With his new documentary feature, director Miko Lim ’02 takes SXSW by storm.

When he first saw a photo of Hurricane Katrina taken by storm chaser Jeff Gammons, Miko Lim ’02 felt as if he was looking at a nebula in outer space. “I was immediately drawn to it,” says Lim, a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. “Everybody else’s work seemed to capture a lot of death and destruction, but his was such an artistic take on natural phenomena.”

Lim hired Gammons, a photographer and videographer, for a commercial he was directing, and after the shoot they kept talking. Those conversations led Lim—who has directed campaigns for Adidas, Nike and Disney and won a Clio for his short film Ocean Mother—to embark on his first feature documentary. Stormbound, which chronicles Gammons’ life and pursuit of extreme storms, had its premiere at South by Southwest (SXSW) in March, where it won the Special Jury Award for Best Feature Documentary, followed by a European debut at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen.

Lim was drawn to Gammons’ life story not only because he braved life-threatening storms and captured them in all their sublime beauty, but because he did so while battling a litany of illnesses and diseases, including spinal cancer and heart and kidney failure.

“This is a guy who’s been dealt the worst possible hand health-wise,” says Lim, “and yet he is still driven to go out into the world and see it with marvel and wonder and hope. It was very inspiring to me.”

After initial meetings with studios more interested in the newsworthy angle of the story than in the personal journey he wanted to share, Lim met Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice), who understood his vision and signed on as executive producer. With McKay on board, IMAX quickly bought into the project, providing funding and access to the full array of IMAX cameras.

“It was a wonderfully hard experience,” says Lim. “There’s a reason why people just film these things on their phones and GoPros. We were out there lugging 80-pound cameras the size of a fridge into these storms.”

Miko Lim filming Stormbound with an IMAX camera.

Using IMAX cameras was important to Lim because they are “inherently more cinematic” than digital cameras. As well as the “fun impossibility of it,” he also appreciated the taller aspect ratio, which is more similar to an old TV than the modern widescreen format.

“So much of this film is literally and metaphorically about looking up. So having a screen this high allowed us to frame things where we can still see our subjects down at the bottom, but we can see the sky opening up and exploding in front of them all in one image rather than having to pan up.”

Premiering the film at SXSW seemed fitting, he says, given that Texas is at the bottom of Tornado Alley and the documentary takes place almost entirely on the roads of the U.S.

A pre-med student at Pomona, Lim realized while doing an oncology research project at UCLA that he might not be able to handle the emotional toll of being a doctor. Having taken a creative writing elective with David Foster Wallace, he decided to tap into his artistic side and applied for a script reader job on Craigslist.

That turned out to be an internship at Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton’s production company. “I walked in blind to that, just trying out something new, and that got me into the idea of using my imagination and creating things. That gave me the bug.”

Lim still takes on occasional commercial work. It can be creatively liberating, he says, and it is also lucrative (he has three kids). Recently, he has been moving more into TV and has started writing his first narrative feature.

“I’m very interested right now in these tiny, intimate stories about people in massive worlds that feel otherworldly,” he says. “You get older and you feel like this world is such a big, magical place, and you’re so small in it, and it’s not a bad thing. Your little story is just as exciting and lovely as the story of the whole universe.”

Lucy Shelton ’65 takes to the famous stage for the first time at age 82.

Photo by KARJAKA STUDIOS

When soprano Lucy Shelton ’65 celebrated her 75th birthday in 2019 with a special concert in Manhattan’s Merkin Hall, she thought it might be her last public performance. Shelton, who is internationally acclaimed for her work in contemporary music, performed that night with more than a dozen colleagues and former students and sang several pieces that had been written especially for her over the years.

It could have been a fitting finale to an extraordinary career. But that’s not how it turned out. Since 2021, Shelton has sung on stages around the world—in Aix-en-Provence, Helsinki, London, Amsterdam, San Francisco and Adelaide—as The Teacher in Kaija Saariaho’s final opera Innocence and, in 2024, in a role tailor-made for her in the world premiere of Laura Kaminsky’s chamber opera Lucidity.

When Innocence, which tells the story of a school shooting and its aftermath, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in April, Shelton made her debut at that hallowed institution at the age of 82.

Shelton’s explanation for her career’s longevity? “I simply love making music.” Beyond that, she thinks she is still able to sing “because I’ve used my voice in many different ways over all of these decades and always found ways to meet the various challenges of the repertoire.”

The distinctive feature in her dramatic role in Innocence is that it primarily uses sprechstimme (speechsong) rather than traditional operatic singing. Shelton is renowned for this expressive style developed in the early 20th century. Saariaho knew of her mastery of sprechstimme and had Shelton in mind when composing the role.

Lucy Shelton ’65 as The Teacher in Innocence

Shelton grew up in Claremont (her father was a Pomona College geology professor and grad) and music was a frequent family activity—her parents met at a music camp in Massachusetts. All five children took piano lessons and studied another instrument as well. Shelton remembers “singing rounds and Bach chorales and silly versions of Christmas carols, where we experimented with sliding between pitches and making weird dissonances. Even as a kid I loved the tension of dissonance and the beautiful release of the consonance that followed!”

After attending Vermont’s Putney School, a high school with an “extraordinary music program,” Shelton entered Pomona College. “I knew how wonderful music at Pomona was, having attended concerts at Big and Little Bridges all my life. Bill Russell, Doc Blanchard and Karl Kohn were all family friends and neighbors.”

While a music major at Pomona, Shelton played flute in the band and orchestra and sang in Choir and Glee club. She took leading roles in the annual Gilbert and Sullivan productions, garnering admiration from fellow students including Deb Hunter ’65. “I followed her because she was quite a star,” says Hunter. “She was just very special even then.”

Hunter, along with 37 other members of the Class of ’65, attended the Met production of Innocence, celebrating their classmate with a reception and dinner after the matinee performance. “I intended to go myself,” says Hunter, “and just threw out the idea at our 60th reunion.”

Debuting at the Met was never a goal for Shelton, whose calendar was already filled with exciting performing opportunities. “It was never something I had imagined or even hoped for,” she says. “I’m delighted—it is a big deal, obviously! But the main big deal is that this opera is such a stunner.”

After all those performances around the world (and she will again sing the role in Paris in November of 2027), Shelton still finds herself moved by the opera. “It is a sublimely devastating drama with astounding music from Saariaho. It still gets me.”

William Marquart ’26 is seeing success in shot, discus, javelin and hammer.

The symptoms started appearing early last fall, each more ominous than the last.

A burly lineman and thrower his first three years at Pomona, William Marquart ’26 lost 45 pounds between September and October. He’d convinced himself a stomach bug was to blame. Surely his muscle mass would return once he recovered.

But why was he having trouble concentrating? And why couldn’t he sleep? And why was his vision deteriorating? “This will all go by,” he thought.

Only when the symptoms became unbearable did Marquart go to the hospital, where he was admitted to the ICU immediately. A doctor told him it was a miracle he could still walk. “You should be in a coma right now.”

Marquart, a biology major from Woodway, Washington, was diagnosed with severe diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening medical emergency requiring immediate and monitored care. Having dealt with autoimmune conditions his entire life—vitiligo, hypothyroidism—he’d gotten used to downplaying warning signs.

“But last semester everything finally caught up with me,” he says.

Once diagnosed and on the proper medication, Marquart returned to the weight room to regain his strength. Doctors recommended he limit himself to 1,300 calories a day, an impossible charge for a 280-pound athlete who needed north of 5,500 calories a day to throw competitively.

Fully healthy this past spring, Marquart was stronger than he was last May, when he became the first Sagehens thrower in 40 years to put the shot farther than 50 feet.

“A big part of throws is body awareness,” he says. “It’s making sure your body is at its peak, and you’re not just strong, but also athletic. You see plenty of strong people try and fail in these events because they don’t know how to use that strength properly.”

While throwing the shot, discus, javelin and hammer can get repetitive, Marquart used each practice in the spring to hone the quirks of his implement and avoid falling into any bad habits.

After becoming the first men’s thrower since 2017 to etch his name in the Sagehens record book last season, Marquart’s personal records in 2026 replaced program marks previously held for decades.

He reached 55’-10.5” in the shot put on March 20, a distance second only to Pomona-Pitzer Hall of Famer Ray Fogg ’75, whose record toss of 58’-10.5” in 1974 remains the oldest track and field mark in Sagehens history.

Elsewhere on the field, Marquart’s top distances in the javelin (187’-10”) and discus (151’-7”) this past spring ranked eighth and ninth all-time, respectively.

“Will brings deep thoughtfulness and explosive quickness to his throwing,” track and field coach Kirk Reynolds says. “To have success in all four throws is remarkable.”

When Marquart wasn’t refining his throwing technique, he was studying for the MCAT, which he plans to take during his upcoming gap year before applying for medical school.

At Pomona, he had the chance to do research “I would never have gotten access to until I was post-grad or a professional,” he says. “I’ve been doing research since my sophomore year, and I’m really glad I’ve been able to build connections and get out there so soon.”

“Pomona was exactly what I was looking for,” he adds. “Small school, phenomenal academics and pre-med program, amazing professors who have a personal investment in their students. This was the perfect fit.”