In recognition of the 50th anniversary of women at Bowdoin College, the college will bestow honorary degrees to five women who distinguished themselves in their fields of athletics, art, economics, journalism and storytelling. The degrees will be conferred at the 217th commencement exercises, Saturday, May 28, on the steps of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Joan Benoit Samuelson holds the bobblehead doll with her likeness. The Freeport resident is one of five women to be awarded honorary degrees this year at Bowdoin College. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald

This year’s honorary degree recipients include contemporary artist Katherine Bradford, best-selling children’s author Raquel Jaramillo (R. J. Palacio), economist and president of Thomas College Laurie Lachance, award-winning journalist and social activist Janet Langhart-Cohen and decorated marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson.

Bradford is best known for paintings of swimmers, superheroes, and ships. Bradford began painting when she was living in Maine in the 1970s, and returns each summer with her spouse, Jane O’Wyatt, to her home in Brunswick. Her work has been the subject of one-person shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Texas and is scheduled for an upcoming survey exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine opening this June, which will travel to several venues.

Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Museum (Maine and Oregon), the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, among others. In 2011, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a year later, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. Other awards include a Pollock Krasner Grant and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art recently added a Bradford painting, “Fear of Dark,” to its permanent collection. The painting was created in Brunswick in the summer of 2020 and was a gift to the museum from David and Barbara Roux in honor of museum co-directors Frank and Anne Goodyear.

Jaramillo is the author of the best-selling children’s novel “Wonder,” which was adapted into a 2017 film starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson and Jacob Tremblay. She has written several books based on the original “Wonder” characters; one of those books, “White Bird: A Wonder Story,” has been turned into a film starring Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson, scheduled for release in October.

Shortly after the birth of her older son, Jaramillo began illustrating her own children’s books, including several picture books and a coffee table edition of “Peter Pan.” “Wonder” was Jaramillo’s first novel, which was published in 2012 under the pen name R. J. Palacio. “Wonder” has gone on to become an international bestseller, translated into 55 languages, with 15 million copies in print worldwide, and more than six years on The New York Times bestseller list. Her story about a boy in need of a little extra kindness from the world launched the anti-bullying Choose Kind movement, which in 2015 inspired myFace, an organization devoted to helping children with facial differences, to start the Wonder Project. This program has reached more than 60,000 students in the U.S. to date.

Maine economist Laurie Gagnon Lachance began her career with Central Maine Power, where she became the company’s corporate economist. She later served as the Maine State Economist for three governors (1993–2004). From 2004 to 2012, she served as president and CEO of the Maine Development Foundation before being named president of Thomas College in Waterville, in 2012. In each of these four major roles, Lachance was the first female to hold the position.

Lachance was inducted into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame in 2014, made the Mainebiz NEXT list as a trailblazer in her industry in 2015, was part of Maine Magazine’s “Fifty Mainers Charting the State’s Future” list in 2016, and was inducted into the Junior Achievement Maine Business Hall of Fame in 2018. Laurie received the American Heart Association’s Crystal Heart Award in March 2022. In 2020, Gov. Janet Mills appointed Lachance cochair of Maine’s Economic Recovery Committee, charged with advising the governor on how to guide Maine’s economy through the pandemic.

Janet Langhart-Cohen is a television journalist and author who began her career as a fashion model and became a broadcast reporter and anchor after first reporting the weather for a Chicago station. She established the media consulting firm Langhart Communications in 2000. Langhart-Cohen is a native of Indianapolis, where she grew up in a segregated housing project. She entered the public eye in the 1960s as a model for the Ebony Fashion Fair. She was the first Black woman in America to host a nationally syndicated show, Good Day. Her broadcasting experience includes work for ABC and NBC, Entertainment Tonight and BET. Her interview subjects have included President Bill Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher, Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and Barbara Walters.

In 2004, she wrote her memoir, “From Rage to Reason: My Life in Two Americas,” which describes her personal experiences with race in America. In 2007, she and her husband — former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen — wrote the memoir “Love in Black and White,” and later edited “Race and Reconciliation” in America. Langhart-Cohen attended Butler University, and she received an honorary degree from Emerson College in 2011. In 2009, her one-act play, “Anne and Emmett,” based on the lives of Anne Frank and Emmett Till, premiered at the United States Holocaust Museum.

Joan Benoit Samuelson is a member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, the National Distance Running Hall of Fame, the International Scholar-Athlete Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sports Foundation Hall of Fame and the Olympic Hall of Fame. She won the Boston Marathon in 1979 and 1983, when she set a course record that stood for 11 years. In 1984, she won the gold medal in the inaugural women’s Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. She won her age group at the 2013 and 2019 Boston marathons. In 1997, Samuelson founded the TD Beach to Beacon 10K Road Race and is chair of its board of directors.

Samuelson has served as a coach at Boston University and has authored two books, “Running Tide” (coauthor; 1987) and “Joan Samuelson’s Running for Women” (1995). Samuelson earned her bachelor’s degree in history and environmental studies from Bowdoin in 1979. She has received eight other honorary degrees and earned her master gardener certification through the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Joan and Scott Samuelson are longtime residents of Freeport.