Mary Bourke
Director of Development
The Oxbow School
530 Third Street, Napa, CA 94559
Cell 415.259.7747
mbourke@oxbowschool.org

THE OXBOW SCHOOL IN NAPA UNDER NEW LEADERSHIP

Michael Williamson from Pennsylvania

[Napa, CA – September 6, 2018] The Oxbow School would like to welcome Michael Williamson as The Oxbow School’s second Head of School. After 20 years as the Founding Director and Head of School, Stephen Thomas retired in June 2018.

Michael brings a wealth of experience in school leadership, arts education and student-centered pedagogy to this role. He is joining Oxbow after 27 years at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia
where he has been teaching Visual Arts, has served as Middle and Upper School Art Department Chair,
Director of Student Activities, 11th Grade Advisor, Dean of Faculty, College Advisor, and Interim Head of
Upper School. Michael also has deep experience working with students in a residential program during
his time at George School prior to Germantown Friends.

Michael graduated cum laude with a B.A. from Yale, and an M.F.A. in Painting from Bard College’s Milton
Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Michael is a practicing artist and
has exhibited his work throughout Pennsylvania and New York. Michael has three adult daughters, and
has moved to Napa with his husband Joe Schick, a physicist. His deep passion for visual arts and the
impact the arts can have on young students at a formidable point in their lives speak directly to the
mission of the Oxbow School.

Co-founded by Margrit and Robert Mondavi and Ann Hatch in 1999, The Oxbow School is a residential
semester program in Napa focusing on studio artmaking and interdisciplinary humanities. This program
provides high school juniors, seniors, and gap-year students the opportunity for an intensive art
experience and thought-provoking academic instruction. Students come from across the country.