Meet the Board of Directors

The Board of Directors of the Saltonstall Foundation is made up of artists and writers from the Ithaca area. Each one brings a passion for the arts and is committed to keeping Connie's dream alive and maintaining the mission of the foundation. 

William Benson, President, Fine Artist, Portraitist

Bill Benson is a nationally known portraitist whose work has been shown around the country and across Europe. Knowing what it is like to make a living as an artist in 21st century America, Bill brings an innate understanding of what the Foundation is striving to accomplish. His passion for the arts extends across disciplines. He is currently hard at work restoring a wooden sailboat which he hopes to have seaworthy by next Spring.

Barry Perlus, President-elect, Photographer, Cornell University Professor and Associate Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning

Barry Perlus has been on the Board of Directors of the Saltonstall foundation since 2008. Although the demands on his time are many, he manages to give the Foundation the benefit of his careful thought and attention to the issues at hand. Of his professional life, Barry says, "My artistic practice employs photography and digital imaging, with a keen interest in observation and interpretation. My work often engages architectural and landscape subjects, using elements of scale, perspective, light, color, and abstraction to create new interpretations."

Mary Gilliland, Treasurer, Writer, Poet

Mary Gilliland is an internationally published poet and recipient of numerous awards, including the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Ann Stanford prize, and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Her work has been published in such literary magazines as AGNI, Poetry, and Stand, and anthologized in The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing 2009; Environment: Essence and Issue; and Moments of the Soul: Poems of Mindfulness and Meditation. She was a featured reader at the 5^th International Al Jazeera Festival in Doha, Qatar.

Rachel Dickinson, Secretary, Freelance Writer

Rachel joined the board in the spring of 2011. She writes about science, nature, environmental issues, birds and birding, and travel. She has been a freelance writer for about a decade and has traveled from China to Tibet to Siberia, South Africa, and South America in search of stories. Among other journals and magazines, Rachel's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Audubon, Wildlife Conservation, National Geographic Traveler, Cooking Light, Islands Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Yankee Magazine, History Channel Magazine, American Archaeology, and Living Bird. She has also written several books including Falconer on the Edge, which was published in 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Alice Saltonstall, Musician, Artist

Robert M. Colley

Robert Colley is associate dean at University College, Syracuse University, and editor of Stone Canoe, a prize-winning journal designed to showcase distinctive art and literature from the entire Upstate New York Region, including many Saltonstall grant winners. He also publishes Vitruvius, a virtual arts journal that is distributed in Second Life, and has recently begun his own publishing company, Standing Stone Books. He is a published author, writing on literature, pr

ofessional ethics and moral education, a published photographer, a tennis player and novice sailor.

Michael Koch, Writer, Senior Lecturer at Cornell University

Michael Koch is a fiction writer and serves as a senior lecturer in the Department of English at Cornell University. His teaching interests include creative writing (specifically the short story), the study of contemporary American short fiction, and the study of contemporary fiction of the American South. Since 1989 he has been editor of Epoch, Cornell's internationally distributed literary magazine.

Diane Ackerman, Writer

Diane Ackerman is a poet, essayist, and naturalist who has published two dozen books, including the bestsellers The Zookeeper's Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. She writes regularly about nature and human nature in the Opinion pages of The New York Times. (She also has the somewhat unusual distinction of having a molecule named after her, dianeackerone, which is a sex pheromone in crocodiles.)

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