Excerpt from the Spring 2025 Extension
The Annual WSU Retirees Luncheon was held Thursday, May 8, 2025, in the E.J. Nutter Center Berry Room. The event, which was open to current faculty and staff as well as retirees, provided a wonderful opportunity for renewing old friendships and creating new ones. We also presented the Lewis K. Shupe Faculty Service Award and Richard A. Johnson Staff Service Award to recognize the service of current retirees who exemplify their qualities.
Richard A. Johnson Staff Service Award—Monica Snow
Monica Snow is Principal at Turning Together Consulting. She also serves as secretary for the Friends of Aullwood Audubon Society and as vice president for Preservation Dayton, Inc., a non-profit organization founded in 1983 to promote historic preservation in the region. She has been an advocate for community building, the environment, and revitalizing Dayton’s underserved neighborhoods since moving to the Oregon Historic District in 1978.
Monica joined Wright State University in 1978 as director of reference services for the School of Medicine Fordham Library. In 1984, she began a corporate career in strategic marketing and product development in the technology, legal, and consumer sectors. She returned to Wright State in 2003 to direct marketing and international programs for 15 years.
Lewis K. Shupe Faculty Service Award—Julia Reichert (Posthumously)
From her pioneering feminist documentary Growing Up Female, which she made as an Antioch student in 1970, to the award-winning film American Factory, which won the Oscar for best feature documentary in 2020, Julia Reichert advocated for the rights of marginalized communities through storytelling for more than 50 years. Julia dedicated 28 years of her career to Wright State’s motion pictures production program, which she helped found with Jim Klein.
Known as the “godmother of American independent documentaries,” her work as a filmmaker, professor, and mentor was foundational to the success of the program. She was a tremendous ally to her students, a powerful force in southern Ohio’s filmmaking community, and an icon in the world of documentary film.
Julia retired from Wright State in 2016 and was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2018, but she never seemed to slow down. She and her filmmaking and life partner, former motion pictures faculty member Steve Bognar, completed making American Factory, which had its Dayton Premier in 2019. The film received the Best Directing Award for U.S. Documentary at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was chosen by Barack and Michelle Obama as the first release by their new company, Higher Ground Productions.
Julia Reichert died in 2022 at her home in Yellow Springs at the age of 76. To honor and continue her long legacy of excellence as a documentarian and educator, Wright State created the Julia Reichert Endowed Director of the Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures fund. Nichol Simmons, her student, close friend and current director of the Tom Hanks Center for Motion Pictures, accepted the award on her behalf.