Sidwell Honors Four Alumni Who Continue to Let Their Lives Speak

Since 1994, Sidwell Friends alumni have gathered annually to nominate winners for the Distinguished Alumni Award. This award aims to recognize members of the returning reunion classes who have shown dedicated service to their community and profession and have continued to “let their life speak.” This year, after review by the Friends Alumni Network Advisory Board, four alumni who graduated in years ending in a 0 or 5 will be recognized during reunion weekend: Grace Dammann ’65, Tia Powell ’75, Toba Spitzer ’80 and Sonya Clark ’85. 

Grace Dammann ’65 graduated just one year after the Upper School building was opened. After Sidwell, she spent time at Smith College and the University of Chicago before graduating from Yale’s Divinity School. She soon moved across the country to attend medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she graduated around the start of the AIDS epidemic. As a medical professional, Dammann became closely involved in the epidemic, setting up a step-down unit for people with AIDS from San Francisco General and the University of California. In 2005, she was honored with the Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award by the Dalai Lama for her work during the epidemic.

In 2008, Dammann was involved in a life-threatening car crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. Her two-year recovery was documented in the movie “States of Grace,” a highly acclaimed film. According to Dammann, her belief in Buddhism helped her through these difficult times. It allowed her to learn that “Nothing lasts forever, even great pain and sorrow,” and made it critical to “be totally in the moment.” Dammann continues her work as a medical provider at Laguna Honda Hospital in San Francisco. 

Tia Powell ’75 is also a medical professional. She now works as a professor of Epidemiology and Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center. 

After graduating from Sidwell, Powell received a BA from Harvard College and an MD from Yale School of Medicine. Her bioethics focus on public policy, aging, dementia, end-of-life care and public health disasters has made great strides in medicine. In 2007, she co-chaired a New York State workgroup that developed ethical and clinical guidance for distributing ventilators during an influenza pandemic. She has since worked with the National Academies of Medicine on many projects and served as an advisor to the CDC, the Health and Human Services (HHS) and the HHS National Alzheimer’s Project Act.

Recently, in 2019, Powell published her first book, “Dementia Reimagined: Building a Life of Joy and Dignity from Beginning to End.” While caring for her mother and growing up around her grandmother, who both had dementia, Powell was inspired to consider the question, “Isn’t there something more we can do here?” which is the primary focus of her book, where memoir meets medicine. 

The third woman to be honored with the Esteemed Alumni Award is Toba Spitzer ’80. She was ordained in 1997 by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and she now serves as the rabbi for Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in West Newton, Mass. During her involvement with social justice work, Spitzer began to see herself as a rabbi, inspired by their impact.

While in rabbinical school, Spitzer continued her social justice work, such as organizing a rabbinic human rights mission to Haiti during the military junta. Spitzer went on to become the first openly LGBTQIA+ leader of a national rabbinic organization, when she was elected president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. She has been featured in “Forward 50” and Newsweek’s “Top 50 Rabbis in America,” and has recently published her first book in 2022 called “God Is Here: Reimagining the Divine.”

The fourth winner is Sonya Clark ’85. Clark is an artist and Winifred Arms Professor of Arts and Humanities at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Clark works with ordinary objects, such as combs, coins and strands of human hair, to create installations and objects that celebrate Black culture and examine the purpose we assign to objects. Some of Clark’s installations include “The Hair Craft Project (2014),” “Unraveling” and “Sonya Clark: We Are Each Other,” a series she finished last year. Her work has been favorably reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Sculpture, Art in America, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Time Magazine. 

As Clark said for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Objects have personal and cultural meaning because they absorb our stories and reflect our humanity back to us. My stories, your stories, our stories are held in the object.” 

Clark approaches art from a unique angle, allowing her to come up with creative projects, including the Solidarity Book Project, a collaboration with her college students and other participants, to celebrate art’s power in changing the world.