OHOH is looking to build a base of volunteers and collaborators. We welcome your involvement. Please let us know your feelings, ideas, and suggestions at info@ohohwaldoboro.org.
Michael Amico is a historian, performer, director, curator, and community organizer based in Waldoboro. His work explores how emotions shape our lives and how a shared community spirit can be cultivated and harnessed for collective growth and possibility. His practice moves between art and philosophy, between making and revealing, using text, performance, and public engagement to open spaces of feeling and reflection.
Acting, lecturing, and teaching all center on something shared in the moment of encounter and afterward through reflection and conversation. For him, these practices create an ongoing exchange across time: a dialogue with the emotional lives and spirits of those who came before us that continues to generate pleasure, stimulation, and discovery.
Michael holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University. His dissertation, The Forgotten Union of the Two Henrys: A History of the “Peculiar and Rarest Intimacy” of the American Civil War, is the first full historical account of a same-sex couple in the war. It marked the beginning of an ongoing exploration of how emotional bonds shape a moral and political imagination.
Michael Amico Director
From 2018 to 2023, he was a Research Scientist at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he wrote about feeling through the radio in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats and on the role of blackface performance in the rise of antislavery sentiment in antebellum America.
Across all his work, Michael treats theater as a model for democratic life—a space where people learn to respond freely to real circumstances without closing off the unknown. He has more than fifteen years of experience in theater and film and performs regularly with Everyman Repertory Theatre in Camden.
Michael is an Associate Trustee of the Waldoborough Historical Society, an elected member of the Town of Waldoboro Budget Committee, and chair of the Medomak River Community Park Committee, which is helping create Waldoboro’s new town park.
jan arabas
Co-curator of installations
Jan Arabas is an artist and collaborative installation artist whose practice encompasses textile design, large-scale fabrication, printmaking, drawing, sound, and video. She is Professor Emerita of Art at Middlesex Community College, where she taught from 1994 to 2024, managing the printmaking studio and teaching drawing, 2D design, and electronic imaging. She received a Diploma in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University, and a BA in Studio Art, cum laude, from SUNY Binghamton, where she received the Studio Art Award.
Her work and research have been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship for textile studies in Cambodian silk villages, a Henry Luce Foundation Scholarship for batik studies in Indonesia, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarship in Southeast Asian Studies.
Based in Midcoast Maine, Arabas has created site-specific installations at OHOH exploring emotion, memory, community life, and relationships to place. This work combines fine-art fabrication with sound, video, oral history, and community research to create immersive environments that bring individual experiences into conversation with larger shared histories.
Board Members
Mia Branco
Mia Branco is Education Program Director at The Waldo Theatre, where she runs the theatre arts education program for youth and adults.
Peter Bruun
Peter Bruun is Executive Director of Studio B, using art and the humanities in support of community justice and wellbeing.
Rebecca Cooney
Rebecca Cooney is the creator of Waldoboro Voices, an ongoing series of testimonies where people talk about their lives and the things most important to them.