Among the many veteran members of the SVA community, few can claim a tenure as lengthy, varied and influential as Abby Kreh’s (1962 Illustration). An alumnus, former administrator and faculty member and current special consultant to President David Rhodes, Kreh began her 60th year with the College this fall.
Kreh enrolled at SVA in the fall of 1959—[one of three female students out of a class of 90]—having already completed an undergraduate degree at Middlebury College, in Vermont, and worked for several years in Life magazine’s [photo] department. Though she valued her education at the College and would later show her work in several group exhibitions, “I realized I wasn’t going to make bags of gold from my paintings,” she says. “So I thought, ‘If I’m going to work for a living, let it at least be for something worthwhile.’ And I was so impressed with SVA.”
In 1962, Kreh joined SVA’s staff as an assistant to founder Silas H. Rhodes. Two years later, she took on the newly created (and ultimately short-lived) position of dean of women—her counterpart, the dean of men, was painter and faculty member Don Nice, who died earlier this year. She went on to serve as SVA’s first Title IX coordinator, as dean of the school and as the College’s vice president, before retiring from the administration in 1975. She characterizes her work in these high-ranking roles as, simply, an advocate for and champion of all SVA students, ensuring their equitable treatment regardless of gender, area of study or personal circumstances.
“Each student’s creativity is absolutely unique, you’re just trying to get that part of them out,” she says. “It’s very hard when you’re 18 to believe in what you’re going to be, because your work isn’t what you want it to be yet.”
For 20 years, beginning in 1974, Kreh taught courses on opera as a member of the SVA Humanities and Sciences faculty. “Opera is like oxygen to me,” she says, and that devotion played a large role in her 1995 move to central New York, near Cooperstown. There, she volunteers for the Glimmerglass Opera Guild, which puts on a renowned annual festival in the area. But she can still be found on the SVA campus, for roughly one week each month, helping to write and edit various College publications, including the undergraduate and graduate catalogs and the student handbook.
“I never thought I would be a college administrator, I never thought I would teach,” she says. “But I believed in the College’s mission. You never went home at night and wondered whether you did anything worthwhile.”

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