April 10, 2025
Contact: Janese Heavin, heavinj@missouri.edu
Photos by Abbie Lankitus, Gretta Cohoon, Nicholas Andrusisian, Sophia Scheller and Sam Cox
Blooms and brighter days — that’s March on campus. We honored outstanding faculty, celebrated our fraternities and sororities and cheered on the Tigers ahead of March Madness. Our university photographer, Abbie Lankitus, takes us through her favorite photos of this past month.
One of the best parts of spring on campus is honoring our newest class of Kemper Fellows. These exceptional professors are nominated by peers with the support of students and selected by a committee to receive the honor, which is supported by Commerce Bank.
The tradition? A surprise announcement at the beginning of one of their classes. Imagine: You’re teaching class as usual when the door opens and in comes a crowd — cameras rolling and someone with a large boom mic (yes, like in the movies), followed by the president, provost and a few leaders from your college.
The most common reaction is a face of bewilderment, surprise and confusion. Then comes the big moment: “Congratulations! You’re a 2025 Kemper fellow!” Cue the applause, smiles and a moment they’ll never forget.
This particular photo spoke to me because a group of students and peers who had been personally impacted by Professor Brown also came into the room to congratulate her. That doesn’t always happen, and it’s such a testament to how much Brown means to those she’s taught and worked with.
Were you ever a prospective student who saw photos of the residence halls on campus? Those photos don’t take themselves. Marketing shoots are a regular part of the job, as we show the culture and perks of living on campus.
For this shoot, we’d already explored the space with Grace Knight and another student. We had turned off the lights and were about to head to another dorm when I took one last look at the ambient light and paused.
For a night owl like me, having the lights off except the colored lamp in the corner gave the best moody vibes and I knew fellow photographer Gretta Cohoon needed to get a photo of this before we left. If I were coming to Mizzou as a freshman, I could totally see myself doing some late-night studying this way.
Can we also give it up for Grace’s decorating skills?! Such a cute dorm space that honors our fierce mascot.
Speaking of marketing shoots, student photographer Sophia Scheller had the great idea to photograph the spring line of Mizzou lululemon gear at Mizzou Rec.
We went mid-morning to avoid a crowd, but I have a big “Thank You!” to the students who worked around us as we got what we needed.
I’m a sucker for natural light and the second-floor track has giant windows that display lovely patterns in the morning.
We were struggling with posing, so I went around the corner to get some weights as props and saw half a dozen students in the pose you see above. We had our model, Shana Rounsavall, get into the same pose and voilà! The light reflected beautifully, and we got an excellent shot of the top, shorts and wristlet.
If you haven’t yet been by The Mizzou Store to check out the spring products, I highly suggest you do!
We all know the season didn’t end like we wanted it to, but what a fun time it was in Columbia when the Tigers played at Mizzou Arena.
Scheller’s photo felt like such a beautiful moment of the struggles we faced, but the support of the crowd that always showed up for our Men’s Basketball team. I could always feel the love and encouragement from our students and fans at each home game. Next season already feels too far away! Can’t wait to see our Men’s and Women’s Basketball teams back on the court, dreaming of March.
Cuteness overload! These puppies visited Hawthorn Hall to encourage voting in the upcoming Residence Halls Association election. Clearly, it worked, and RHA got a new president and vice president.
Photographer Gretta Cohoon said the best part of this shoot was when the guy on the left decided to come sniff out her camera. Real “ruff” day on the job, eh?
But seriously, I love these moments of curiosity and connection. Much could be learned about the college experience if we stepped out with curiosity and connected to the people around us. It also just brings a brevity to the rigors of student life that I’m sure many needed with midterms looming.
Not long ago, Show Me Mizzou ran a story on the treehoppers hanging out in Professor Rex Cocroft’s lab in Tucker Hall. They’re fascinating little guys (and I DO mean little!).
Mizzou Magazine is also publishing a version of the story and needed an additional photo — one of a treehopper staring at the camera head-on. Now, this is a little tricky because, as you might’ve guessed, these guys like to hang onto trees. But the treehoppers are fairly pliable and you can gently pick one up and move it.
So, the plan was to get one to the top of a tree, put the tree on the ground and get to a vantage point to look down onto it. I brought a flash and a 100mm macro lens — in other words, I could get really close and get a lot of detail. The best part: They mostly don’t move, so I had an excellent model.
While this particular photo won’t be in the alumni magazine, look for more images of these fascinating guys in the upcoming issue of Mizzou Magazine.
I couldn’t pick just one Kemper Fellow, so I had to pull this photo of Assistant Teaching Professor Tamara Hancock as well. Her reaction encapsulates what it means to be honored as a Kemper Fellow among the Mizzou faculty.
She was teaching in a very small room with a bunch of lab desks with microscopes on them. So, I had one option — down on one knee and directly in front to get all the action.
Hancock teared up during this whole interaction. It was incredibly touching, and you could just tell that how meaningful the honor was for her.
Be sure and check out the full list of Kemper awardees, and, if any of them have impacted you, reach out and congratulate them! They’ll be officially honored April 30 in Jesse Hall Rotunda as part of Faculty Excellence Week.
Maybe it’s the fact that I cannot wait to get into my own yard and start growing things that made me love this photo. The layers of students provide such great composition and a visual of what’s going on.
These students are planting at the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center as part of its urban garden event. All students were welcome to come plant in the garden as well as decorate pots to take succulents home.
One of the wonderful things about Mizzou being in Columbia is that there is such an active gardening community here. With the Famer’s Market, Sustain Mizzou and Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture, there are plenty of ways to get involved and exercise your green thumb (or create one if it’s missing).
Greek Week in March included many fun events, including the Greek Week Fling.
While many of the performances were cool and worth celebrating, I love that the audience of any fraternity/sorority event truly shows what it means to be a brother or sister in these organizations. The cheers, screams of love, claps and rallying cries are just a glimmer of what it will be like to leave campus and have these same friends cheer you on in your life and successes.
It's a beautiful example of the lifelong friends that are made here, in a time and place that will be unlike any other in a student’s life. This photo really displays that to me.
I joined a non-panhellenic sorority late in my college years, but the friends I made in just two years I still connect with today. Whether the connections you make come from a fraternity, sorority, club or a tight-knit friend group, treasure them. They will follow you and be the cheerleaders in the world and life beyond Mizzou.
Late in the month, the Memorial Union clock got a much-needed cleaning. Video producer Nick Andrusisan went along and got some photos from on top of the lift, as well as drone photos of the cleaning.
It’s not often we get these kind of vantage points, so we took advantage of it as soon as we heard it was happening. Be on the lookout for more photos of the cleaning on Show Me Mizzou in May.
Obviously, the best thing about this photo is the amazing perspective, which gives a birds-eye view of the detail of the clock and sculpture. When you photograph campus over and over, many views tend to blur together and look the same. A new look at the same campus can breathe fresh air into the stories and marketing of our great university, and this photo does just that.
A lot of cool research happens at Mizzou – but you knew that, right? We have some of the best faculty and researchers in the world! It’s on us as the storytellers to communicate that.
In this photo, Clint Green from the College of Veterinary Medicine is observing tissue samples under the bulbs of surgery lights. The lighting is so dramatic, and I love it so much. This was part of a larger shoot in Associate Professor Teresa Pitts’ lab. She’s the department chair for Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences in the College of Health Sciences. She and collaborators in her lab study issues related to swallowing and how they may lead to deeper health concerns.
But here’s a little marketing tip: the difference between this photo and a stock photo of just anyone? Branding. We need to show that the researchers are Mizzou researchers and not just anyone. Whether we put our mark on a monitor like this image, have a poster in the background or put a lapel pin on the scrubs, we need to show that you’ll get these specific and fantastic individuals at Mizzou and nowhere else.
As we enjoy April and see campus come even more alive, I have to end on one of the most beautiful trees on campus. Spring is a time of awakening and renewal, of growth and perseverance.
When things get too busy or too heavy, I like to walk around campus and take in all the blossoms and sweet smells. They remind me of the cyclical nature of things that come and go while the beauty of this world remains. The sun rises again, the days get longer and the air gets warmer. And that thing that was stressing me out, stresses me out a little less.
It’s one of my favorite times on campus and I hope it is for you too.
