Summer Centered: Amelia LaMotte ’25 Helps Connect Audiences to the Fringe

Each September, Philadelphia nonprofit Fringe Arts hosts a three-week-long festival with hundreds of genre-hopping performances and events that put the city’s arts scene at center stage. Guiding visitors through all those opportunities to engage with the performing arts is no small task, as Amelia LaMotte ’25 is learning this summer.

Working as a publications intern with support from the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, she has been helping to lay the foundation for both artists and audiences to make the most of their Philadelphia Fringe Festival experience. Alongside festival manager Anna Fiscarelli-Mintz ’22, who served in the same role as LaMotte a few summers ago, she has been communicating with artists to gather information and prepare a magazine-style guide that will be distributed to tens of thousands of festival attendees.

For LaMotte, the internship has been something of a homecoming. She spent eight summers at the Arden Theater Company’s camp in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood, where Fringe Arts is based. Acting and singing helped her break out of her shell and find her own forms of self-expression. Those summers, she said, “nurtured my appreciation for the freeing nature of art and creativity.”

Although her own theater career was short-lived, LaMotte, who is majoring in English and environmental studies at Haverford, has found new ways to explore the arts and their power as a vehicle for change. 

“Art's ability to freely express humanity makes it an important tool for social justice, as art has the power to speak against the dehumanization that is vital to so many forms of oppression,” she said.

After taking a course last fall focused on opposition to capital punishment in American literature and culture, and assisting anti-death penalty activist and artist Mark Menjivar with his exhibition Currently which ran January 20-March 3 in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery on campus,  LaMotte wanted to further explore the intersection of art and writing. At Fringe Arts, she’s been able to do that, honing her editing, and communication skills, and developing the patience required by the slow and intricate process of compiling the festival guide. 

She’s also used the internship as an opportunity to contemplate how she can connect her interests down the line. Although she’s enjoyed her summer at Fringe Arts, it’s also revealed to her that she is drawn to working with artistic expression that is more directly rooted in activism.

  “Since I am also interested in sustainability,” LaMotte said, “in the future I hope to become involved in art projects related to environmental justice.”

—Ben Seal