Holly Handman-Lopez and Tom Lopez, OC ’89, met at The Mandarin in February 2003. Mutual friends of theirs in the Dance department were “playing matchmaker,” which Holly wasn’t aware of at the time. While she is now an assistant professor of Dance, she was then a visiting artist from New York City.
Tom was quick to charm her. For him, that meant regular visits to Warner Main, sometimes with cookies. Soon thereafter, they had their first date at The Feve, which only came about after a group of their friends had made plans for dinner, only to all cancel but Holly and Tom. Who’s to say whether or not this was also a matchmaking scheme?
The energy had shifted during that dinner and the two began dating. At the time, it was long-distance — Holly in New York City and Tom in Oberlin. They would split the distance during this period with weekend trips to a little town in Pennsylvania.
In the earliest days, Holly and Tom were brought together by a shared love of collaboration between TIMARA — Tom working as department chair — and Dance. At Oberlin, the two co-taught a StudiOC cluster in fall 2018, Arts of Conflict Resolution, made up of two classes, Mixed Media Collaboration and What Moves Us: Somatic Approaches to Conflict Resolution, which culminated in a project called “Some Things Cosmic Are These.”
Presently, they’re collaborating on Oberlin Dance Company’s spring 2024 showcase, to be held May 3 and 4 in Hall Auditorium. The piece is a work of dance and theater based on the life of French sculptor Auguste Rodin and his lover and fellow French sculptor Camille Claudel. It will be a show of artistic talent as well as tumultuous, romantic passion.
Aside from art, Holly and Tom share a life here in Oberlin with their two daughters and golden retriever, Saveen, as well as a mutual affection for brunch at The Feve. For Valentine’s Day, they make it a point to watch the 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck with their daughters. For Holly, it’s a particularly meaningful tradition coming from her life before Oberlin in Brooklyn, where the film is set.
