Past Instructors
Here are the excellent past instructors we have featured over the years. We hope many of them will teach with us again in the future, and we’ll keep you posted when they decide to do so. We are so proud of the academic courses we have sponsored over the last eleven years.
Ed Miller
Ed Miller grew up in Teaneck, N.J., where his parents delivered newspapers for a living and were members of the Communist Party. Ed has been a writer, editor, and publisher of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, …
Julie Mockabee
Julie Mockabee graduated from Massachusetts College of Art with a BA in Art History. During her study she found herself constantly drawn to the work from the Bauhaus Era. She has done extensive research on the…
Pat Nash
Dance has been a passion of Pat’s from the time she was two years old and first danced to The Nutcracker Suite in her living room. It has continued to be an important part of her life. She is grateful for the…
Christopher Ostrom
Credits include productions for Odyssey Opera, Opera San Jose, Tulsa Opera, Chautauqua Opera, Mobile Opera, Hawaii Opera Theater, Asolo Repertory Theatre, Kentucky Opera…
John Portnoy
John Portnoy holds degrees in biology (BA), wildlife biology (MS) and marine ecology (PhD). He has lived in Wellfleet since 1979, and worked as an ecologist for Cape Cod National Seashore from 1979 to 2008…
Michael Pregot
Dr. Pregot has served as a secondary school administrator at the middle school and high school levels for 15 years and as a P-12 school superintendent for 15 years. Most of his administrative experiences…
Steve Reynolds
During my theatre training at Tufts-in-London and The University of Michigan in the 1970s, I studied and experienced many different approaches to Shakespeare's plays. At Wittenberg University in…
Robert Rindler
ROBERT RINDLER has been a part-time resident of Wellfleet for more than 30 years. Since moving here full-time in 2005 he has served on the Boards of CCCC (Cape Cod Community College) and WPH (Wellfleet Preservation Hall), chaired the Education Committee at…
Seth Rolbein
Seth Rolbein, award-winning journalist, editor, and documentary filmmaker, served for the past six years as chief of staff and then senior adviser to Cape and Islands Senator Dan Wolf. He recently became the Director of the Fisheries Development Trust at the Cape Cod…
Martha L. Rothman
Martha Leibowitz Rothman, FAIA, graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1965 with a Master of Arts in Architecture. She joined Rothman Partners in 1971, founded in1968 by her husband Elliot Paul Rothman…
Jim Sefcik
Jim Sefcik retired as Director of the Louisiana State Museum system in 2004 following management positions at the NY State Museum, the Chrysler Museum, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. He taught undergraduate and graduate courses on Early America in…
John Shuman
John Shuman is a theatre actor and director now based in Wellfleet. He began a New York career in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot l Baltimore” for Circle Repertory and then appeared on and off Broadway and in regional theaters including Yale Rep, Guthrie Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre and Portland Stage. For many years he has performed the solo play,“Underneath the Lintel” by Glen Berger, last seen here at Payomet. Other Cape appearances have been with WHAT, Cape Playhouse and last year in “The Lady Hamlet” at The Provincetown Theatre.
John has taught at the Bread Loaf School of English (Middlebury College) in Vermont
and led improvisation workshops for adults and locally at Wellfleet Elementary School. For Open University John has co-taught courses on the playwrights A. R. Gurney and Thornton Wilder.
Jan Sidebotham
Jan Sidebotham has been an avid Open University student since she took the course on Middlemarch (and subsequent courses on Bleak House, The Golden Bowl, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Mrs. Dalloway, Absalom, Absalom, and War and Peace)…
Toby Simon
Toby Simon retired 7 years ago from her role as the director of the Gertrude Hochberg Women’s Center at Bryant University. Serving as the first director, Simon’s responsibilities included providing leadership for programs addressing women’s concerns, collaborating…
Jeff Tash
Jeff Tash has owned a home in Wellfleet for the past quarter century. Prior to retirement, Jeff was an entrepreneurial CEO and, before that, a corporate executive at Hewitt, DEC and IBM. Nowadays, Jeff channels his twin passions for Wellfleet and computing into a popular website…
John Thornley
John Thornley has a Bachelor’s Degree in Art and Architectural History from Dartmouth College and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from The Princeton School of Architecture. He began his professional career working with Eero Saarinen, he…
Don Wilding
Since the start of the millennium, Don Wilding has been telling stories of Cape Cod Outer Beach history. An award-winning writer and editor for Massachusetts newspapers since 1985, Don has contributed the “Shore Lore” history column for The Cape Codder newspaper of…
David Wright
David Wright is the author of, "The Famous Beds of Wellfleet: A Shellfishing History," and has worked at the Wellfleet Historical Society and Museum for 20 years researching, interpreting and teaching Wellfleet's history. Having spent 22 years. as a summer resident and 38…