Museum curator used her understanding of history to imagine a better future Nina Gumpert Parris, a longtime resident of Burlington Vt., passed away peacefully on October 21, after a year in hospice at the Arbors in Shelburne, Vt. Nina was born in 1927 in Berlin, Germany. Her father was Dr. Martin Gumpert, a German poet, writer, doctor, and pioneer in public health and gerontology. Her mother, Dr. Charlotte Blaschko, was also a physician. Nina’s mother died of tuberculosis when she was six years old, and in 1937, at the age of 10, she fled the rise of Nazism in Germany and emigrated to the United States. She frequently talked about the dangers and stress she experienced as a Jewish child under Hitler and the challenges of being an outsider and not speaking the language in her new country. Raised in New York City by her father, she went to the Dalton School, with a strong interest in art, drama and political activism. After a brief stint at the Yale Drama School and studying stage design that included apprenticeships on Broadway, she joined the Caravans performance troupe, which entertained audiences prior to campaign speeches by then presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. It was there that she met her husband, Arthur Parris, a pianist. Later they spent a year in Paris, where Nina studied art while Arthur studied music at the Paris Conservatory. After returning to the United States, Nina started working as activities director at the Home for the Jewish Aged in Philadelphia, while raising her first son Carl. In this job, she was given leeway to innovate with activities that encouraged residents to build upon their life skills and interests — an early example of her ability to blaze new paths in many of her endeavors. Nina returned to college while Carl and her second son, Tom, were attending junior high and elementary school. At Bryn Mawr, where she was a McBride Scholar and Wilson Fellowship recipient, she received her bachelor’s degree in art history. She completed her master’s and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, with a specialty in 20th-century German painters. She returned to Germany as part of her dissertation research, where she was able to revisit the famous Berlin art museums of her childhood and observe the post-war changes in the younger German mindset. After her divorce, she and Tom moved to Burlington, Vt., where she became the curator of the Robert Hull Fleming Museum at…