Announcing Our Interim Executive Director.

Dear friends of the Thoreau Society,

We are delighted to announce that Rebecca Migdal will serve as the part-time Interim Executive Director of the Thoreau Society. Many of you already know Rebecca from her excellent work at our sister organization, the Thoreau Farm Trust, where she has served as Executive Director since 2021, a position she will continue to fill. In her interim role with the Thoreau Society over the next several months, Rebecca will support the development of a long-term leadership and staffing plan for the Thoreau Society. We are fortunate indeed to have someone with Rebecca’s experience, energy, and insight as we continue our work and look to the future.

For Thoreau Farm, Rebecca has grown the Write Connection series of author talks and writing workshops into a vibrant forum for using the written word to better understand ourselves and our world, and to change both for the better. She has updated and streamlined the organization’s managerial practices at Thoreau Farm, led successful fundraising efforts, won a Freedom’s Way Heritage Area interpretation grant, and helped steer a proposed trail connecting Thoreau Farm to the Minuteman National Historical Park through a daunting tangle of bureaucratic thickets. The Thoreau Society is fortunate to be able to draw on her strong executive experience with non-profits.

Rebecca comes to the Thoreau Society with extensive experience in the museum and nonprofit world. She holds an MA in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program, Museum Studies Certificate from the University of Delaware, and a BA in Art History from Framingham State University. She has served as a Fellow of the Winterthur Museum and worked as a gallery associate at the Meredith Ward Fine Arts Gallery in New York City after beginning her career as a program assistant at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has also served, and continues to serve, on a variety of non-profit boards in the region, developed numerous exhibitions at museums in Massachusetts and across the country, and published a book, Museum Mercenary: A Handbook for Independent Museum Professionals, in 2020.

Rebecca has worked closely with Michael Frederick and other members of the Thoreau Society staff since her arrival at Thoreau Farm Trust; both organizations have offices in the Thoreau birth house, and Rebecca has been at the center of extensive collaborations on programs and events featuring the fruitful legacy of Thoreau and his contemporaries. We are especially grateful to Michael Frederick for working alongside Rebecca these next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition.

We are excited to welcome Rebecca to her new role, and we look forward to working with her and her colleagues at the Thoreau Farm Trust. You can reach her at: rebecca@thoreausociety.org

Best wishes,

John Kucich, Vice President & Rochelle L. Johnson, President