biomedical faculty administration, faculty development, women in medicine and science, continuing medical education, and graduate medical education. At Brown, she has served in multiple leadership positions, including director of the Division of General Internal Medicine, program director for the General Internal Medicine Residency Program, leadership director for the Brown University/Women’s and Infants Hospital National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health, associate dean of medicine for graduate medical education, associate dean of medicine for women in medicine, co-chair of the University’s Sexual Assault Task Force, chair of the Title IX Oversight Committee, and co-chair of Brown’s COVID-19 Testing Working Group. She has been the principal investigator for Department of Health and Human Services grants for primary care residency training and is currently co-principal investigator for two grants from the Warren Alpert Foundation to establish school-based student health clinics coupled with pathways to medicine programming in public schools in Central Falls, RI. An advocate for faculty, diversity, mentorship, and advancing women in medicine and science, Cyr is the recipient of dozens of honors and awards, including election to Master of the American College of Physicians. She has published numerous articles, chapters, and books, including coauthoring The Complete Book of Menopause: Every Woman’s Guide to Good Health and The New Truth about Menopause: Straight Talk about Treatment Choices from Two Leading Women Doctors. A nationally recognized expert in women’s health, she served as the co-principal investigator for the federally funded Women’s Health Initiative vanguard site in RI. An art and biochemistry double major at Bowdoin, Cyr graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and went on to Dartmouth Medical School, graduating with honors in 1979 before returning to Maine for her internal medicine residency at Maine Medical Center in Portland. Elected to the Board of Trustees in 2000, in addition to serving as chair she has served on the Executive Committee, as vice chair of the board, and as chair of the Committee on Trustees and the Academic Affairs Committee. She has also served as a member of the Facilities and Properties, Admissions and Financial Aid, Information Technology, President’s Visiting, and two Presidential Search committees, as well as on the Special Committee on Multicultural Affairs, Museum of Art Executive Advisory Council, and Subcommittee on Honors. Cyr has served as a BCAN advisor, a BASIC representative, and as a member of the Reunion Gift and Leadership Gift Committees for her class. In 1997, Cyr received Bowdoin’s Distinguished Educator Award.

Black and white headshot of Jeremy Frey

Jeremy Frey, one of the foremost Passamaquoddy craftspeople of his generation, descends from six generations of esteemed Indigenous basket weavers. Born and raised in the Passamaquoddy Indian Township Reservation in Maine, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki methods from his mother and by apprenticing at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. Woven from natural materials that the artist himself forages, such as sweetgrass and wood from black ash trees, Frey’s vessels are characterized by subtle forms, delicately layered colors, and elaborate weaves. Building on and experimenting with the material histories of Wabanaki basketry, his work is also in dialogue with contemporary sculpture’s emphasis on materiality, form, and variation within repetition. To create his basket relief prints, Frey has developed a novel form of flat weaving that can be run repeatedly through a printing press, preserving and sharing his techniques without impacting the stock of his rare materials. Basketry represents a core mode of cultural expression for Passamaquoddy people, whose tribal nation is one of five that form the Wabanaki Confederacy, along with the Penobscot, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki. Frey is committed to asserting the presence of Indigenous people in the past, present, and future. His baskets have revitalized this artform and created new possibilities for emerging Native American artists to innovate their craft. The first solo show of Frey’s work was held at Karma, New York, in 2023. His first institutional solo exhibition, Jeremy Frey: Woven, which debuted in 2024 at the Portland Museum of Art, was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through February 2025. In June 2025, Woven will travel to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. As a 2024 finalist for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, Frey was included in The Celebration of Craft, a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo. Other recent group exhibitions include Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2024); Baltimore Museum of Art (2024); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2024); Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC (2022); and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts (2022). He is the first two-time winner of Best of Show at the Heard Museum Indian Guild Fair and Market in Phoenix, Arizona. Frey’s work is held in the public collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Maine; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; University of Delaware Special Collections & Museums; and Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, among others.

Commencement

Honorary Degrees

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