Art & Design Faculty

Matthew Barnes - Art & Design 

Mr. Barnes’s personal motto is: “He who dies with the most tools wins.” He uses his tools to hand-carve slate tombstones, to motorize toy airplanes, to add micro-cameras to Estes rockets, and to repurpose 1950s rotary phones into his home’s intercom system. He knows how to cast metal, solder wire, and weld sheet steel. He can run a lathe and drill through glass and design a textbook. (Want to see more of what he can do? Go to mattmakes.weebly.com.)

Mr. Barnes has a bachelor’s degree in education from Notre Dame College in Manchester, N.H., and also started a successful company that designed and manufactured tiles. His most important work recently, though, has been staying home on Peaks Island with his two small children.

Baxter has brought him back to the mainland and to the classroom. He remembers his first visit to the school: “People were excited to be there. They WANTED to be there and it showed in everything I saw. Students helped students in unselfish, uncritical ways and supported one another. Teachers were part of their classes and waded directly into whatever was going on rather than hovering on the edges. The mantra of "Let's try it" elevated everything happening at Baxter and for me, it was like Dorothy stepping into the colored world of Oz. I spent a long time thinking, ‘This can't be actually happening,’ but it is, and I can't wait to start.”

Fun facts about Mr. Barnes: He’s a pilot, a scuba diver, and the cemetery keeper for Brackett Memorial Cemetery on Peaks. He can write with either hand and walk across the bottom of a pond. Ticks freak him out. He loves the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series and can quote anything from Monty Python (but please don’t ask him to do that in front of his family because it embarrasses them).

Dave Connor - Art & Fabrication 

Mr. Connor comes to Baxter with a wide and varied background. He has been has been in education as both student and teacher for 20 years. Before joining Baxter in 2017, he taught vocational and employability skills for seven years at an alternative high school in Portland. Before that, he was an English teacher at Sanford High School for four years. “Having taught in both an alternative and traditional setting, I feel Baxter combines the best of both worlds all under one roof.” Mr. Connor teaches art and fabrication at Baxter and is really excited to be able to combine both of his loves and help kids develop their own appreciation for each.

Mr. Connor is a veteran of the Coast Guard where he spent three months in the Bering Sea doing search and rescue and two months in the South Pacific doing drug interdiction. He spent his remaining three years as a photojournalist in and around the San Francisco Bay area. Mr. Connor has an Undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Orono, an Associate’s degree in Construction Technology from Southern Maine Community College and a Master’s degree in Teaching and Learning from University of Southern Maine.

Mr. Connor is also a print maker and does original linocuts. His work has been shown in numerous restaurants, businesses and galleries around the Greater Portland area and he’s done a number of commissions for individuals, rock bands and local craft breweries. When Mr. Connor isn’t doing art or teaching he loves to ride his motorcycle, tend his large garden, play in his greenhouse, and care for his bees, chickens, ducks, cats and dog. He’s also a husband and parent to two teenagers.

Fun Facts about Mr. Connor:  He has been a year-round surfer in Maine for over 25 years. In California, he had a shark swim past him about 10 ft. away. He’s hung out the back of an airplane while it was flying, and he’s gone 35mph on a skateboard.

Sunny Stutzman - Fabrication & Engineering 

Mr. Stutzman describes himself as a teacher, an industrial designer, a maker, a farmer, and a musician who wants to help build a program at Baxter that “embodies the spirit of making.” He arrives from Yarmouth High School, and his passion is sharing the knowledge he’s accumulated through years of product design. He introduces his students to new technologies and techniques that are relevant to today’s creative economy and that has helped them make everything from carbon fiber skateboards and surfboard to hovercrafts and human-powered vehicles. He himself once designed a prototype bicycle for use in Antarctica, and the project won a National Creative Genius Award.

“After only a few minutes at Baxter Academy I could tell that Baxter was a place I could call home,” Mr. Stutzman says. “I grew up on a small vegetable farm in Sangerville, Maine. There is a certain energy that surrounds the farm that I have also found at Baxter. It is derived from the sense of community and the coordinated dedication found in both the staff and the student body. Ideas are allowed space to grow and flourish. Project-based learning allows both students and faculty to discover new subject matter in a manner that gives both relevance and purpose to the curriculum.”

Mr. Stutzman has also coached the Science Olympiad and has served as assistant director in the drama department. In his free time, he surfs, hang glides, snowboards, and plays music.

He has a bachelors degree in Business/Economics from the University of Maine at Farmington, and an associates degree in specialized technology from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he majored in industrial design technology. He’s done industrial design for L.L. Bean, Maine Discovery Museum, and Moosehead Manufacturing, among others.

Fun facts about Mr. Stutzman: He surfs year-round in Maine’s coastal waters. He’s been a professional musician since age 11 and plays the saxophone, upright bass, harmonica, guitar, cello, fiddle, didgeridoo. Plus he sings. He gained important experience maintaining small engines through his hobby of hang gliding—using a harness outfitted with a small two-stroke high-performance engine attached to a folding propeller.

Wiley Muller - Engineering

Originally from Greenville, SC, Wiley has lived in Maine for almost two decades.  He began his educational career working for the Boy Scouts of America and the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.  He studied history at the University of Tennessee where he received a B.A. and most recently earned a M.S. Ed from USM here in Portland with a focus on Teacher Leadership.   

He has taught in several southern Maine school districts including Windham, Cape Elizabeth, and Old Orchard Beach before coming to Baxter. 

Along with classroom teaching, Wiley has spent (and continues to spend) a significant amount of time in the Marine Trades as a yacht rigger, fabricating parts for all types of boats.  While being a teacher, he also works as a commercial fisherman, a yacht captain, and a home design/remodeling carpenter.  

He lives in South Portland with his young family and loves all things outdoors.  His true passions are tinkering with fabrication projects, sailing, and chasing his young kids around.

Eric Kawamoto - Design, Computer Science & Mathematics

Eric Kawamoto comes to Baxter after a 22-year career as an algorithm development (software) engineer at IDEXX Laboratories. He is new to teaching high school students, but has served as a teaching assistant for freshman calculus while an undergraduate Physics major at the California Institute of Technology, and as a teaching fellow for freshman physics while completing his dissertation in condensed-matter physics at Harvard University. He came to Portland in 1997 after three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he began acquiring the programming skills needed for developing algorithms (image processing and quantitation, curve fitting, optimization, clustering and classification, machine learning) for diagnostic instruments used in veterinary medicine. At IDEXX, Eric facilitated communication between biochemists and immunologists, and his fellow software, optical, and electrical engineers, by "speaking each other's language", while developing his junior colleagues into good communicators and strong individual contributors. He plans to take what he has learned from the corporate world, so much of which resembles the mission of teaching, into classrooms and project-based learning at Baxter, where he will teach Computer Science, Programming, and Engineering Design.

Besides long harboring a desire to pursue a second career as a secondary educator, Eric is an avid amateur orchestral and chamber musician, as well as a choral singer. In the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra, he currently plays violin (http://www.midcoastsymphony.org/musicians/eric-kawamoto/), while during summer workshops at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music, he derives great joy from the hard work of participating in chamber ensembles as a violinist and violist. Up until last year, when he began to take courses toward a teaching certification at the University of New England, Eric had sung tenor with the a cappella choral group Renaissance Voices. He has also served on the boards of the Maine AIDS Alliance and the Maine Gay Men's Chorus, supporting LGBTQ causes and safe spaces. Eric hopes that his experience as a scientist in academia, engineer in industry, musician, and advocate for women and people of color in STEM will inform a rigorous, practical, and compassionate teaching style to develop the next generation of innovators and problem solvers.