Chester Theatre Company Elects New Board Members

Chester Theatre Company has announces the election of three new members, Alaina M. T. Macaulay, Nnamdi Pole, and Emily Wojcik, to its board of directors. They join existing members Karen Schader (President), Carol Seltzer (Clerk), David Pascucci (Treasurer), Robert Boulrice, Charles Johnson, and Rhonda Steeg.

"Chester Theatre Company has been fortunate to have over thirty years of dedicated, talented board members," says Producing Artistic Director Daniel Elihu Kramer. "I'm excited to have Alaina, Emily, and Nnamdi joining the board, and I look forward to the partnership and conversations I know we will share as we look toward our future."

Alaina M. T. Macaulay is the Executive Director of Diversity and Inclusion for the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since joining the Isenberg family in the Summer of 2019, she has been focused on developing and managing programs that make members of underrepresented groups feel at home at Isenberg, while working with all groups to support them in being engaged and inclusive community members. Prior to her work in Isenberg, she served as the Director of Diversity and Inclusion for Elms College in Chicopee, MA.

During her career, Alaina has led workshops and presentations nationally and internationally on the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion and understanding bias. Originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she now lives in Springfield, Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and their dog.

Nnamdi Pole earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.

Nnamdi Pole has been a board member of the American Psychological Association Trauma Division and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He is also a fellow of the American Psychological Society.

His passion for theatre began in junior high school where he had singing roles in Once Upon a Mattress and Babes in Arms. He was the first African American president of the Hightstown High School Drama Club and a member of the International Thespian Society. He cofounded the Creatures of Awareness Theatre Company and codirected two plays there. He costarred in productions of I'm Not Rappaport and The Big White Fog at the Black Repertory Group in Oakland, CA. More recently, he has participated in play readings at Smith College and discussion panels for CTC.

Emily Wojcik is a Smith College alumna, and earned her PhD in English, with an emphasis on American and British modernism from the University of Connecticut. She is the Managing Editor and Business Manager of the nonprofit literary magazine Massachusetts Review. She got her start in nonprofit publishing with the now-defunct Paris Press, a feminist press based in Ashfield, Massachusetts, and has been involved in publishing, both trade and nonprofit, for nearly two decades. She is a member of the Patient and Family Advisory Council for Cooley Dickinson Hospital, and formerly volunteered as a tutor and college-readiness advisor with Girls Inc. of the Pioneer Valley. She lives in Northampton with her husband and dog.