Nathan Suter (February 14, 1973-May 13, 2025 ) was always in motion. As a teenager, he’d often run from his house in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to his friend Shawn’s, 10 or 12 miles away. He’d stop in and hang out as he made and ate two or three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then run on to visit another friend.
On May 13, at age 52, Nathan was running with a group of friends when he suffered a fatal heart attack. One week later, the receiving line for visitors at Guare & Sons funeral home in Montpelier wrapped around the block. All the way down St. Paul Street, high schoolers, still in their jerseys after a track meet, hugged and cried and shared stories about their coach. City leaders, nonprofit organizers, migrant workers, teachers, artists, colleagues, neighbors, family and friends did the same. Everyone was shocked that Nathan was gone, but no one was surprised by the length of the line.
Nathan seemed to know everyone. Montpelier parents and students saw him as an engaged and caring track-and-field coach; artists remember him from his time as executive director of the Helen Day Art Center (now the Current) in Stowe. Still others witnessed his commitment to the community in his roles with the Peace & Justice Center in Burlington, Migrant Justice, and in Montpelier’s flood recovery. As an organizational consultant, he helped Vermont nonprofits and businesses plan for the future. What struck many friends and acquaintances was that despite all the demands on his attention and all the connections he had, Nathan was always deeply present.
He was born in 1973 in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father, Bob Suter, was a medic with the U.S. Air Force. The family soon moved back to Indiana and, in 1977, to Poughkeepsie, where Bob was a professor of biology at Vassar College for more than 30 years. Nathan’s mother, Val, taught high school physics and chemistry. Bob spent decades studying the behavior of spiders; Val was renowned for physics field trips to Great Adventure amusement park.
Bob and Val were deeply committed to Quaker values. Nathan’s sister, Katherine Fisher, described the Bulls Head-Oswego Friends meeting they attended as a community of people who cared for each other, listened and “really saw the importance of recognizing the humanity in everyone.” That upbringing was foundational for both of them, she said, and informed how Nathan interacted with the world.
“He became part of the fabric of wherever he was.” Katherine Fisher
Nathan loved travel and the outdoors. One summer while he was in college, he took a research job with one of his dad’s colleagues. He collected plant samples from Hawaii’s volcanic slopes while also making friends with locals and learning to surf and cook. Nathan was well over six feet tall and slender, with long hair and a tanned complexion, blending in easily in the islands. Because he was genuinely interested in getting to know them, Katherine said, people quickly started treating him like one of their own.
“That’s the story of who he was,” she said. “Everywhere he went, he listened — and he became part of the fabric of wherever he was.”
In 1998, Nathan and his childhood friend Michelle Nijhuis trekked through Mexico and flew to Cuba — forbidden by U.S. policy at the time. His luggage was filled with medical supplies to bring to the island. “He didn’t just travel,” Nijhuis said. “He made sure that service was part of it.” Even though his Spanish wasn’t yet perfect, “Nathan just had this incredible fearlessness about approaching other people.”
Many of his acquaintances talked about Nathan’s knack for maintaining friendships over time and distance — the way he would call, check in and pay attention to what was going on in their lives. He often introduced people to each other. According to JK Connor, who taught English to Nathan’s daughter, Amani, at Montpelier High School, “Nathan’s superpower was connecting people in this seemingly effortless way. And his ability to do that just transcended spaces — really any space he was in, whether it was the Peace & Justice Center or a track meet.”
Nathan was an accomplished long-distance runner and track athlete in high school and at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he is still a top-10 record holder for the 3,000-meter steeplechase. By his sophomore year, he was already captain of the cross-country team when Gavin Boyles joined him for a run as a 16-year-old prospective student. Even on that first run, Nathan stood out. “He had this long, flowing ponytail and was just a real free spirit,” Boyles said. “He was very welcoming, and the team culture reflected that.” Boyles’ daughter Thea, now also 16 and a student at MHS, echoed the sentiments: Nathan coached her in track and field for six years.
Nathan graduated from Haverford in 1995 with a fine arts degree in photography, then earned a master’s degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. He met Mitch Temple in a critical theory class. Where Temple was quiet, Nathan was “infallibly gregarious,” at ease expounding on French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Temple didn’t like his classmate at first, but that didn’t matter: Nathan had an ability to ignore petty slights in favor of getting to the heart of people’s ideas, a quality Temple admired as they became close friends.
During that time, Nathan’s artwork was expanding beyond photography. Temple described one installation as 12 fans arranged in two rows and blowing to support a single piece of twine, which floated in the air as though drawn there with a pencil. “That was Nathan at his best,” Temple said. “It was just so elegant. It was so conceptual. It was so practical.”
While still students, Nathan, Temple and their friend Dennis McNulty started the nonprofit Root Division in San Francisco in 2002. Working against the Bay Area’s affordability crisis, the organization offered subsidized studios to artists, who would then lead classes or curate exhibitions. Nathan, always eager to teach himself new skills, was adept at both the big visioning and the nitty-gritty details of nonprofit management, such as strategic planning and budgeting. According to longtime executive director Michelle Mansour, he was instrumental in setting the inclusive, equitable culture of the place, which is still going strong almost 25 years later.
He brought those skills with him to Vermont. Nathan met his wife, Morgan Lloyd, while she was still a Haverford student and he was working there after graduation; they married in 2001. Morgan grew up in Burlington, and they moved back to be closer to family when they were expecting their first child, Amani, in 2006. They settled in Winooski and then Burlington before moving to Montpelier when Morgan started teaching at Union Elementary School. Their son, Asa, was born in 2008.
Soon after arriving in Vermont, Nathan was hired as the executive director of the Helen Day Art Center, a position he held for a decade until stepping down to start his own consulting firm, BUILD, in 2016. During his time at the Helen Day, Nathan doubled the art center’s educational programming; when he left, it was serving more than 500 students a year.
Nathan also set a new, forward-looking direction for the art center, according to current executive director Rachel Moore, whom Nathan hired as a part-time curator and assistant director in 2011. “He gave big, crushing hugs,” she recalled, and “wanted to do so much good in the world.” Nathan organized exhibitions on topics such as surveillance and masculinity, challenging the status quo and sparking discussions about social justice within the art community.
Seven Days described one such exhibit in 2010, featuring Iraqi American artist Wafaa Bilal, as “arguably the most provocative exhibit the Stowe gallery has ever hosted.” Bilal had been working with an image of a traditional Iraqi morgue where bodies are washed before burial and was unsure how to incorporate it into the exhibition. Nathan surprised him by building an entire site-specific installation, re-creating the morgue in the gallery. As an artist, Bilal said on a recent phone call, it doesn’t often happen that “you have a person who not only gives you space to find your inspiration but to empathize with you — to see what you really want to communicate with your audience.”
Two years later, Bilal asked Nathan to help him re-create one of his pieces from Stowe at the Jakarta Bienniale in Indonesia. Over meals of the spicy street food Nathan loved, they strategized how to get components for the installation — including a large, potted ficus tree — without a truck. Nathan told him not to worry, Bilal recalled, and headed out into the busy city. “He came back, carrying a tree, on a bike.”
Nathan’s generosity and ingenuity extended to his community organizing. “Any time we had a resource, he was willing to share it,” Morgan said, “and that was especially his time and his love.” Through his work on the board of Migrant Justice, he was able to connect families from Latin America with the resources they needed to settle in Vermont. When Burlington’s Peace & Justice Center considered shutting its doors in 2011, Nathan stepped up, becoming a board member for more than a decade and volunteering countless hours to help revitalize the organization.
And after Montpelier’s 2023 floods, Nathan became an integral member of the city’s Commission for Recovery & Resilience. According to commission member and Montpelier Alive executive director Katie Trautz, “He always had a thousand questions, which inevitably led us in the right direction.”
Of all the roles Nathan played, one of the most meaningful was coach. Starting at Main Street Middle School in 2019 and moving on to the high school two years ago, Nathan put in many hours and hard work to grow the Montpelier-Roxbury track-and-field program from a handful of kids to more than 90 on the combined middle and high school teams today. Many of them remembered his joyful attitude, his sense of humor, his ability to be everywhere at once and the way he met each student at their own level.
“He didn’t just care about the team as a whole,” MHS senior Jay Borland said. “He cared about every single person on the team.”
Earlier this year, junior Miriam Serota-Winston was struggling to improve her time in the 3,000 meters; Nathan knew how nervous she was about qualifying for the state championships. Then came a race where, she said, “I was flying.” She looked to Nathan on her last lap to see if she would make her time. When he realized she would, he whooped, jumped in the air and ran across the infield toward the finish line.
“I was so, so happy, but I think he was happier,” Serota-Winston said. “He supported me at my worst, and he supported me at my best. And he was so good at both of those things.”
Corrected July 25, 2025: An earlier version of this story misattributed a quote. Montpelier High School junior Miriam Serota-Winston shared the story of the 3,000-meter race.
“Life Stories” is a series profiling Vermonters who have recently died. Know of someone we should write about? Email us at lifestories@sevendaysvt.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “‘Nathan’s Superpower Was Connecting People’ | Nathan Suter, February 14, 1973-May 13, 2025”
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