Cynthia / Joy

Cynthia, 1971

Cynthia in Djenne, Mali

Joy, 1971

Joy aux Deux Magots

As a high school senior at Concord Academy, Cynthia Perrin Schneider applied to two colleges — Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College and Radcliffe.  Rejected by Ringling Bros., she wound up at Harvard and would subsequently becoming a tenured professor in art history at Georgetown University with a specialty in Rembrandt.

But thanks to “a fluke,” she heard about something called the Renaissance Weekend on Hilton Head in the early 1980s, where she became fast friends with Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 1998, President Clinton appointed her ambassador to the Netherlands, where she learned how to deepen relationships between countries by promoting cultural diplomacy.

Upon returning to the United States, she did “a crazy thing,” namely give up her tenured position in art history to teach a class in the School of Foreign Service. Since then, she’s created a series of projects at Georgetown to support artists and leverage their voices around the world, including the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, which works to humanize global politics through the power of performance. From the LA-based Muslims on Stage and Television that works to combat Islamophobia in Hollywood to the Timbuktu Renaissance in Mali where she’s helped organize concerts featuring great African music, she’s been able to connect her two life-long loves, travel and culture.

For PasstheMic75, Cynthia spoke with her old Adams House roommate and friend, Joy Horowitz, about how change is the animating force in her life.