The University of Puget Sound celebrated another year of inspiring philanthropy, with nearly 3,600 donors giving $22.1 million in fiscal year 2025–26. The Puget Sound community came together to support the university and advance its mission of providing a transformative liberal arts education that offers students experiential learning opportunities, expands access to education, and inspires a lifelong love of learning.

This fall, five steel-and-weaving sculptures hang in the Kittredge Art Gallery, part of a summer research project that represents an artistic shift for their creator.

Roy Kersten-Hellikson ’27 has spent the summer welding, polishing, and weaving as part of a research project focused on developing his artistry. The result is a series of five steel frames, ranging from two to five feet tall, with basket weaving stretched between them. They mirror each other in size and hang horizontally in a line, allowing visitors to walk between them.

Here at the University of Puget Sound, students take their fresh insights and ideas far beyond the classroom, turning passion projects into reality through the Office of Experiential Learning’s Summer Research program. Working closely with a faculty advisor, they spend the summer exploring questions in their field and developing their own research projects. Along the way, they get the time and resources to deepen their expertise, whether that’s studio art, chemistry, or whatever they’re most passionate about.

Everywhere Anna Dery ’27 looks, she sees stories waiting to be told. As a student at the University of Puget Sound double majoring in art history and economics and minoring in Spanish, Dery has spent her college career seeking out new opportunities to learn and grow. Whether studying abroad in Denmark, telling stories on her radio show, or starting a club for runners, Dery continues to find creative ways to express herself while building community.

While working at Mural Arts Philadelphia, an organization based inside the former home and studio of acclaimed painter Thomas Eakins, interdisciplinary artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter unearthed a disturbing piece of the past online. Researching in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' digital archive, she discovered photographs from 1882 of a young Black girl, nude and vulnerable, taken by Eakins in the very room where she stood.