Michael Bouman
Executive Director
In 1995 Michael became the third Executive Director of the Missouri Humanities
Council. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, he spent his childhood in the rural
town of New Egypt until a family move to the newly-minted community of
Levittown, Pennsylvania on his tenth birthday.
He attended Penn State University, earning a B.A. and Master of Fine Arts in Music (voice and choral conducting). He took classes in Art History and creative writing and won a small poetry prize in his senior year. His graduate monograph was a critical appraisal of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte.
While a graduate assistant he made his professional debut as a baritone with the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and appeared on public television as the baritone soloist in a university performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams' Christmas oratorio, Hodie.
In an eight-year college teaching career, he taught at the State University College in Oswego, New York; Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado; and The College of Santa Fe, where he was Head of the Music Division for five years. During his final two years in Santa Fe, he was engaged for two fall semesters as a Visiting Professor at Johnson State College in northern Vermont, where he met and studied poetry with the renowned poet and literary critic, Hayden Carruth.
In 1977 Michael moved to Vermont to join the staff of the Vermont Council on the Humanities and Public Issues, where he remained for the next eighteen years. He managed Council grants, created a Speakers Bureau, encouraged the Council’s first relationships with museums, planned annual humanities conferences, helped involve the Abenaki people in public programs, and encouraged the first library-based book discussion programs. These programs achieved phenomenal success and led directly to NEH support of the “Let’s Talk About It” programs of the American Library Association.
His work with Vermont museums led to an assignment as the manager of a Governor’s Conference on preserving historical legacies and materials, an appointment to the strategic planning task force of the campus-like Shelburne Museum, and an appointment on the Vermont Statehood Bicentennial Commission. He was honored by the Living History Association for his work to help the association develop good relations with academic historians.
When he came to Missouri in 1995, Michael worked to concentrate MHC's best previous accomplishments into distinct, replicable services and programs. He converted the occasional program named "Parents as Teachers of the Humanities" into the statewide family reading initiative named READ from the START. RFTS is now the Council’s most extensive program. In 1998 he created a consulting service for local history organizations. The Museum and Library services of MHC experienced a four-fold increase in demand in 2009, pointing to a demographic shift as Baby Boomers influence the thinking of those institutions. In 2003 Michael completed the development of a four-state project that involved Native American communities in discussing the meanings of the Lewis and Clark expedition and national expansion. Funded by the $300,000 grant from the NEH Division of Public Programs, the two-year project served eighty-five rural venues in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa.
As a consequence of the network of friendships with tribal historians, Michael created a project whereby four tribes would work with Missouri museums and exhibit designers to create tribal heritages exhibits in their former homeland areas. A touring exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage was completed in June 2006. The exhibits on the Osage Heritage will open in Lexington in 2010, and the exhibit on the Missouri Shawnees and Delewares will open in Marble Hill in 2010.
During the 1980s Michael pursued an interest in photography, publishing numerous landscape images in Vermont Life magazine, calendars, and coffee table books. In the past decade his chief interests have centered on singing and horticulture. He participated as an Artist in the biennial Pitten (Austria) International Music Festival in 1994 and 1998 through 2004. He has been a member of the Saint Louis Symphony Chorus since 1998.
His horticultural interest is focused
on hybrid daylilies. He has been an amateur hybridizer of daylilies since
1994 and is currently a garden judge and garden judge instructor with the
American Hemerocallis Society. He has registered nine hybrid daylilies.
His first, Hemerocallis 'David and Alan' (left), is named for the co-directors
of the Pitten International Music Festival.
Michael and Sandra Bouman were married for almost 32 years at the time of her death, from breast cancer, in June of 2008.
Michael married Kathy Wofford, the former President of the Harlin Museum (West Plains, Missouri), on July 19, 2009 on the lawn of The Green Center, a nature education organization in University City. Kathy grew up in the Los Angeles area and moved to Missouri in 1980 with Tom Wofford and his teenage sons, Keith and Kevin. She attended Missouri State University and majored in writing. Keith is now a missionary in Ukraine and Kevin is stationed in the state of Washington with the U.S. Army. Michael's daughter, Jennifer Steagall, is an employment lawyer in Portland, Orgeon. His son, Ben, is a financial counselor in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Michael has announced his plan to retire on May 15, 2010.