Joan Schirle ’65 was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association of Movement Theatre Educators (ATME) in August 2018. She gave a plenary speech at the International Alexander Technique Congress in Chicago in July 2018. Schirle is the founding artistic director of Dell’Arte International in Blue Lake, California, and in May she will perform the lead role in the Portland production of Going Down in Flames by Daniel Mankin. She was also recently awarded a grant from Opera America to create the libretto for an opera about American painter Morris Graves.