[Hidden-tech] Cheers for our Berkshires Coordinator!

[A - Z International]

Hi all,

I so pleased for our Berkshire coordinator, Peter 
Bergman, who will dip in and out of the virtual 
and bricks and mortar worlds in his new position. 
Who knows? He may be seeking your assistance some 
day. I'll keep the list posted on the 
developments at Austerlitz (see below), which 
Peter says won't be open to the public for more than a year.

If anyone deserves this job, it's Peter. I hear 
he beat out 74 people nationwide for the honors 
of bringing Edna St. Vincent Millay's home alived. Good luck to Peter!

Amy Zuckerman
Hidden-Tech Founder



NEW YORK, NY, February 5­Writer, journalist, and 
artist Peter Bergman from Pittsfield, 
Massachusetts has been named Executive Director 
of the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society, the 
nonprofit organization committed to protecting 
and preserving the literary and real property of 
American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay for the 
enjoyment of present and future generations. 
Founded in 1978 under the guidance of Norma 
Millay, the poet's sister, the Society is steward 
of Steepletop, Millay's former home in 
Austerlitz, NY, designated a National Historic 
Landmark in 1972 and a museum under the New York State Education Department.

Bergman is the first Executive Director of the 
organization, which will be based at Steepletop, 
with a branch office in New York.  “I feel 
honored to begin work on this extraordinary 
project with so much of Millay’s life already so 
evident in her home,” Bergman said. “I look 
forward to helping to restore Steepletop  and 
creating a site that will attract scholars, fans, 
and an international tourist body to the 
‘Columbia County side’ of the Berkshire Hills, a 
region already made outstanding with the 
performance and visual arts and a perfect place 
to explore historic authors and artists in their residences.”

Bergman (known to his readers as J. Peter 
Bergman) has been active in the cultural life of 
the Berkshire region since 1981.  A frequent 
contributor to The Berkshire Eagle as theater, 
music and culture features writer, he was the 
first resident Managing Director of The Berkshire 
Opera Company and a member of the founding boards 
of the Berkshire Stonewall Community Coalition, 
the Berkshire Writers Room, and two successful 
major  public art projects, Sheeptacular 
Pittsfield! and Art Of The Game. He wrote the 
centenary exhibit texts for The Berkshire 
Museum’s 100th anniversary and co-curated (with 
art critic Charles Bonenti) a special exhibit at 
the Norman Rockwell Museum that combined the 
artistic impulses of writers and 
three-dimensional artists based on poetry and 
fiction published in The Berkshire Review. He 
recently worked with the Executive Director at 
the Berkshire Historical Society at Arrowhead, 
the Herman Melville house museum in Pittsfield. 
The 2005 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural 
Council Volunteer of the Year Award, he served as 
an advisor on the arts to three Pittsfield mayors.

Born in New York City and educated at Queens 
College, Juilliard and the New School, Bergman 
spent a decade working in New York for the 
Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded 
Sound at the New York Public Library and Museum 
at Lincoln Center. During that time, he also 
served on a repertoire advisory committee for the 
New York City Opera Company. While at the R&H 
Archives, he produced and presented three ethnic 
arts festivals, did dramatic and musical 
presentations, designed the aural aspects of many 
exhibitions there and for the Library of Congress 
in Washington, D.C., and helped promote the 
revitalized career of composer Scott Joplin, 
whose work had rested in relative obscurity until the 1970’s.

Bergman’s own published work includes a recent 
series of plays dealing with real people in 
Pittsfield in the 1870s and 1940s; the 
productions, staged in historic homes in the 
Berkshires, were all record-breaking hits. These 
unconventional venues included the Crane Family 
Model Farm in Dalton, Massachusetts and the 
Thaddeus Clapp House in Pittsfield. In 2003, 
Bergman received the Charles Dickens Award for 
Counterpoints, a collection of short stories 
published by The Digital Hand Press that also 
published his poetry collection, A Versifier’s 
Childish Garden Gleanings. He continues to write 
an arts and fiction website, 
<http://www.berkshirebrightfocus.com/>www.berkshirebrightfocus.com.

For further information about the Edna St.Vincent 
Millay Society and the restoration of Millay’s 
house and gardens at Steepletop, see 
<http://www.millaysociety.org/>www.millaysociety.org.

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