The Great Cranberry Island Portrait Project combines art and oral history, printmaker Janet Best Badger's original black and white and color prints and photojournalist Rebecca Buyers' color photos and oral histories of Great Cranberry Islanders.

Rebecca Buyers will share the story of how The Great Cranberry Island Portrait Project came to be and read some of the “word portraits” she created after interviewing residents of Great Cranberry Island in 2009. She will also discuss the value of capturing living history in small communities, the joys of collaboration and the benefits of sitting down with subjects to hear their stories told in their own words.

Rebecca Buyers, author of The Great Cranberry Island Portrait Project and The Marvelous Macadamia Nut, got her start reporting for The Bar Harbor Times under the editorship of Earl Brechlin in the 1980s while still a student at College of the Atlantic. She earned a degree in journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada in 1985 and returned to Mount Desert Island where she spent the bulk her career in journalism and philanthropy, writing for The Ellsworth American and The Mount Desert Islander, grant making at the Maine Community Foundation and fundraising for area nonprofits. Since 2010, she has traveled and  lived abroad, from the sunny tropics to the misty Anglo Celtic Isles. In 2023, she earned her Masters in Creative Writing from Birkbeck UCL in London and returned to Maine where she now lives with her husband, Nils, and their cat, Caper.