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
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
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 16, 2022
Bryonn Bain (MA ’99)’s Rebel Speak was published by University of California Press in April 2022.
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
Jade Doskow (BA '00)’s photographs appeared in the New York Times article “Everybody Loves Red Hook. Or So They Say.”
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
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
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.
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
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.
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 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
Paty’s poem “Jalousie” was published in the October 2021 Issue of Poetry Magazine.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 1, 2021
Susie Bartley (BA '00) published We Can Recover: Healing Words for Family and Friends of Addicts (Luminare Press, 2021).
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.”
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
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.
Feb 1, 2021
The African Lookbook: A Visual History of 100 Years of African Women by Catherine McKinley (MA ’16) was published by Bloomsbury.
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
Oct 13, 2020
Aija Mayrock (BA ’19) published her first poetry collection, Dear Girl (Andrews McMeel, 2020).
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
Maria Sherman (BA ’13) wrote Larger Than Life: A History of Boybands from NKOTB to BTS.
Jul 31, 2020
Jameson Fitzpatrick's (BA ’12) debut collection of poetry, Pricks in the Tapestry, was released by Birds LLC in June 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.
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 4, 2020
Jake Weinstein (BA '12) and Sarah Naughton returned to Feinstein's/54 Below to present Javanka! on January 4, 2020.
Nov 1, 2019
Seoul resident, Candace Lunn (BA ’05), held a women’s film festival in collaboration with KU Cinematheque called, “I/SHE/YOU,” in November 2019 that screened a small selection of international and local Korean films about women redefining gendered expectations.
Sep 1, 2019
Michelle Dorrance (BA '99) will choreograph a new Lincoln Center production about LSD.
May 1, 2019
Molly Felder (BA ’02, MA ’05)’s children’s book, Henry the Boy, based on Felder’s own experience as someone born with cerebral palsy, was released by Penny Candy Books in April 2019.
May 1, 2019
Hayden Dunham (BA ’11)’s newest installation “HA: no name no sides :TH” was on display at Artspace in Sydney, Australia, from April 4 through 28.
May 1, 2019
Michelle Dorrance (BA ’01)’s Dorrance Dance performed at the New York City Center from March 28 through 30, 2019, and was reviewed in The New York Times: “Michelle Dorrance Happily Shares the Spotlight.”
May 1, 2019
Cole Sprouse (BA ’15) plays Will, a surly teenager with cystic fibrosis, in Five Feet Apart, which was reviewed in The New York Times: “‘Five Feet Apart’ Review: Ailing Teenagers Live Dangerously for Love.”
May 1, 2019
Beowulf Sheehan (MA ’96)’s exhibition Vignettes: Portraits of Writers from and Beyond the Pages of Author: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan was recently on view at the new Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.
May 1, 2019
Mickey and the Bear, Annabelle Attanasio (BA ’15)’s feature directorial debut premiered at South by Southwest and was featured in Variety and Women’s Wear Daily.
May 1, 2019
On April 18, 2019, Slightly Altered States theater company and DMNDR at The Arc presented a reading of Sari Caine Glickstein (BA ’04)’s new play, Ty Rex, an autism-inclusive production.
Mar 1, 2019
Rachel Naomi Hilson (BA ’18) has been cast in the recurring role of Teenage Beth in the NBC series This Is Us. Her role was covered by Essence in "'This Is Us' Guest Star Rachel Hilson Talks Working With Phylicia Rashad And Playing Teenage Beth: 'Behind Every Strong Woman Is Some History'".
Jan 29, 2019
Daniel Seara (BA ’14) is first author on a new paper published in the November 2018 issue of Nature, “Entropy production rate is maximized in non-contractile actomyosin”.
Jan 29, 2019
Things You Can Do, a play by Kristen Palmer (MA ’04), was published by Original Works Publishing.
Jan 29, 2019
With Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Catherine E. McKinley (MA ’16) co-curated the exhibition “Aunty!” which was reviewed in The New York Times's November 14, 2018 article “How Photography Has Shaped Perceptions of African Women”.
Jan 29, 2019
Gun Love, the 2018 novel by PEN International President Jennifer Clement (BA ’82), was named one of the top 10 books of 2018 by TIME Magazine. The novel was also finalist for the 2018 National Book Awards.
Jan 29, 2019
Rockaway, a feature film written and directed by John J. Budion (BA ’03), had its premiere at the Village East Cinema on January 11, 2019.
Jul 1, 2018
Open Me, the debut novel of Lisa Locascio (BA ’07), is included on the Village Voice round up “5 Great Debut Novels to Help Get You Through This Summer." In the fall of 2018, Locascio will join Mendocino College and serve as Executive Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference.
Jul 1, 2018
Beowulf Sheehan (MA ’96)’s first book, AUTHOR: The Portraits of Beowulf Sheehan, will be published in October 2018 by Black Dog & Leventhal and will feature some 200+ photographs of authors from 35 countries, with a foreword by Salman Rushdie.
Jul 1, 2018
On July 2, 2018 at the Williams College Museum of Art, dancer and choreographer Adam Weinert (MA '15) brought together a group of interpreters to open the exhibition “Dance We Must: Treasures from Jacob’s Pillow, 1906-1940” about the life and works of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis. The exhibition runs through November 2018.
Feb 28, 2018
Sophie Lasoff (BA '16) published Resistance Guide: How to Sustain the Movement to Win.
Feb 15, 2018
Henry Holt and Co. will release Heather Harpham (MA '98; MFA GSAS '00)'s memoir Happiness: The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After in August.
Feb 1, 2018
Gun Love, the latest from poet, author, and President of PEN International Jennifer Clement (BA ’82), will be released from Penguin Books in March 2018.
Dec 1, 2017
Trapped in the Closet, a play co-written and directed by Jake Weinstein (BA '12) and Sarah Naughton, opened at Feinstein's/54 Below in early December 2017.
Dec 1, 2017
Brian McAuley (BA '09) wrote the film Dismissed, starring Dylan Sprouse (BA '15), which was released by The Orchard on digital and VOD platforms in November 2017.
Dec 1, 2017
Chinaka Hodge (BA '06)'s Chasing Mehserle, a performance piece that maps the city of Oakland's changing demographics, morphing culture, gentrification, and the communal response to the real-life tragedy of Oscar Grant, opened at Hi Arts in late November 2017.
Dec 1, 2017
Vandana Hart (BA '08)'s documentary series on dance cultures around the world, We Speak Dance, will premiere on Netflix on New Year's Day. Hart, a former UN advisor and an Alvin Ailey-trained dancer, is the creator and host of the series which follows her travels around the globe as she explores, through movement, the connections between dance and politics.
Dec 1, 2017
John Matthew Fox (BA '03)'s I Will Shout Your Name was published by Press 53 in December 2017.
Dec 1, 2017
Emily Dufton (BA '04)'s first book, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America, was released by Basic Books in December 2017.
Dec 1, 2017
Dorrance Dance, the dance company of Gallatin alumna and MacArthur Award winner Michelle Dorrance (BA '01), will perform at the Joyce Theater from December 19-23, 2017.
Nov 8, 2017
Duston Spear (MA '98) organized an exhibition of work from women detained at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women at the Hewitt Gallery of Art at Marymount Manhattan College in New York.
Nov 1, 2017
Katherine Faw (BA '05)'s second novel, Ultraluminous, was published in December 2017 by MCD.