parisDirector photo
Learn confidence, independence, new critical perspectives, and expand your horizons beyond your comfort zones.
– Shelley Cavaness
Paris program director

meet the director

Shelley Cavaness
Every Central College Abroad program boasts a resident director who plays a unique role in students’ experience. Directors provide academic advising; teach a hands-on seminar, where students learn about the host city and then experience it first hand; and lead the cultural excursions connected to the seminar class. Central College Abroad takes pride in the personalized attention that it can provide its students.

Shelley Cavaness, the on-site program director in Paris, brings a wealth of knowledge and experience about Paris and all of France to the program. Shelley received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of South Florida, a Master of Arts Degree from Columbia Unviersity, a doctorate from New York University and her D.E.A. from the Unviersité de Paris-3 La Sorbonne Nouvelle. As the on-site program director, Shelley facilitates personal growth and learning by offering support, academic advising and a complete on-site orientation to the host city and country.

As director, she most enjoys watching students grow over the course of the semester. She recognizes students’ transformations most clearly through their questions: in the beginning of their stay students are quite easy to answer, but later, as students mature and understand French society, their inquiries become increasingly more complex.

Shelley has personal interests in dance, painting, music and theatre and couldn’t imagine living anywhere other than Paris - the capital of the arts.