I met Maddie Adams-Miller ’26 outside her apartment on a sunny Friday afternoon. It became immediately clear from the way she asked, “Are you good with taking the stairs?” that we both work as campus tour guides and are trained to take ADA accessible routes. I laughed and nodded, remembering just how many times I’d shown families to the elevators.
For Maddie, accessibility is always top of mind. Maddie is a double major in theater and engineering — something she calls a classic “liberal arts combo” on her tours. This year, she’s presenting her Engineering 090 Senior Design Project on structural accessibility in historic theater spaces.
“You have a theater that was built in the 1920s or 1930s and does not adhere to current ADA standards at all,” she explained. “How can we keep all the history there but also make it accessible? [About 12.2%] of Americans have mobility disabilities. It’s the never-ending question of, ‘Are they not going because they can’t go or because they don’t want to?’”
But for Maddie, accessibility extends beyond ramps and elevators. It’s also about cultural access: who gets to experience art and how? In her Theater and Performance class with Associate Professor and Theater Department Chair Isaiah Wooden, Maddie explored the differences between live theater, movie adaptations, and bootlegs.
“Bootlegs give access to people who wouldn’t otherwise have it,” she said. “But on the performer side of things, [they] are not getting paid enough to be doing what they’re doing … It’s a double-edged sword. Still, for young people getting into theater and who are interested in theater, I think bootlegs are really important. It would be amazing if the proshot of every musical could be freely accessible to people, but that’s not how it works.”
It would be easy to assume that theater and design have always been part of Maddie’s plan — her natural sociability, her expansive knowledge of musical theater, even her adorably styled apartment, complete with leftover birthday decorations she made for her flatmates. Despite this, theater wasn’t even in the question for her when she began at Swarthmore.
“I came to Swat thinking I would study engineering and classics,” she told me. “I’ve never had an original thought in my life. My dad was an engineering major, and my mom was a classics major. I was just going to combine them.”
That changed her first week on campus.
“I walked up to the theater table, and I met Murph,” she said, referring to Director of Lang Performing Arts Center James Murphy. “I talked to him for a while, and he told me to take his Lighting Design class. So I did. From then on, I was locked in. I loved it.”
Even though performing and creating theater weren’t major parts of Maddie’s life before college — aside, of course, from her memorable role as Pink Lady #17/17 in her high school’s production of “Grease” — theater surrounded her throughout her childhood. For the first ten years of her life, her mom worked at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
“I grew up running around the festival every summer,” Maddie remembered. “I would sell raffle tickets. I knew Shakespeare when I was really little — I was such a little nerd. I had a children’s version of all the Shakespeare plays, and I’d ask my parents to read them to me before bed.”
Later, her mom went on to work at the Paramount Hudson Valley Theater in Peekskill, NY, where she now serves as the executive director.
“Paramount movie theaters were built all around the country, and then they went out of business,” Maddie explained. “So there was this gorgeous one in Peekskill that was sitting empty for ten years. My mom and a few other people got it and turned it around.”
The Paramount became her first taste of a theater class.
“I observed lighting, sound, house management, and stage management,” she said. “Having grown up in that space, I’ve seen a lot of different sides of theater, but I didn’t know I could combine them until I got here. Then I was like ‘Oh, shoot!’ I can actually do this for a career.”
At Swarthmore, that realization solidified through hands-on production work and mentors. “I did Production Ensemble, and I was assistant lighting designer for Murph. During tech, I would be sitting on the same side as [Associate Professor of Theater Matt Saunders].” She continued, “I found out one day that it was Matt’s birthday and I emailed him an American Greetings e-card. He responded a few hours later with, ‘What? This is the funniest thing ever.’”
That small interaction led to a much more meaningful connection.
“After one of the first times we met, I went to his office and said, ‘Okay, so this is what I want to do in life, and I need you to tell me if I have any talent at all. Can I do this?’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I’ve never even seen you do anything, so I have no idea if you have any talent yet. But, I have a good feeling about you.’ From then on, he was my mentor.”
When I asked about her favorite production to work on, she recalled lighting for Jules Kyung-Lee Zacheis ’24’s senior show. “The set was pretty minimal. The walls were made of a kind of frosted glass, so I could light it from behind and have different colors in each panel. There were also a lot of time changes in the show, so between scenes, I was able to make it look like we were going back in time.”
Though she describes herself as a “strictly design person,” she has never felt sidelined by professors. She took Acting I in the spring of her first year, and despite having fun, ultimately decided that set and lighting design was her future.
“The theater department really adopted me and helped me realize that I still have a place in the department, even if I’m not on stage.”
Even outside the theater and engineering, Maddie’s instinct to create shapes her experiences on campus. As the co-president of the WSRN radio station, music has largely influenced her college life. By fostering a welcoming space for musically-inclined students to express themselves on air, Maddie has, in many ways, designed her own kind of performance venue — one that makes parts of theater like sound design accessible to people who may not yet be ready to join a class or production.
“I’ve realized among the student body that there’s a misconception that you need to be a theater major or a theater minor to do theater here,” she said. “I think it’s important for people to know that is not the case at all … I think more people should get involved. We’re not scary.”
Towards the end of our conversation, Maddie mentioned something interesting. “Before me, there’s only one guy in Swarthmore’s history to have been an engineering and theater major,” she said, then added with a laugh, “I’m taking credit where I don’t actually deserve any, but now there are multiple of us here at the same time.”
She often meets prospective students on her tours who are interested in combining the two subjects. “It’s absurd to me that I’m able to be a resource for them. I’m showing people that it is possible to do these two things, especially at a smaller liberal arts school. You can get the best of both worlds.”
Capturing Maddie in a single article feels almost impossible — she is so full of life it seems to bubble out of her. In truth, our almost two-hour “interview” consisted of us sharing our favorite musicals, talking about our vinyl collections, and making loose summer plans, all with plenty of laughter in between.
But underneath the range of topics, there was a consistent thread: she is always thinking about how people enter spaces and who gets left out. For Maddie, theater, engineering, and even radio are not separate. They are different tools for the same goal — designing access and ensuring more people get to be a part of the story.
