Julia M. Boltin '83

Julia M. Boltin '83 on November 18, 2010, of cancer. She was forty-nine and lived in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

Julia was an English major. She took part in the Exeter Program and the Drama Club.

She enjoyed a career in printmaking, graphic design, and photography in this country and abroad. Julia owned The Third Circle Press, a letterpress printing and design business, and the design studio Press 13.

One Kenyon friend recalled her as "an exotic force of nature." And she was described as a snappy dresser.

Julia was mentioned in the New York Times on May 1, 1992, as the "frighteningly well-informed printer" at Bowne & Company Stationers, where visitors could operate a nineteenth-century hand press, order wedding invitations, and discuss, with Julia, "the fine points of the history and design of type."

At a 2008 symposium at Smith College, Julia lectured on her project documenting the impact of breast cancer treatment and extensive surgery on her body. She designed a poster for the symposium.

According to a report on the online Bioethics Forum, Julia told Smith students that her project had a personal and public goal involving her quest to make sense of suffering and to learn how to suffer without becoming a victim. That same year, Julia participated in the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. For the Columbia program on personal and cultural narratives about living with cancer, she was described as a fine-art printer and designer who documented the effects of cancer treatment on the human body.

A friend from Croton-on-Hudson said Julia's "courage inspired us."

Julia was survived by her daughters Isobel and Flora and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lee Boltin. Memorial donations may be sent to Zufall Health Center, 17 South Warren Street, Dover, New Jersey, 07801.