Hampshire Mourns Founding Staff Member Andrea Wright
Wright served the College for more than 30 years, first as director of the former Early Identification Program and later as director of the Career Options Resource Center. She died on February 3, 2026, at the age of 87.
Wright grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania. She was drawn to the arts, studying ballet and cello, and loved classical music and opera from a young age. She graduated from Smith College and earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard University.
In the early 1960s, she joined one of the Peace Corps’ pioneer programs and spent two years in Ethiopia teaching English and history. There, she witnessed firsthand the transformative power of service and education.
In 1969, Wright joined the founding staff of Hampshire, hired by the College’s first president, Franklin Patterson, to direct the Early Identification Program, a leadership program for urban youth. She became a mentor to many young teens whose potential and value she believed in.
“She was just the person Franklin Patterson needed,” says friend and Professor Emerita of Biology Merle Bruno. “She involved Hampshire students and faculty as tutors, counselors, outdoors leaders, and more. Andrea kept up with quite a few of the kids and with many Hampshire alums who tutored kids in the program.”
When the program lost funding, in 1980, Wright shifted roles, becoming director of the Career Options Resource Center — a job she loved until her retirement. During her time there, she created a widely popular course called Life-Work-Planning to help people of all ages reflect on their strengths and values and consider possible career paths.
She and her partner, Margaret (Peggy) B. Anderson, met in the late 1970s and married in 2004. After retirement, the two were active in the Raging Grannies, an international activist organization whose groups sing at protests. She used her voice — quite literally — to stand up for justice by singing and writing songs to use humor to promote peace and equality.
Wright had an extensive collection of women’s autobiographies, which she donated to Hampshire as a community resource, helping to endow their care into the future. Her gift was the foundation of what became and is the Women's Lives Collection on the third floor of the library. “She was interested in how women understood their lives rather than how historians interpreted them,” says Bruno.
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