See below for recent news and achievements from Gallatin students, faculty, and alumni. Over the last decade, the Gallatin community has been honored with major international awards and prizes. A full list of student academic awardees, including Fulbright, Marshall, and Rhodes Scholars, can be found on this Fellowship page. Awards for faculty and alumni include the Academy Award, Tony Awards, MacArthur "Genius" Grants, Guggenheim Fellowships, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, and more.
May 17, 2022
The New York City Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment awarded Alicia Waller (MA ’17) the Women's Fund for Media, Music, & Theater grant.
May 17, 2022
Madeline Sayet (TSOA BFA ’10; GAL MA ’12)’s solo show Where We Belong will embark on a national tour following a successful film adaptation last summer.
May 17, 2022
Maya Rodale (BA ’04; GSAS MA ‘10)’s The Mad Girls of New York was published by Penguin Random House.
May 17, 2022
Meribah Knight (BA ’04) won the Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting for her reporting on the abuses of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee.
May 17, 2022
Mamoun Friedrich-Grosvenor (BA ’20) and Rita Ruiting Wang (BA ’20)’s project Phytobionic was featured in the Bio Design Challenge exhibition at Philadelphia’s Esther Klein Gallery.
May 17, 2022
Kate Folk (BA ’07)’s story collection Out There was published by Random House in 2022.
May 17, 2022
Small Girls PR, founded by Mallory Blair (BA ‘10), was awarded PR Agency of the Year by Campaign US and was included in Observer’s annual list of the 50 best PR firms in America.
May 16, 2022
Bryonn Bain (MA ’99)’s Rebel Speak was published by University of California Press in April 2022.
May 16, 2022
Gallatin students Yagmur Akyurek (BA ’22; English Teaching Assistantship [ETA], Turkey) and Mai Mageed (BA ’22; ETA, Greece) and recent graduates Julianna Bjorksten (BA ’20; ETA, Italy), Stephanie Holguin (BA ’22; Research Award, Brazil), and Lachlan Hyatt (BA ’21; Arts award, Estonia) have been awarded 2022 Fulbright Awards.
May 16, 2022
Gallatin student Zamiya Jean (BA ’25) has been awarded a Gilman Scholarship from the US Department of State to support a semester abroad in Italy.
May 16, 2022
In May 2022, Dean Susanne L. Wofford was awarded the Colin Clout Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the International Spenser Society, the most prestigious award given by the Society, which is presented at variable intervals to a senior scholar whose body of work represents a wide-ranging, long-standing, and distinguished contribution to the study of Spenser.
May 16, 2022
MA Alumna and Gallatin faculty member Eiko Otake (MA ’07) was featured in the New York Times article, “Bill T. Jones and Eiko Otake: Opposites Guided by ‘Too-Much-Ness’.” New York Magazine called Otake’s performance series at NYU Skirball, The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable, “visionary” and included it in the “highbrow, brilliant” quadrant of their Approval Matrix.
Apr 11, 2022
Cynthia Oliver (MA '96; Tisch PhD '03) has been awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. Oliver will use her fellowship to work on a book project about the involvement of Black artists in avant-garde and postmodern dance and experimental work.
Apr 11, 2022
A current Fulbright grantee in the arts in Berlin, Aine Nakamura (MA '20) was selected as one of the five artists/collectives for the Berliner Festspiele's 2022 Theatertreffen - Stückemarkt for her performance series, Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains. The series first premiered at The Gallatin Galleries in 2021. Nakamura was also selected as one of two winners of the Biennale College Teatro grant; the grant will allow her to create a site-specific theater performance conceived for the outdoor spaces of Venice, with the project being staged as part of the 50th International Theatre Festival.
Apr 11, 2022
MTV Documentary Films acquired the worldwide rights to Alysa Nahmias (BA '01)’s 2021 documentary film, Krimes. The film had its world premiere at the Heartland Film Festival and has since been screened at DOC NYC and the Big Sky Film Fest.
Apr 11, 2022
John Wells Productions will adapt Danya Kukafka (BA '14)’s novel Notes on an Execution into a forthcoming series; Kukafka will serve as an executive producer on the project.
Apr 11, 2022
Meribah Knight (BA '04) and Ken Armstrong won the John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Journalism for their exposé on the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee.
Apr 11, 2022
Jade Doskow (BA '00)’s photographs appeared in the New York Times article “Everybody Loves Red Hook. Or So They Say.”
Apr 11, 2022
The Today show featured LaTasha Barnes (MA '19) as part of Hoda Kotb’s “Together We Rise” series. Barnes will also be honored with the Social Dance Innovator Award at the MAD HOT BALL 2022 in May.
Mar 10, 2022
Coco Mellors (BA ’11; GSAS MFA ’16)’s first novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein was published by Bloomsbury in 2022.
Mar 10, 2022
Danya Kukafka (BA ’14)’s second novel, Notes on an Execution, was published by HarperCollins in January 2022, receiving great critical acclaim.
Mar 10, 2022
For her short film Lucky Fish, Emily May Jampel (BA '17) was one of the recipients of the 2021/22 Frameline Completion Fund.
Mar 10, 2022
The film Prayers for the Stolen, adapted from the novel by Jennifer Clement (BA ’82), was named best international film at the Palm Springs Film Festival. It also received the Ibero-American Award.
Mar 10, 2022
Joosje Duk (BA ’16)’s non-fiction debut, IK ZIE JE BIJ DE UITGANG (I’LL SEE YOU AT THE EXIT), was published by Lebowski Publishers in September 2021. The book takes the form of an ICU diary written for the author’s father as he battled COVID-19.
Mar 10, 2022
Gregory Bonsignore (BA ’05)’s new illustrated children’s book on Betty White, That's Betty, was published by Macmillan in February 2022. The book has been reviewed to be a sweet and delightful retrospective on the life of a beloved American figure.
Feb 25, 2022
Heather Berg (BA ’08)'s first book, Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, an investigation into the sex work industry, was published by University of North Carolina Press.
Feb 4, 2022
Estella Struck (BA ’24), founder of Estella Struck Marketing, was awarded a First Generation to College Founders Fellowship, and is one of the program’s inaugural fellows. Struck’s agency helps established sustainable businesses expand their Gen Z reach using social media and short-form video content.
Feb 4, 2022
Vasuki Nesiah was appointed to the Jacob K. Javits Visiting Professorship at NYU for the Spring 2022 semester. Nesiah teaches human rights and legal and social theory at Gallatin and is faculty director of the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights.
Feb 4, 2022
Reef (Robert Tewlow; BA ’92) was the Producer/Mixer and Songwriter for the song “Tonight” from Doja Cat’s Planet Her, which was nominated for two awards at the 2022 Grammy Awards: Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album.
Feb 4, 2022
Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022), the first full-length poetry collection from Darrel Alejandro Holnes, was recognized with the 2022 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.
Feb 4, 2022
Bessie Award winner LaTasha Barnes (MA ’19) was featured as one of the New York Times’s Breakout Stars of 2021. Barnes was also interviewed and profiled on an episode of NPR’s podcast Rough Translation.
Feb 4, 2022
Isabel Bethencourt (BA ’16) co-directed the coming-of-age documentary Cusp, which is currently streaming on Showtime, and has been nominated for 2022 Best Documentary by the American Society of Cinematographers.
Feb 4, 2022
Academy Award winning writer-director John Ridley (BA ’87) has begun production on the film Shirley, which tells the story of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black Congresswoman from New York. The film will star Academy Award-winner Regina King as Chisholm and will appear exclusively on Netflix.
Feb 4, 2022
Patrick Scorese (MA ’20) and Kendra Capece (MA ’20) co-authored Pandemic Performance: Resilience, Liveness, and Protest in Quarantine Times (Routledge, 2021). The book grew out of Alejandro Velasco’s 2019 Thesis Proposal Seminar.
Feb 1, 2022
Darrel Alejandro Holnes announced Stepmotherland, (Notre Dame Press, February 2022) his first full-length collection of poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance.
Dec 9, 2021
The Gallatin Internship Office awarded Alyssa Barone (BA ’23), Nikki Myers (BA ’23), Lydia Pamudji (BA ’23), and Laura Zhang (BA ’23) with the 2021 Mike Bender Internship Award. Named after New York City businessman Mike Bender, the annual award is designed to supplement work at unpaid internships that promote compassion, understanding, and tolerance.
Dec 9, 2021
Jordan Anderson (BA ’14) and Blake Slatkin were selected by Forbes for the tenth annual “30 Under 30” list created to “identify the new guard, the young innovators, trailblazers and disruptors remaking our world.” This year’s additions to the Forbes 30 under 30 list join influential Gallatin alumni recognized by Forbes for leaving their mark, with over 20 NYU alumni making the cut. Since 2014, 24 Gallatin alumni have been named to the list. Past notables include Madeline Sayet (MA ’12 in Arts Politics and Post-Colonial Theory), Phillip Picardi (BA ’12 with a concentration in Beauty), and Rachel Tippograph (BA ‘09 in Entertainment Business & New Media).
Dec 4, 2021
Ali Mirsepassi's The Discovery of Iran, a re-examination of the history of Iranian nationalism through the life and work of Taghi Arani, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021.
Dec 3, 2021
Nico Daswani (MA ’09) was the executive producer of the World Economic Forum’s See Me: A Global Concert, an international collaboration between hundreds of musicians, including Yo-Yo Ma, the Chamber Orchestra of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Black Pearl Chamber Orchestra, the Choir of the State Orchestra of São Paulo, the Orchestra della Toscana, the Drakensberg Boys Choir, the Beijing NCPA Orchestra, and sand artist Jim Denevan.
Dec 3, 2021
Einstein’s War (Dutton, 2019) by Matthew Stanley was awarded the Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society for the best book intended for a general audience.
Dec 3, 2021
Chef Jordan Anderson (BA ’14) was featured in Forbes’ “30 under 30” for his work as the executive chef and co-founder of Sami & Susu, an all-day Mediterranean restaurant based in NYC. Producer and writer Blake Slatkin, a non-grad alum, was also featured for his achievements in music. Gallatin alumni have been named to the Forbes list twenty-four times.
Dec 3, 2021
Home is Not a Country (Penguin Random House, 2021), a novel in verse by Safia Elhillo (BA ’13) was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
Dec 3, 2021
Rachel Krantz (BA ’10) published Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-monogamy (Penguin Random House, 2022).
Dec 3, 2021
Avi Wisnia (BA ’05) released the jazz/pop album Catching Leaves.
Dec 3, 2021
“Where Do We Go From Here? Revisiting Black Irish Relations,” a conference about the intersection of Blackness and Irishness in the history of the United States, was co-hosted and co-organized by Kim DaCosta (NYU Gallatin) and Miriam Nyhan Grey (Glucksman Ireland House).
Nov 18, 2021
Noche de Fuego, the film adaptation of Jennifer Clement’s (BA ’82) novel Prayers for the Stolen (Penguin Random House, 2013) debuted at the Cannes film festival in the summer of 2021. It earned best film and best direction at the Athens International Film Festival and was chosen to represent Mexico in the Oscar race for Best Foreign Film in November of 2021.
Oct 25, 2021
In partnership with Monument Lab, Patricia Eunji Kim co-wrote and co-edited a national monument audit of 50,000 conventional monuments from every US state and territory. The audit was produced in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to inform its $250 million monuments project and was featured in NYU News and Futurity.
Oct 25, 2021
Gallatin student Jack Byrne (BA ’23) is half of the duo behind SidetalkNYC, a series of one-minute Instagram stories that feature New Yorkers talking about New York. Byrne is producer and cameraman for the series, which caught Knicks fans in a moment of joy when the team beat the Celtics in the NBA season opener. Byrne was interviewed in Forbes and showcased in the New York Post.
Oct 25, 2021
For the first episode of the second season of Criss Cross, podcast host KC Trommer spoke with Gallatin faculty member and celebrated multimedia artist Nina Katchadourian about the collaborative process behind To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World, an art exhibition which premiered at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco in January 2021. Having read the book, Survive the Savage Sea (1973), as a child, Katchadourian and shipwreck survivor Douglas Robertson scheduled daily phone calls during the early days of the pandemic for thirty-eight consecutive days, mirroring the time that Robertson and his family were adrift at sea. Based off of the exchange, Katchadourian created videos, sculptures, photographs, drawings, text message exchanges, and excerpts from her recorded phone calls with Robertson. To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World is currently on display at the Columbus Museum of Art through April 24, 2022.
Oct 12, 2021
LaTasha Barnes (MA ’19) won a 2021 Bessie Award for Sustained Achievement. Having danced with Caleb Teicher & Company, Dorrance Dance, Ephrat Asherie Dance, Ladies of Hip-Hop, and Passion Fruit Dance Company, Barnes is a versatile dancer in Lindy Hop, house dance, and hip-hop. "Barnes is celebrated globally for her musicality, athleticism and joyful presence," the Bessies committee noted.
Oct 8, 2021
Meribah Knight (BA ’04) and Ken Armstrong wrote “Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist. Almost Nothing Happened to the Adults in Charge,” a long-form investigative report published by WPL News 90.3 in Nashville, Tennessee. Based on the article, eleven members of Congress sent a letter to ask the US Department of Justice to open an investigation into the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County.
Oct 1, 2021
Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert's The Art of Activism: Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible was published by O/R Books.
Oct 1, 2021
Paty’s poem “Jalousie” was published in the October 2021 Issue of Poetry Magazine.
Sep 21, 2021
Amogh Thakkar (BA ’25) was named a Breakthrough Junior Challenge finalist for “You Are Part Virus: Human Endogenous Retroviruses.” The Challenge is an annual global competition for students to inspire creative thinking about science.
Sep 20, 2021
Dakota Fordham (BA ’25; pictured left) and Carol Plakk (BA ’25; pictured right) won the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Northeast Regional Championships in Geneva, New York. The duo won the doubles title and Fordham defeated Plakk in the singles final.
Sep 19, 2021
Stephen Colbert’s “Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand Building Back America Great Again Better 2020,” written by Nicole Conlan (BA ’13), won the live variety special Emmy. Conlan was also nominated for another Emmy for her work at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert at CBS Studios.
Sep 18, 2021
Pictures from Frances Denny’s (BA ’07) exhibit Major Arcana: Witches in America is included in the exhibition The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming, held at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
Sep 17, 2021
Freshkills Park Photographer-in-Residence Jade Doskow (BA ’00) opened a solo show at the Tracey Morgan Gallery in September 2021.
Sep 17, 2021
The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Department of Cultural Affairs paired with the NYC mayor’s office to distribute one time $5,000 grants to over 3,000 NYC artists in late September. The funds, from a new $25 million recovery initiative designed to help NYC-based working artists who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, were received by Gallatin faculty Kathryn Posin, Meera Nair, Judith Sloan, and staff member KC Trommer.
The grant for the Kathryn Posin Dance Company was used to create a performance at Manhattan’s Gene Frankel Theater. Meera Nair’s grant supported Stories from a Plague Year, providing space for Tibetan community members to share stories and lived experiences of working, struggle, illness, grief, and experiences with anti-Asian hate, as NYC-based immigrants, workers, students, and families living through the pandemic. Judith Sloan and Alicia Waller (MA ’17) presented “Songs and Poems: Of Migration, Refuge, and Finding Home,” a public performance that will be held at the outdoor stage of the Jamaica Performing Arts Center in Queens. KC Trommer’s grant will support running the 2021-2022 Red Door Series, a reading and meditation series offered twice a month at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Jackson Heights, Queens.
Sep 11, 2021
In honor of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Eiko Otake (MA ’07) performed “Slow Turn” in Battery Park City, a new piece that centers on Otake’s memories of that day and its aftermath.
Aug 20, 2021
The Nederlands Film Festival selected writer-director Joosje Duk (BA ’16) for the Festival’s Talent en Route initiative, and will feature her web series Almost Starring.
Aug 18, 2021
Maria Sofia Hernandez (BA ’19) directed a bilingual tribute to Cuban playwright Maria Irene Fornes which debuted at the Russian Arts Theatre & Studio in August 2021 and was performed by the All-Latina Theatre Collective.
Aug 11, 2021
LaTasha Barnes (MA ’19) presented The Jazz Continuum, an exploration of Jazz and Lindy Hop, at Jacob's Pillow in August 2021. Performances were reviewed in the Boston Globe, Valley Advocate, the Berkshire Eagle, and Broadway World. Barnes performed in The Kennedy Center's 50th Anniversary Celebration Concert which was broadcast nationwide by PBS.
Aug 10, 2021
NextUs Ventures founder Damon Kornhauser (BA ’02) received a double grant from the US Department of State and IREX to create a new model of digital collaboration.
Aug 2, 2021
Nancy Agabian won a Jeanne Cordova Prize for Queer/Lesbian Nonfiction from Lambda Literary.
Aug 1, 2021
Jay Goldberg (BA ’82) was selected as the Visual Muze Storytelling Artist-in-Residence by the West Harlem Art Fund to work on The Memory of America: Remember Your First Baseball Game, a multimedia project documenting the first baseball game of immigrants and members of the military.
Aug 1, 2021
Critical Disaster Studies, co-edited by Jacob Remes and Andy Horowitz, was published by University of Pennsylvania Press.
Aug 1, 2021
Legendary actor André De Shields (MA ’91) will reprise the role of King Lear for an upcoming production of Shakespeare’s tragedy but first, he will return to Broadway in Hadestown.
Aug 1, 2021
Kim Coleman Foote has been selected as the 2021-2022 George Bennett Fellow and will be Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Jul 30, 2021
Three Minutes: A Lengthening, a new documentary film based on Glenn Kurtz's book, Three Minutes in Poland (Macmillan, 2015), premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September.
Jul 30, 2021
Noche de Fuego, the film adaptation of Jennifer Clement's (BA ’82) novel Prayers for the Stolen (Penguin Random House, 2013), premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and was reviewed in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety.
Jul 16, 2021
Aine Nakamura (MA ’20) performed Circle Hasu at the Gallatin Galleries throughout July and August.
Jul 15, 2021
Brandon Lee (BA ’22) and George Li’s Middlemen, an online authentication and handling service for safely swapping sneakers online, participated in the 2021 NYU Summer Launchpad and in the NYU-Yale Pitchoff, held on July 15.
Jul 1, 2021
Poet Michael Frazier (BA ’00) is one of the inaugural fellows for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, a fellowship that provides financial and professional support to emerging Black poets.
Jul 1, 2021
Joosje Duk (BA ’16) was one of only two winners of the Amsterdam-based Netflix New Voices Script Contest. For her screenplay One and One Equals Three, an anti-rom com about female sexuality, Duk won 25,000 Euros and has her screenplay on track to be adopted as a Netflix original film.
Jul 1, 2021
The screenplay for Noche de Fuego, a film directed by Mexican-Salvadoran director Tatiana Huezo, was adapted from Prayers for the Stolen (Hogarth, 2014), a novel by Jennifer Clement (BA ’82). Noche de Fuego was nominated for a Palme d'Or at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Jul 1, 2021
We The People, a new animated children's musical series by Chris Nee (BA ’93), was released on Netflix and reviewed in the New York Times, Decider, and Variety. Another Netflix show by Nee, Ridley Jones, launched on July 13.
Jul 1, 2021
For the Washington Post, Millery Polyné and Laurent Dubois co-authored the Op-Ed “Haiti is stuck in a cycle of upheaval. Its people suffer the most.”
Jul 1, 2021
The Bio-Informatic Digester, an art installation that uses mealworms to eat styrofoam packaging developed by Mitchell Joachim and Terreform ONE, was included in A New View Camden, a six-month-long exhibition featuring six unique public art projects in Camden, New Jersey.
Jul 1, 2021
Ali Mirsepassi and Arang Keshavarzian co-wrote the multidisciplinary book Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Jun 30, 2021
Dorrance Dance, the award-winning tap dance company founded in 2011 by Michelle Dorrance (BA ’01), opened the 2021 Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.
Jun 29, 2021
Jeongki Lim (BA ’10), Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons at the New School, collaborated with the Parsons N Ventures team to launch "Creativity & A.I. Specialization," one of the first New School courses on Coursera.
Jun 18, 2021
Academy Award-winner John Ridley (BA ’87; screenwriter, 12 Years A Slave), is co-founder of Milwaukee-based No Studios, which announced $25,000 in grants to six Wisconsin musicians.
Jun 15, 2021
To celebrate Pride Month, NYU profiled Tara Lombardo (BA ’06) for her work as executive director of the Institute for Human Identity (IHI), the first and longest-running LGBTQ+ mental health organization.
Jun 15, 2021
Josue Ledesma (BA ’12) is part of the cast of BRAGGING RIGHTS, a sketch comedy competition show that re-opened at The Player's Theater.
Jun 14, 2021
In association with the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Mohegan theater-maker Madeline Sayet (MA ’12) performed Where We Belong, a solo play that unpacks the legacy of solo play about the role of the UK in colonialism and Brexit. To unpack her work, Sayet was invited as a guest speaker on Shakespeare Unlimited, a podcast from the Folger Shakespeare library
Jun 13, 2021
Chinaka Hodge (BA ’06) was announced one of the writers for The Midnight Club, a new Netflix horror show based on Christopher Pike’s 1994 novel.
Jun 9, 2021
Jane Rosenthal (BA '77) and Robert de Niro, the co-creators of the Tribeca Film Festival, celebrated the festival's 20th anniversary with a series of in-person gatherings throughout the city.
Jun 6, 2021
Shutter (Penguin Random House, 2021), a psychological thriller by Melissa Larsen (BA ’15), was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, Mystery and Suspense Magazine, Criminal Element, and was a New York Times selection for “Summer Reads Guaranteed to Make Your Heart Thump and Your Skin Crawl.”
Jun 4, 2021
John Ridley (BA ’87) and Carlton Cuse co-wrote the screenplay for Five Days at Memorial, a new limited series from Apple TV+ about the first five days in a New Orleans hospital after Hurricane Katrina made landfall.
Jun 1, 2021
LaTasha Barnes (MA ’19) joined the faculty at Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance, and Theatre.
Jun 1, 2021
Poppyseed, a 10-minute play by Michael Dinwiddie (BA ’80; TSOA ’83), streamed in the Metropolitan Playhouse series “East Side Stories Unmasked: Welcome to the Neighborhood.”
Jun 1, 2021
For The New York Times, Kim Phillips-Fein wrote “New York City's Post-Covid Recovery,” an Op-Ed on how New York can become a more equitable city, post-pandemic.
Jun 1, 2021
KC Trommer was interviewed by Emily Everett for The Common’s podcast, New Books in Literature, about her new poem “The Couple” and about her work with QUEENSBOUND poets.
May 27, 2021
Paula Chakravartty and Ajantha Subramanian wrote “Why Is Caste Inequality Still Legal in America?,” for the May 25, 2021 edition of The New York Times.
May 27, 2021
Cumulus, Nina Katchadourian's first show at New York’s Pace Gallery, was reviewed in the May 27, 2021, issue of the New York Times: “Nina Katchadourian’s Eccentric Existentialism.”
May 22, 2021
A reading of The Master and the Magician, a comedic play about love, gender, leadership, and art, written and directed by Julius Galacki (MA ’89) was staged on Zoom.
May 11, 2021
Susan Fritz (BA ’02) published Everything Relevant Has Already Been Said (2021), a memoir about the death of her husband from non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
May 10, 2021
Jennifer Rittner (BA ’92) served as the Guest Editor of The Policing Issue, an issue of Design Museum Magazine dedicated to exploring the relationship between design, narrative, and the oppression of BIPOC.
May 9, 2021
Academy Award-winner John Ridley (BA ’87; screenwriter, 12 Years A Slave) and Giuseppe Camuncoli wrote the first issue of The Other History of the DC Universe, which was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Single Issue.
May 7, 2021
Saransh Desai-Chowdhry (BA ’20), Valerie Kipnis (BA ’16), and Valerie Tu (BA ’20) were announced as 2021 Fulbright Scholars. Locations for these scholars include India for Desai-Chowdhry, Ukraine for Kipnis, and Taiwan for Tu.
May 3, 2021
Christina Schuler (BA ’20) was named a 2021-2022 New York Urban Fellow, a competitive nine-month fellowship which places recent college graduates in positions in the New York City government.
May 1, 2021
Susie Bartley (BA '00) published We Can Recover: Healing Words for Family and Friends of Addicts (Luminare Press, 2021).
May 1, 2021
With funds from a Dean's Award for Graduating Seniors, Gallatin students Lia Hagen (BA ’19) and Anika Hussen (BA '21) created Stalled, a five-episode comedy series about 19-year-old nonbinary person that featues a cast of Gallatin students. Gallatin faculty Cynthia Allen served as executive producer.
Apr 27, 2021
BLACK FEMINIST VIDEO GAME, a new play written by Darrel Alejandro Holnes and performed by a cast featuring Kyla Jeanne Butts (BA ’23) was announced by the Civilian Theater Company in Brooklyn.
Apr 13, 2021
Keli Goff (BA ’01) spoke with female TV writers of color for “Creating Entertainment in a Year of Heartbreak and Horror,” published in the Hollywood Reporter For Vogue, Goff wrote a short personal essay about becoming a screenwriter: “How my Hair Drove me from Cable News to my Dream Career.”
Apr 12, 2021
Playwright and Gallatin faculty member Kristoffer Diaz (BA ’99) was elected as the Secretary of the most inclusive board yet of the Dramatists Guild of America.
Apr 8, 2021
April 8, 2021 was named André De Shields Appreciation Day to honor the work, activism, and influence that the Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award-winning De Shields (MA ’91) has had on both stage and screen.
Apr 1, 2021
Julian Cornell, Vasuki Nesiah, and Carol Zoref were honored with a 2021 Gallatin Dean's Awards for Excellence in Teaching. Cynthia Allen won Gallatin’s 2021 Adviser of Distinction Award.
Mar 29, 2021
Sabrina Choudhary (BA ’22) was appointed as the Deputy Culture Editor at Washington Square News, NYU's official student newspaper.
Mar 29, 2021
In the fall of 2021, Maame Boatemaa (BA ’19) will visit Asia on a year-long Luce Scholarship. A nationally competitive fellowship program aimed at enhancing the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society, the Luce Program will welcome Boatemaa and seventeen other scholars, all of whom receive stipends, language training, and professional placements at various locations around Asia. While placements have not yet been decided, it’s likely Boatemaa will be living and working in Seoul, South Korea, or in Thailand for 2021-2022, where she plans to focus on transportation and urban planning.
Mar 11, 2021
Invisible Valley, a documentary film from Zach McMillan (BA ’08) and Aaron Maurer, opened the 2021 Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF).
Mar 1, 2021
Eunice Levis (MA ’21) was awarded a $20,000 grant from the Independence Public Media Foundation to fund InVade, a short film about an 8-year-old boy detained with his father during an ICE raid.
Mar 1, 2021
MA student Renata Romain directed Homeless Hotel, a documentary film about the homelessness crisis in New York City which was released on December 22, 2020.
Mar 1, 2021
Duncan Yoon and Pedro Monaville (NYU-AD) have been awarded a 2022 Washington Square North Faculty Fellowship for their project “Kinshasaʼs Ambiance: Remembering TK Biaya,” which will focus on the work of the Congolese interdisciplinary scholar.
Mar 1, 2021
Nina Katchadourianʼs first solo exhibition at the Catharine Clark Gallery, “To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World,” was celebrated in a full page review in the New York Times and in the San Francisco Chronicle. Katchadourianʼs sound sculpture, “Talking Popcorn,” was included in Imagining Data, a virtual exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design.
Mar 1, 2021
The Poetry Foundation hosted the launch of Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press, 2021) by Darrel Alejandro Holnes, winner of the 2021 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize.
Mar 1, 2021
Subah Dayal has been awarded a 2022 Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress to research “The Household State: Empire and Belonging in the Mughal World.” Dayal will examine the Naqvi Family Collection in the Africa and Middle East Division.
Mar 1, 2021
Paula Chakravartty has been awarded a 2022 NYU Humanities Center Fellowship to support her book project Technologies of Freedom? Racial Capitalism and the Infrastructures of Empire, a study that charts the Cold War lineages of today’s rise of algorithmic right-wing nationalisms and social media-triggered fake news targeting minorities and migrants.
Mar 1, 2021
John Leake (BA '18) was awarded a 2021 Pickering Fellowship, which provides two years of funding for graduate school and selection into the US Foreign Service.
Mar 1, 2021
Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. co-edited by Patricia Eunji Kim, Bethany Wiggin, and Carolyn Fornoff, was published by University of Minnesota Press.
Feb 26, 2021
Isabel Bethencourt (BA ʼ16) and Parker Hill (Tisch BA ʼ16) co-directed Cusp, a cinema verité documentary about teenage girlhood which won The Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker after its January 30 premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.
Feb 16, 2021
Three Gallatin alumni were selected by Forbes for the annual “30 Under 30” list that spots “young innovators on the verge of making it big.” In the Retail and ECommerce category, Jack DeFuria, 23 (BA ’19, with a concentration in Human-Computer Interaction), was featured for his work as co-founder of Parade, a line of eco-friendly colorful underwear that comes in inclusive sizes. In Finance, Elana Knoller, 29, (BA ʼ14, with concentration in Global Investment Strategies and Contemporary China), was recognized for her leadership as the Chief Product Officer at Better.com, an online homeownership service. In Music, Julian Swirsky, 26, (BA ʼ17) was recognized for his influence as a producer for Justin Bieber, Nicole Scherzinger of The Pussycat Dolls, Bow Wow, and more as the Senior Vice President of Artist and Repertoire at Republic Records.
Feb 1, 2021
Adam Weinert (MA ʼ15) received a Bessie Nomination in the Outstanding Revival category for “Monuments: Echoes in the Dance Archive,” which he presented at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in the fall of 2019.
Feb 1, 2021
The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women by Catherine McKinley (MA ’16) was published by Bloomsbury.
Feb 1, 2021
Gallatin faculty member Jacob Remes has launched the Initiative for Critical Disaster Studies at NYU Gallatin which seeks to foster this emergent field both within NYU and in the broader academy, with a series of lectures to be presented this spring to celebrate the Initiative.
Jan 15, 2021
Gallatin's Assistant Director of Communications, KC Trommer, was named a 2021 artist-in-residence through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's GI COVID-19 Response Residency Program to support the writing of her second collection of poetry.
Jan 8, 2021
Each year, the Urban Democracy Lab selects students for the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Urban Practice (GGFUP). The program provides funding of up to $5,000 and support for six to ten advanced BA and MA students to pursue extended, community-engaged, practice-based research projects in partnership with urban social justice organizations. Each research project is co-designed by the host organization with faculty mentors and GGFUP fellows.
The 2021 Urban Practice Fellows and their community partner organizations are as follows:
Najah Aldridge (CAS BA) - The Clemente
Lau Guzmán (Gallatin BA) - The Loisaida Center
Nosheen Hossain (Gallatin BA) - WHEDco
Xixi Jiang (Gallatin BA) - Right To The City Alliance
Maggie Moss (Wagner MUP) - ALIGN
Ama Sarpomaa (Gallatin BA) - African Communities Together
Mira Silveira (Gallatin BA) - Pratt Center for Community Development
Costanza Tremante (Wagner MUP) - Paisaje Transversal
The bios of the fellows can be found on the GGFUP website.
Jan 1, 2021
Violinist Midori (BA ʼ00, MA ʼ05) has been named a 2021 honoree by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, one of the country’s highest artistic honors. Performances and ceremonies for the Kennedy Center Honors will happen in May, with a broadcast scheduled for June 6 on CBS.
Dec 18, 2020
Saransh Desai-Chowdhry (BA ʼ20) published Soundstorm (New Degree Press, 2020), a collection of essays that analyzes the interconnections between business, art, and culture in the music industry.
Dec 18, 2020
In December 2020, Saransh Desai-Chowdhry (BA ’20) published Soundstorm (New Degree Press, 2020) a collection of essays that analyzes the tensions between the creative and business aspects of the music industry. “I wanted to bridge the gap between those different worlds so that we can think about potential futures for music, both creatively and commercially, that can actually appeal to artists, business leaders, and listeners alike,” he said in a Zoom interview.
Desai-Chowdhry graduated in May 2020 with a concentration in cultural entrepreneurship which centered around the synthesis of commercialization, development, and the social productivity of cultural products, including music. His concentration explored the question of how business could be used as a force for social good. Soundstorm contains some forms of the same question and looks at the impact of the music industry and whether or not it is helping musicians.
Despite the difficulty of what he characterizes as the music industry’s “hyper-capitalistic framework,” Desai-Chowdhry remains optimistic about the potential music has to bring about social change. “It’s different from a typical product because it actually can be used as a force to harness social and cultural change.”
Desai-Chowdhry is originally from LA and grew up performing Indian classical music. He believes that the most successful artists are those whose visions have been respected by the business side of the industry. “If the business side of things wants to continue to be fruitful, they need to find ways to actually magnify the artistic voice as opposed to superseding it.” From coffee shop soundtracks to the busking of street musicians, music is an ubiquitous art form. “You're not even choosing to engage with it—you’re literally absorbing the sound waves, and being impacted by choices that are made by record executives and public rights organizations,” he said.
While at Gallatin, Desai-Chowdhry took music criticism classes at Gallatin with music writers and critics Amanda Petrusich and Ben Ratliff, a musicology course with musician and Gallatin faculty member Kwami Coleman, and was part of the inaugural cohort of 4th Wave, the Gallatin Summer Music Intensive. “I wrote a few essays for my classes with the explicit intention of including them in the book,” he said. “Particularly in Ben Ratliff’s graduate course ‘Critic Versus Cliché’ and Amanda Petrusich’s ‘Pop Cultural Criticism.’”
Written from June 2019 to December 2020, Soundstorm was funded in part with a NYU Gallatin Dean's Award for Graduating Seniors. “This book is so much a reflection of my experience at NYU and Gallatin,” he said. “It would not exist without the professors and the students that I encountered along the way.”
--Lau Guzmán
Dec 16, 2020
Each year, NYU Gallatin sponsors the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, which is supported and advised by a group of distinguished leaders in the field of international human rights. The program awards fellowships to select undergraduate and graduate students from across New York University in the amount of $5,000 each to support extended summer projects and internships with international and domestic human rights organizations.
Since 2011, Gallatin has sponsored more than 100 Global Fellows. This year’s applicant pool was strong again, with 12 Human Rights Fellows selected to work with organizations around the globe during Summer 2021. Organization locations include France, Palestine, Paraguay, Senegal, Spain, and the United States.
The 2021 Human Rights Fellows and their partner organizations are as follows:
Allison Argueta (Gallatin BA) - Esperanza Immigrant Rights Project - USA
Graciela Blandon (Gallatin BA) - Association for Human Rights of Andalusia - Spain
Alicja Borzyszkowska (NYU Abu Dhabi BA) - Human Rights Watch - France
Madeline Cohodes (Gallatin/Global Public Health BA/MPH) – Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture - USA
Lucas McKinnon (Global Public Health MPH) - United Nations Development Programme -Paraguay
Diya Moushahwar (Gallatin BA) - Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research -Palestine
Alya O (NYU Abu Dhabi BA) - Arab Reform Initiative - France
Ian Partman (Liberal Studies BA) - Project NIA & Survived and Punished - USA
Mahima Sharda (Wagner MPA) - International Crisis Group - USA
Matthew Solomon (Gallatin MA) - OutRight Action International - USA
Tabara Sy (CAS BA) – Tostan - Senegal
Leonard Zhu (CAS BA) -Upstate/Downstate Housing Alliance - USA
During the spring semester before the summer work, the fellows participate in a two-credit human rights seminar and complete an independent study. Over the summer, the fellows conduct independent research or pursue internships with international and domestic human rights organizations to gain experience in the human rights field in ways that complement their academic trajectories at NYU. In the fall, the fellows present at the annual Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights Symposium, giving an overview of their fellowship work and their findings while working in the field.
For more information on the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Human Rights, please contact NYU Gallatin's Office of Global Programs at gallatin.global@nyu.edu.
Oct 13, 2020
Rachel Tipograph (BA ’09) secured $10 million in a Series A round of funding for her eCommerce and marketing platform, MikMak.
Oct 13, 2020
Aija Mayrock (BA ’19) published her first poetry collection, Dear Girl (Andrews McMeel, 2020).
Oct 13, 2020
Stacy Kranitz (BA ’99) was awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography. In 2015 she was named Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year and her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, will be published by Twin Palms.
Oct 13, 2020
Bradley Hope (BA ’06) and Justin Scheck published Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power (Hachette, 2020).
Aug 19, 2020
Renata Romain (MA ’22) released a short film, Mariah, for the 2020 Easterseals Disability Film Challenge.
Aug 19, 2020
Zoriah Carter (BA ’22) and Cassandra Quayson (BA ’23) have been selected for Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships, a program of the Department of State that funds a semester or year of study away.
Aug 19, 2020
Sara Franklin was awarded a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Grant for research and writing leading to a biography of American cookbook and literary editor Judith Jones for her project The Life and Work of Judith Jones, the 20th-Century Editor Who Changed the Way America Cooked, Ate, and Read.
Aug 19, 2020
Donna Bilak, along with Tara Nummedal, co-edited the book Furnace and Fugue: A Digital Edition of Michael Maier's Atalanta fugiens (1618).