Board of Directors

Scroll down for board bios…

Annie Riecken, President

Michelle Cleveland, Vice-president

Kate Vachon, Treasurer

Geoffrey Cunningham

Linda DeMaio

Vince Pelote

Dennis Quinn

Isabelle Stafford

***

Michelle Cleveland, vice-president of ACT, was born and raised in Jackson, Michigan and spent her professional career in education and economic & workforce development. She and her husband John built their home in Tamworth eight years ago as an eventual retirement location. When a series of professional opportunities became available that allowed them to be flexible in where they lived, they moved into their ‘retirement’ home early. Within a couple of years, three of Michelle and John’s five children moved to Tamworth. Many hearts and hands are now active in Tamworth! Since retiring in 2007, Michelle has enjoyed volunteer roles with Tamworth’s Master Plan committee, the Tamworth Volunteer Energy Committee, Caregivers Board, and the Community School’s CSA.  She joined the Arts Council in the fall of 2008. Michelle enjoys traveling to communities in which John is providing urban sustainability consultant services, visiting family, reading and baking pies.

New board member Geoffrey Cunningham has appreciated the performing arts since he learned that he could sing on key. He currently sings in multiple languages with the alumni of the Yale Russian Chorus. He started working in theater backstage at age fifteen, and for over twenty-five years had a full-time career as lighting designer, stage manager and director. For the past ten years Geoffrey has been working with architects in private practice, as draftsman and designer. He lives in Tamworth with Becca Boyden, managing director of Advice to the Players.

Linda DeMaio received her bachelor’s degree from Trinity College in Burlington, VT with a major in history, and became a middle school teacher. She and her husband Lou settled in Londonderry, NH, where they raised a son and a daughter. In 2003, after summering in Tamworth for 17 years, they took up permanent residence in Sandwich, NH. Linda is an avid hiker, reader, pianist and knitter. She enjoys all types of music and recently has taken up the ukulele. Linda has been on the Arts Council board since the fall of 2004, serving as president from 2006 to 2008. She has brought many outstanding musicians to the ACT stage, including Mose Allison in 2006 and more recently a young classical pianist named Albert Kim. Linda currently serves as nominating chair and is on the program committee. She would like to make her enthusiasm for ACT contagious!

Vince Pelote, MBA is currently the managing partner with daVinci Consulting. The focus of Vince’s work is strategic planning, executive coaching, and large-scale transformation. He employs his many years of experience and training in the behavioral sciences to provide a systematic approach for developing and implementing best practice competency models. Vince’s background includes coaching executives and organizational leaders on creating engaged, energized, and motivated work environments. Vince is an invited research member of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL), was the lead researcher for a major leadership-training grant that was funded by the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) and Hay McBer, and was a member of the steering committee for a leadership benchmarking initiative for the University Health System Consortium. Vince also directed the research for and co-edited Masterpieces In Healthcare Leadership: Cases and Analysis for Best Practice, which was published by Jones and Bartlett in 2007.

Longtime board member Dennis Quinn has been producing, promoting and supporting live music in the Mount Washington Valley since 1989, when he built a stage onto the front of Scarlet Begonias Boutique, which he co-owned, so that folks could hear music and dance in the street. A touring Deadhead since the late ‘70s, Dennis has been on the radio at 93.5 WMWV for 16 years, and the host of Scarlet Begonias Radio (podcast at sunnyfield.us/sbradio.htm) every Saturday night for 13 years. Dennis is ACT’s sound guy and IT genius. He runs sound for Wolfeboro Folk and did so for the former Drylongso Coffee House, produces sound effects and provides technical assistance for Barnstormers Theatre summer productions, designs and maintains websites, and is baker’s assistant/husband at Sunnyfield Brick Oven Bakery.

Board president and program committee chair Annie Riecken spent the first summer of her life in Bethel, ME. Her family has returned to the area since the 1950s, building a home in Center Lovell in the 1970s. After 10 years as an ex-pat, living in the Netherlands, Annie came back to the area in 2003 and settled in Tamworth. Freely admitting that “they pay me NOT to sing in public,” Annie has worked in a production capacity on events, music, film & video and writing projects since the 1970s. She lives in South Tamworth where she gardens, ferments foods and beverages, and raises chickens. Daughter of a psychology professor and a potter, Annie has a lifelong love of and appreciation for all the arts. She is employed as an editor. Other volunteer work includes editing The Tamworth Civic News.

Longtime house manager and former board president Isabelle Stafford has been living in the Tamworth area off and on for the last 16 years. Music has been a strong theme in Belle Stafford’s life. She plays the piano and more recently the violin, and has held many music-related posts: in the jazz office at New England Conservatory in Boston, as tour manager for the NEC’s Youth Philharmonic Orchestra in Chile and Argentina, and at UNH in the music department as bookkeeper and assistant to the chair, while her husband Hans finished his degree in vocal performance. She is also a certified Suzuki piano teacher. Belle and Hans moved here permanently 11 years ago. When not playing music, raising her two children, volunteering at the school, and helping Hans with his electrical business, Stafford Electric, Belle is busily involved with the Arts Council of Tamworth.

Treasurer Kate Vachon returned to the ACT board in 2010 after several years’ absence. She and her husband Tom have lived in Tamworth since 1998 and in New Hampshire since 1990. Kate spent the previous twenty years living in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, NY, working mostly in the theatrical costume industry. Before that she did costumes at Arena Stage in Washington, DC and the Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut, and (in the very far past) at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center and the University of New Hampshire. Kate is the telecommuting editor of a niche-audience magazine published in New Jersey. When she’s not working, she plays flute with the Mountaintop Music Center community orchestra and anybody else who will have her, or travels to visit her kids and grandkids in California and Minnesota.