Self Starters

Bennington Magazine spoke with four alumni who have started radically different projects: a shop, a forest cemetery, a non-profit writers residency, and an alternative reality gaming company. Despite their differences, each has used deeply personal motivation marked by creativity, uncertainty, and the joy of the work.

Briana Magnifico '08: W. Collective

Since high school, Bennington native Briana Magnifico ’08 has always wanted to have a shop, specifically one that sold both beautiful pastries and handcrafted items she made herself. She co-founded and owns W. Collective on North Street in Bennington. “It is my dream realized,” she said during a recent visit. “I always knew that I was meant to be a business owner.”

At Bennington she studied costume and fashion design, photography, acting, and voice. She was able to get a job straight after graduation working as a costume production assistant for Taking Woodstock, directed by Ang Lee. From there, she worked for fashion designer Adam Selman and assisted him and his brand with all of Rhianna’s tours and red carpet looks, most notably the nude Swarovski crystal dress she wore for the Council of Fashion Designers of America Fashion Icon of the Year award show. “Bennington College gave me so much. It was unlike anything else,” she said. “I miss it, and I dream of it often.”

All along, while working other jobs, she designed and made things—candles, original clothing, and napkins and placemats dyed with natural pigments—and curated antiques and vintage clothing to take to markets.

Now, in the spacious, artistically appointed space at W. Collective, Magnifico sells handcrafted items made by women artisans, including herself. Items are chosen for their beauty and sustainability. Between the work of operating the shop, she makes screen printed clothing, candles, a string of pennants made of recycled denim…. And she stages them.

“I have an idea in my mind, and I am a perfectionist. I sacrifice a lot to reach my vision,” she said, pointing to a pink light illuminating a 5-foot grapevine wreath studded with dried hydrangeas. “It had to be pink,” she explained.

True to her high school daydream, Magnifico also sells coffee and espresso drinks and pastries from local women-owned bakeries and those she bakes herself. The shop is the only local purveyor of natural wine. “It just tastes better, and it’s better for the environment,” she said. “It’s important to have a place like this in my hometown, to have that sense of community and to feel a little bit better every time you leave,” she said. “I hope people can come in and feel inspired and make the world more beautiful for ourselves and for each other.”

Michelle Hogle Acciavatti '05: The Vermont Forest Cemetery

As a student at Bennington College, Michelle Hogle Acciavatti ’05, who now lives in Montpelier, Vermont, studied human development and the brain. “Bennington allowed me to pursue that as a science exploration and a philosophy exploration and to look at neuroscience through writing and not to give up my love of singing,” she said. “I went to Bennington because I never understood that you had to fit into one box to do anything.”

But just a few months before graduation, her class suffered deep trauma. There were three student deaths all within five months: Adam Mills ’05, Kelly Muzzi ’06, and Elissa Sullivan ’05. She thought of them throughout Commencement. “The people at the podium were saying that we could do anything we wanted.” At the same time, she recognized that lives end, sometimes abruptly.

She carried the thoughts of her friends with her as she entered graduate school for neuroscience at Boston University and, later, as she worked as a research consultant in the Office of Ethics at Boston Children’s Hospital. She saw parents and families go through what she describes as the worst possible situation, the death of a child. Despite having access to the most extensive medical and support resources available she remembered thinking, “these parents need more than what exists. There is a piece missing.”

That’s when she began to ask, how do we support people through the dying process? “That has been the driving question for me throughout my work.” She trained as a hospice volunteer, then a home funeral guide and an end-of-life doula, not long after the term itself was coined. Acciavatti wracked up many end-of-life credentials by the time she started Ending Well, a for-profit company, in 2016. (She rebranded it as Green Mountain Funeral Services in 2023.) Her aim was to help people understand what their options were and how to access them.

The more conversations she had the more she came to understand people’s needs and fears. She heard people say, I want to go back to nature. I want to do something good with my body when I die. “These are people who drive electric cars and eat organic food. They don’t want their bodies stuffed with chemicals or contributing to the carbon load in the atmosphere,” she said. She and many others she encountered wanted to be buried naturally in a forest. Only natural burial— placing a deceased person’s remains directly into the earth without embalming, a casket, or a burial vault—was not legal at the time. “The missing piece kept getting bigger,” she said.

In 2016, Acciavatti led a campaign, successful in 2017, to legalize natural burial in Vermont and began steps to create a forest cemetery on more than fifty acres in Roxbury, Vermont. It’s called the Vermont Forest Cemetery. Looking back, she recognizes, “It’s not so much about creating the cemetery. I am really attempting to create a system that changes the way people in Vermont engage with the end of life,” she said. “How do we connect people with how they want to die? It means connecting with how we live and with our values.”

The cemetery has five areas of interest. In addition to burial, they also work on conservation, art, learning, and community. “We want people to come into relationship with this land. If you are going to sustain it with your body when you die, what can it offer when you are still alive?” There are a lot of ways people are interested in engaging, she said. Conservationists are interested in the land’s tree and bird populations and how to turn forests into natural sponges to alleviate flooding, while historians are considering the land’s pre-colonial and colonial inhabitants. “It’s not even about death and dying; it’s about making this place meaningful to them in life.”

Acciavatti considers herself as much a storyteller as a deathworker. “People’s stories… have been tremendously enriching to me.” When people visit the cemetery, she gives them tours and shares the stories of the people buried there. “One of the things that we have tried to do at the cemetery is make sure that people’s stories become as much a part of the ecosystem as their bodies do.” She is working with a documentary filmmaker to offer 15-minute documentaries to the families of each of the the twenty-three people buried in the cemetery so far. An interactive map will allow visitors to read about, see photos, or watch a short film about the people who Acciavatti describes as literally sustaining the forest.

“For me, it is all about love. How do we love the world and how do we love the people that we bury and how do we continue to love the people who come in the future? Who we are is how we love.”

V Hansmann MFA '11: Prospect Street Writers House

V Hansmann MFA ’11’s 30-year career in finance ended abruptly when the company he worked for closed in 2008. He said, “If I never see another annual report in my life it will be too soon.” His retirement lasted just six months. “I was at risk of becoming that gay man who had seen everything on and off Broadway and could talk at length about it, and I did not want to be that person.” So he applied to the Bennington Writing Seminars and became, he said, “the English major I always intended to be.” His favorite part of the master’s of fine arts in writing was the residencies, ten days in January and June, especially the company. He said, “I loved being with smart people who are interested in making better sentences.”

When graduation came in June 2011, he didn’t want the program to end. He had heard poet Donald Hall say, “The friendship of writers is the history of literature,” and he took it to heart. Thinking of ways he could replicate the residency experience, he went back to New York City and started a monthly reading series that ran for 10 years. While the series expanded his literary circle in New York and achieved great success, he said, “What I really wanted was to build something.”

In 2018, he was in North Bennington celebrating the graduation of a friend from the Bennington Writing Seminars when he noticed that a derelict nursing home at the top of Prospect Street was for sale. He had to take a look. He thought, “I can do something with this.” By that December it was his. He called Centerline Architects, and by June 2019, construction had begun.

The original building, a historic Victorian, blends in with the new modern light-filled spaces that make up the vast majority of the 6,000 square-foot structure. There are three suites of four bedrooms each. Most rooms have their own bathroom, and the suites have a kitchenette and a sitting room. “It’s the best dorm ever,” he said, as he showed a well-appointed room.

In June 2021, the house was finished “in the way construction is ever ‘finished,’” he joked, and in June 2022, they had their first paying writers. He admits that he started the residency without any sense of what it would be like, operationally, or how much work it would entail. He began by doing all of the jobs himself, including housekeeping and cooking dinner, the one communal meal offered every day.

He soon partnered with Gary Clark, formerly of the Vermont Studio Center, to handle submissions, applications, and invoicing. “I needed someone who knew the residency business, and we work great together,” Hansmann said. Unlike many other residencies, residents can choose their dates. Residencies are shorter than most, as little as a week. “This is a new kind of residency, in a way.” It is friendlier for writers who work other jobs and those who have children, he notes. “Parents can leave their kids with family members for a week, but not two,” he said.

“The learning curve has been pretty steep. In 2021 we offered people to come for free, so we could gain some confidence; I made a lot of mistakes,” he said. “I didn’t get enough rest. People got COVID. I became short tempered.”

At this point, more than 3 years into hosting residencies, Hansmann is deeply satisfied. “It has been a lot of fun,” he said. He’s hired a housekeeper to help him turn over the rooms between residents, a bookkeeper, a gardener, and, this summer, a cook. Enjoyable conversations unfold over wine. “Writers are great to talk to because they each have an interesting project,” he said. “They are my people. I know what they are trying to do. I know the whole process, and I identify with it. And, it turns out, I am a good host.”

And he writes daily in a journal he calls The COVIDiary, a mashup of COVID and diary. He has compiled 300,000 words on 750 pages and intends to turn it into the story of Prospect Street. “I just need to get myself to a residency,” he said, laughing, “where I can sit and make an outline, and I can see what all these sentences are about.”

Asad Malik '19: Jadu AR Inc.

Asad Malik ’19 is the CEO and Founder of Jadu AR Inc., a company of more than thirty designers, engineers, and artists recognized as augmented reality (AR) pioneers. Their work is taught at the nation’s top tech schools, and they have partnered with American rapper Snoop Dogg and Transformers Producer and Director Michael Bay, among many other household names. Beyond that, Malik has been lauded by Variety, Rolling Stone, and Forbes for being young and influential in the tech industry.

“It all started while I was here at Bennington,” said Malik during a visit to campus this past fall. “My background was a bit more in design and technology and a bit less in art and expression. That’s why I wanted to force myself to try art at a place like Bennington. Being here was awesome. It really pushed me to figure out work involving my personal perspective and past.”

Originally from Pakistan, he attended his first hackathons while a student. Doing so helped him earn the money to buy his first augmented reality headset. He and fellow students—one of whom, Jack Daniel Gerrard ’18, is the JADU’s Chief Technology Officer—worked on short-term projects that earned them spots at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, even before graduation.

After graduation, he said, “I knew that I wanted to go back to the technology roots and build a longer term product. That’s when we founded JADU, my current company.” The company has worked on projects based on the conditions in the market and their strengths. For the last two years, they have been working on an augmented reality game called JADU. It is a first-of-its-kind multiplayer fighting game for iOS and Android phones. It has 345,000 users and a 4.8 app rating from nearly 10,000 reviews.

“The game unfolds in a futuristic city invaded by an alien species known as the AVAs,” the site reads. Players build their own avatar and start rivalries with friends or compete with strangers. The game uses the phone’s camera to bring a character into the player’s physical space on their phone’s screen. Other players playing online at the time can enter the world for a one-on-one battle. It launched globally in October 2023.

Malik plays daily, mostly test versions. He takes out his phone. “This is from this morning. We are trying out a jetpack mechanic, where the character is a bit smaller. You are not actually using a joystick. The character is following the movement of the camera. It makes it way easier to fly around and maneuver and go on a table or go on a different surface.”

Malik loves how all encompassing games are. Like films, they use art and music, “but games take it a step further because they are interactive,” he said. “The players have some agency to find their direction, and there’s a big community element where people contribute as a player in a world where other people interact with them.” The company has a community of players around the game. They show up at forums, know each other’s usernames, and interact. The community helps guide change. For instance, player environments forced creators to shrink the characters. Smaller characters fit better into players’ physical rooms.

Currently, the JADU team is at a pivotal moment. They attempted to create playable characters with stories and predefined movesets that would help reveal the game’s culture while also providing intellectual property (IP) assets. But they found that people would far rather create their own character than play one designed for them. So the IP they created will no longer be playable, though Malik said, “you may encounter them or have a battle with them or a story moment with them. The characters will help us express the world and the lore or the vibe.”

“We are also moving away from the real time multiplayer, where another player shows up in your room who is currently online and you compete, to a set up where you are competing against different creatures.” Players will explore the world, collect resources, and upgrade their tools in ways that help them progress through the world. “You might encounter other real players in these settings, but the relationship is more cooperative, where you and other players help each other to further defeat these enemies and explore the world,” he explained.

The overall goal is to change the nature of mobile games, which have been until now largely casino-like and financially exploitative. Malik is aiming to make a game that makes money while also ensuring that the experience is good for free players. He also wants mobile games to have more prestige. “We are trying to make a phone game you can be proud of playing, that’s cool and interesting for the younger generation. Most excitingly, it offers a way of interacting with your space and your phone that’s totally new.”