2025 Honorary Degree Recipients
Makoto Fujimura
Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa
Makoto Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist whose work has been featured in galleries and museums around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Huntington Library, the Tikotin Museum, Belvedere Museum, C3M North Bund Art Museum and Pola Museum. His process-driven, refractive “slow art” has been described by David Brooks of The New York Times as “a small rebellion against the quickening of time.”
Born in Boston and educated in Japan and the United States, Fujimura was the first non-Japanese citizen to be accepted into the post-MFA doctoral program at Tokyo University of the Arts in the longstanding lineage of Nihonga tradition. He also holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Tokyo University of the Arts and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Bucknell University.
Fujimura is the author of five books: Art Is: A Journey Into the Light (Yale University Press, forthcoming October 2025); Art+Faith: A Theology of Making; Silence and Beauty; Refractions; and Culture Care. He is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2023 Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life and the American Academy of Religion’s 2014 Religion and the Arts award. An advocate for the arts, from 2003–2009 Fujimura served as a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and more recently was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania for the 2024-25 academic year.
In 2013 Gordon’s Barrington Center for the Arts hosted the “QU4RTETS” exhibition. The show featured paintings by Fujimura and was developed in collaboration with Bruce Herman, painter and former Gordon College Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts; composer Christopher Theofanidis; and theologian Jeremy Begbie. The exhibition included works in paint, poetry and music, all developed in response to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Paintings from the Qu4rtets project will again be exhibited at the Barrington Center for the Arts alongside new works by Fujimura next fall, August 27–October 15, 2025.
Richard Timothy Breene
Doctor of Business Administration, honoris causa
Born in Turkey, raised in Belfast and a scholar of Trinity College Dublin, Richard Timothy Breene has been a lifelong student embracing the extraordinary diversity and wonder of the world in a career that has spanned more than five decades and taken him to more than 40 countries. In that time he helped some of the world’s leading multinationals navigate tumultuous changes, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of the Chinese economy and the ending of apartheid. More recently Breene has led initiatives addressing poverty and climate change in places as diverse as Malawi, Burundi, Rwanda and Kenya and come alongside refugees fleeing conflict zones in South Sudan, DR Congo, Jordan and Syria.
Breene began his career in brand marketing with Unilever before joining McKinsey, the world’s premier strategy consultancy, in 1978, where he subsequently became global lead of their marketing practice. He then spent a decade working in a variety of international leadership roles in advertising, consumer goods and retail before joining Andersen Consulting, which he helped take public as Accenture in 2001. While at Accenture Breene was responsible for the development of its worldwide Management Consulting Business, its High-Performance Business research and its Strategy and Corporate Development function—leading vision casting, advising on organization and business-model design and pioneering Accenture’s approach to acquisitions and acquisition integration. He also founded and led Accenture’s digital marketing and consulting organization—now the largest in the world. His insights on strategy development, innovation and renewal have been published by HBR Press both in articles and the book Jumping the S-Curve.
Since retiring from business in 2011, Breene has used his gifting and experiences in service of the Church both here and overseas. He has contributed to Christian leadership development and healing and reconciliation initiatives with his wife Michele, leading World Relief, serving as a trustee of Gordon College and most recently as executive vice president of strategy and innovation at Gordon.