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.
Nov 20, 2020
Azeki Ali (BA ’23) was awarded first place in the Undergraduate Writing Prize Competition from The Grey Art Gallery for his poem written in response to the exhibition Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, which was on view at the Grey from January 14 to March 13, 2020.
Nov 20, 2020
Gregory Vargo edited Chartist Drama (Manchester University Press, May 2020), a collection of four plays written or performed by the Chartist movement of the 1840s.
Nov 18, 2020
Bellanca Smigel Rutter (BA ʼ80) producer for Jagged Little Pill, a musical inspired by the eponymous 1995 Alanis Morissette album, was nominated for a 2020 Tony Award in the Best Musical category.
Nov 18, 2020
Julie Knutson (BA ʼ01) wrote Global Citizenship: Engage in the Politics of a Changing World
(Nomad Press, September 2020), a book for readers ages 12 to 15 designed to help them discover the resources and information they need to act in support of global human rights.
Nov 18, 2020
For the Biden 2020 campaign, Tess Fenn (MA ʼ17) co-produced and cast two ads focused exclusively on climate change: “Cherries” and “Melanie,” the first climate change-focused ads ever produced for a presidential campaign.
Nov 18, 2020
Frances F. Denny (BA ʼ07) published Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America (Andrews McMeel Publishing, November 2020), a photo-based exploration of modern-day witches from all over America.
Oct 15, 2020
Nicole Watson (MA ʼ08) was appointed Associate Artistic Director of the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.
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).
Aug 19, 2020
Maria Sherman (BA ’13) wrote Larger Than Life: A History of Boybands from NKOTB to BTS.
Aug 19, 2020
Along with Terreform ONE co-founder Maria Aiolova, Mitchell Joachim authored Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities (Actar, 2020).
Aug 19, 2020
Kwans Kim (BA ’24) worked on the proposed art installation “Do Look Down,” which won the Van Alen Instiute’s competition Reimagining Brooklyn Bridge in the Young Adult category.
Aug 19, 2020
Kathryn Posin’s (BA ’94) Dance Company performed from August 14-22, 2020, as a part of the 39th Annual Battery Dance Festival with free, virtual performances available on YouTube.
Aug 18, 2020
Rosalind Fredericks’s book Garbage Citizenship was awarded the 2020 Toyin Falola Best Book on Africa by the Association of Global South Studies.
Jul 31, 2020
Lauren Walsh organized the June 2020 showcase, “Quarantine Through the Lens of Gen Z,” for The Bronx Documentary Center, featuring work by the students in her “Photographing Peace” course.
Jul 31, 2020
Jameson Fitzpatrick's (BA ’12) debut collection of poetry, Pricks in the Tapestry, was released by Birds LLC in June 2020.
Jul 31, 2020
Sara Duvisac (DFUP ’20), a Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice with the Urban Democracy League was chosen as one of 22 ACLS Public Fellows for 2020, and was appointed as Research and Policy Advisor for Oxfam America.
Jun 29, 2020
Two Gallatin seniors and one recent alumna have been recognized by the Fulbright US Student Program for research, study, and teaching opportunities in countries outside of the US: Lauren Stockmon Brown (BA ’20) is a Senegal ETA Recipient, Melody Xu (BA ’18) will travel to Beijing as a China Research Recipient, and Jakiyah Bradley (BA ’20) is a Namibia Research Alternate. A fourth recent graduate, Rebecca Karpen (BA ’20), will travel to Austria as a US Teaching Assistant in the Teaching Assistantship Program of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF), which is administered by Fulbright Austria.
May 25, 2020
Darrel Alejandro Holnes was awarded the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, which is for his full-length book of poems Stepmotherland, which is forthcoming from University of Notre Dame Press in 2021. Holnes was awarded the Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize for his chapbook Migrant Psalms, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press later this year.
May 20, 2020
Eve Meltzer was awarded a Scholars-in-Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library to complete research towards and the writing of one chapter “Psyche Obscura, Camera Lucida: James Baldwin, America, and the Moving Image,” of her book-in-progress, Not-Me, Mine, Ours: Belonging After Photography.
May 20, 2020
Hannah Gurman, with Kaeten Mistry, co-edited Whistleblowing Nation: Disclosing US National Security and the Challenge of Dissent (Columbia University Press, 2020).
May 15, 2020
Kwami Coleman was named a 2020 Career Enhancement Fellows by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, which aims to create career development opportunities for selected faculty fellows with promising research projects.
May 10, 2020
Leila Buck was named a 2020 Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellow by the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) and the William and Eva Fox Foundation.
May 4, 2020
Kristoffer Diaz, alongside an array of artists, contributed to 24 Hour Plays, with Round Six - Musicals, including “Five Minutes in this Hallway,” with lyrics Diaz wrote, airing on Instagram TV. His script for Football Football Football Football (or I love Lave Dash), which placed as a finalist, was virtually streamed for the 2020 Ink Playwriting Festival following the award, hosted by the American Theater on May 1-4, 2020.
May 1, 2020
Actor and director Jessie Austrian is the recipient of the Theater Latté Da New Work Development NEXT Generation Commission, a new opportunity for women artists and artists of color to support the creation of new musical theatre projects.
Apr 23, 2020
Alex Halberstadt’s book, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and A Reckoning (Penguin Random House, 2020), was named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Excerpts of the novel published in the April 5, 2020, issue of The New Yorker and on March 18, 2020, edition of Literary Hub. Halberstadt also participated in a Zoom book launch with journalist Masha Gessen, hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library and Greenlight Bookstore on April 23, 2020.
Apr 15, 2020
Mitchell Joachim is bringing together author/designers Eran Chen of ODA, Julia Watson and Paul Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, to discuss their new books and how they address sustainability in a post-covid world in the Virtual Design Festival hosted by Dezeen and Terreform ONE from April 15 to July 10, 2020.
Apr 1, 2020
Jacob Remes spoke on the COVID Calls/Slow Disaster Podcast, a weekly podcast featuring disaster experts like Remes weighing in on the COVID19 crisis.
Mar 5, 2020
Judith Sloan had a reading/performance on March 7 at the Queens Theater of the work-in-development of It Can Happen Here, a play with music written by Sloan.
Mar 5, 2020
Nina Katchadourian and Brooklyn-based guitarist Lisa Liu form the sTans, which is also the name of their first album that was released on March 6, 2020.
Mar 5, 2020
Michelle Dorrance (BA ’01) and her company, Dorrance Dance, will take over Jacob’s Pillow July 1-5, 2020, as part of the 2020 festival, debuting several new works in addition to curating a week of Inside/Out outdoor performances beginning August 3, 2020.
Mar 5, 2020
Current resident of the I AM SOUL - Playwright Residency Program, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, wrote Bayano, the story of an escaped African slave in 16th century Panama, performed on March 11-15, 2020 at the Dr. Barabara Ann Teer’s National Black Theatre Institute of Action Arts.
Feb 21, 2020
Rebecca Amato was awarded a grant from Humanities New York to facilitate a Reading and Discussion Program on the topic of "Serving," particularly in relation to civic engagement.
Feb 21, 2020
Peder Anker was awarded an Abu Dhabi Washington Sqaure North Faculty Fellowship for Spring 2020.
Feb 5, 2020
Alexis Williams (BA ’17) is the Associate Producer for the Netflix documentary, The Pharmacist, which was released on February 5, 2020.
Jan 26, 2020
On January 26, 2020, Tony Award-winning artist André De Shields (MA ’91) was awarded a Grammy at the 62nd Grammy Awards for Best Musical Theater Album: Hadestown.
Jan 4, 2020
Jake Weinstein (BA '12) and Sarah Naughton returned to Feinstein's/54 Below to present Javanka! on January 4, 2020.
Jan 1, 2020
Kimberly Phillips-Fein was awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Fellowship for her current book project which analyses the defenses of economic inequality advanced by American business leaders and economic writers.
Jan 1, 2020
Millery Polyné, co-editor - with Laurent Dubois, Kaiama L. Glover, Nadève Ménard, and Chantalle F. Verna The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, Politics which was published by Duke University Press in 2020.
Jan 1, 2020
The latest episode of President Andy Hamilton's podcast, Conversations, included a discussion between Hamilton and SeaStraws co-founder and Creative Director Echo Chen (BA '20) and CEO and Co-founder Antonio DiMeglio (Stern '20).
Jan 1, 2020
Lisa Goldfarb was awarded a 2020 NYU Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship to support her current book project, Proustian Poetics and the Modern Lyric.
Dec 26, 2019
Libertad Guerra (MA ’11) was named the new Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center. She is also the recipient of the Lower East Side Community Hero Award and the NY ACKER Award for Avant-Garde Excellence in 2019.
Dec 12, 2019
For The Nation, Doctoral Fellow in Urban Practice Nantina Vgontzas co-wrote the December 2019 piece "Amazon's Bullshit Environmentalism."
Dec 12, 2019
Michelle Dorrance (BA '01) and her dance company's performances were featured in The New York Times: "11 Dance Performances to See in NYC This Weekend," "A Breakout Year for Tap," and, "Review: A 'Nutcracker' Taps and Swings."