St. Charles native receives graduate honors at Illinois Wesleyan University

St. Charles native Connor Speck received the Hope Ellen Pape President's Club Award in the Fine Arts during recent commencement exercises at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Ill.

The award is given for outstanding accomplishment in art, music or theater arts. Speck graduated magna cum laude from Illinois Wesleyan on May 7 with a major in theater arts. He designed costumes for Illinois Wesleyan's School of Theatre Arts' main stage productions of "Fame: The Musical," "The Crucible," "We Three," a number in the Faculty Choreographed Dance Concert, and two lab theater productions: "Pluto was a Planet" and "Float." He also worked on a number of other Theatre Arts' productions including "GIANT," "Blown Youth" and "The Boys from Syracuse," among others.

Illinois Wesleyan is a top tier, national liberal arts university that is exclusively undergraduate. A highly selective institution, Illinois Wesleyan offers 81 majors, minors and programs in a unique curriculum that combines the liberal arts and sciences with professional schools of art, music, theater, and nursing, and enrolls approximately 1,700 students from 33 states and 22 countries. Illinois Wesleyan is located in the central Illinois community of Bloomington-Normal.