Esther Hyneman is a painter, former educator, and human rights advocate. When Esther Hyneman retired after decades as an English professor, she decided she wanted to pursue an international career. Outraged by the rape, murder, and silencing of women under the Taliban, Hyneman became interested in advocacy work to help the women in Afghanistan achieve basic human rights – to safety, to an education, to work. In 2001, just after 9/11, Hyneman began volunteering with Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a New York-based organization that had been formed six months earlier. Soon after she joined WAW’s board of directors she led efforts to create and support WAW’s Family Guidance Center in Afghanistan, which offers counseling and legal representation to women experiencing human rights violations. Hyneman has also helped establish the Children’s Support Center in Kabul, Afghanistan, a residence for children who had been living in prisons with their mothers; a women’s human rights awareness training program; and halfway houses for women transitioning from prison or shelters and cannot return home. (Bibi Aisha, who was on the cover of Time magazine in 2010 after her nose and ears were cut off by her husband and male in-laws, is one woman WAW is assisting). WAW opened three Family Guidance Centers and shelters, two additional Children’s Support Centers and two halfway houses this year. In just the past year, the group has secured access to justice for more than 1,000 women. She became a Purpose Prize Fellow in 2011.
Esther Hyneman
Studios
New Hampshire
Esther Hyneman worked in the New Hampshire studio.
New Hampshire Studio, originally named Peterborough Studio, was given to MacDowell by Mr. and Mrs. William Schofield, Mrs. H. A. Chamberlain, Mrs. Andrew Draper, and Miss Ruth Cheney. The studio was renamed in 1943. The Gilbert Verney Foundation established an endowed maintenance fund in 1990, and a bequest in memory of MacDowell Fellow Victor Candell underwrote the…