By: Madelynn Lockwood, Features Editor
Chloe Cohen-Breen graced the paper with her talents back in the spring of 2022 and has been a crucial part of our layout and photography team since. She now serves as the sports layout director and co-photography director. Although her talents are evident throughout the sports section, her campus presence doesn’t stop in the newsroom: she is also a Division One athlete competing on the cross country and track team.
Being a Rochestor native, Cohen-Breen isn’t too far from home, but she hadn’t heard of Canisius until the cross country and track team began showing interest in her becoming a part of their team. At Canisius, she majors in journalism and strategic communication with a concentration in multimedia journalism. Despite her immediate interest in The Griffin, Cohen-Breen says she hesitated and didn’t find her way to the paper until the second-to-last edition of her freshman year. She explains that when staff applications came out, she thought, “This is my time!”
“I literally just hit everything when it asked what I was interested in: news, sports, opinion, anything!” After that she came down to the office to learn layout from some of the outgoing officers, “I was shadowing [Adam Gorski] for the first edition I went to, and then for MUD, I basically did it all. It was bad. I did a bad job.” With some practice and confidence, in her sophomore year, Chloe took over as sports layout director and gradually began incorporating her passion for photography into her new position.
Chloe’s off-campus passions are what set her apart from ordinary college students. If you are familiar with her in the slightest, you know that it is not uncommon to see her on Friday morning and find out she is in another country by that night. Chloe has been to 14 different countries across North America, South America and Europe — traveling has been a constant in her life from a young age, and she is not planning on stopping such a habit.
Annually, her family departs on an extended road trip led by her mom. She explains that this passion for exploring comes from her mom: “She has always been on the go, and she kinda wanted us to have the same lifestyle, but more home based.” Chloe explained that these roadtrips never have an explicit plan, but there is always some sort of goal in mind. Her family always returns after about a month, but a few times they arrived home the day before school started.
Chloe’s mom has been an incredibly influential person in her life. She explained that her mom was a photographer and that she has been able to learn an infinite amount of lessons from her. She also notes that her mom is “an absolute girlboss.” One thing that Chloe is especially grateful for is her name. Only Chloe and her sisters received the “Cohen” portion of their last name, as it is her mother’s maiden name. Her brothers’ last names are simply “Breen.” To Cohen-Breen’s mom, it was important that her daughters carried on her name, too.
Her most recent summer was chock full of out-of-this-world experiences. This past summer she worked a seasonal job on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, CA along with her older sister at a zipline company. During her free time, she found herself on “The Price is Right,” finished traveling to all 48 of the continental United States and explored the West Coast.
Post-graduation, she dreams of working for National Geographic so she can combine her two passions of photography and traveling. This year she has broken into a new sphere of photography and began exploring sports photography, specifically focusing on hockey and basketball. She hopes that she can continue building her photography business that will lead to more opportunities.
The Griffin is extremely grateful for the dedication that Chloe has for this staff, and we are even more excited to see Chloe’s growth as she embarks on her senior year in the fall.