Theatre Arts Alumni

A-Z \ Z-A

Ira Deutchman

Professor and Chair - Ira Deutchman has been making, marketing and distributing films since 1975, having worked on over 150 films including some of the most successful independent films of all time. He was one of the founders of Cinecom and later created Fine Line Features—two companies that were created from scratch and in their respective times, helped define the independent film business. more

Courses

Film MFA: The Business of Film An overview of the business side of theatrical motion pictures, from the Hollywood major studios to small independents and self-distribution. Covers all the ancillary markets (cable, home video) and their relationship both to the theatrical success of the film and to its bottom line.

Sabrina Dhawan

('02SOA) - Sabrina Dhawan was born in England, raised in Delhi and lives in New York. She graduated from Columbia University’s film program in 2001 with a Masters of Fine Arts in Film. Sabrina’s student short "Saanjh – As Night Falls" was cited as "Best of the Festival" at the Palm Springs Film Festival in 2000, won an award from New Line Cinema for "Most Original Film," won the "Audience Impact" Award at Angelus Awards and was nominated for a Student Academy Award. more

John Dias

Adjunct Assistant Professor - John Dias is the Artistic Director of Two River Theater Company in Red Bank, NJ. For almost twenty years he was in New York City, where, as a producer and dramaturg, he was a leading advocate for stimulating productions of the classics and bold new American plays, including the Broadway productions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Lisa Kron’s Well. For 12 seasons, he worked in a variety of capacities at The Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival, including Associate Producer and Associate Artistic Director. more

Katherine Dieckmann

Assistant Professor - Katherine Dieckmann has made three feature films, beginning with the lyrical fable A Good Baby (2000), starring Henry Thomas and David Strathairn, which was workshopped at the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriting and Directing laboratories. Dieckmann then went on to direct Diggers (2007), a bittersweet comedy-drama starring Paul Rudd, Maura Tierney, Ron Eldard, Lauren Ambrose, Josh Hamilton, Sarah Paulson and Ken Marino. Her most recent feature film as writer-director is Motherhood (2009), a day-in-the-life comedy starring Uma Thurman, Anthony Edwards and Minnie Driver, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009. more

Courses

Film MFA: Screenwriting III and Screenwriting IV A two-semester intensive screenwriting workshop. The Screenwriting III/IV class allows for the careful and more sustained development of a feature-length script. In the fall semester, students develop an idea for a screenplay and write the first act (approximately 30 pages). In the spring semester, students finish writing the script and, time permitting, begin a first revision.

Rineke Dijkstra

Mentor - Since the early 1990s, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a complex body of photographic and video work, offering a contemporary take on the genre of portraiture. Her large-scale color photographs of young, typically adolescent subjects recall 17th-century Dutch painting in their scale and visual acuity. The minimal contextual details present in her photographs and videos encourage us to focus on the exchange between photographer and subject and the relationship between viewer and viewed. more

Mark Dion

Mentor - Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an ecologist, biochemist, detective, and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and America since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments, and museum caches of the great historical naturalists—following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics. Dion crosses Darwin, Disney, and Hitchcock in work ranging from hundreds of photographic "specimens" documenting all the insect life in a single meter of meadow, to the meticulous gathering and labeling of the rubbish tossed out over hundreds of years from a sixteenth-century Italian castle. more

Timothy Donnelly

Associate Professor - Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated and have appeared in such periodicals as A Public Space, Fence, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review and elsewhere. more

Bathsheba Doran

('03SOA) - Bathsheba Doran’s play Parents’ Evening will receive its world premiere at The Flea Theater in April 2010, directed by Jim Simpson. Her play Ben and The Magic Paintbrush will receive its world premiere at South Coast Repertory Theater in June 2010. more

Julie Dubiner

SOA Alumna - Julie Dubiner is the associate director of American Revolutions at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. American Revolutions is a commissioning project with the goal of creating 37 new plays concerning moments of great change in US history. more

Stephen Dubner

('94SOA) - Stephen J. Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, TV and radio personality who lives in New York City. He is the co-author, with Steven D. Levitt, of Freakonomics (2005) and its sequel SuperFreakonomics (2009). He is also the author of Turbulent Souls (1998), Confessions of a Hero-Worshiper (2003), and a children’s book, The Boy With Two Belly Buttons (2007). more

David Ebershoff

Adjunct - David Ebershoff earned his BA at Brown University and is the author of the novels The 19th Wife, The Danish Girl, and Pasadena and a collection of short stories, The Rose City. His fiction has won awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lambda Literary Foundation and has been translated into 16 languages. He is an editor-at-large at Random House. more

Sian Edwards

('00SOA) - Sian Edwards has produced a wide range of topical, factual, entertainment and investigative programming. For Food Network, Sian executive produced Everyday Italian with Giada De Laurentiis and Good Deal with Dave Lieberman. She also executive produced the Food Network's first original web series, Eat This with Dave Lieberman, which went on to become Dave Does. more

Deborah Eisenberg

Professor - Deborah Eisenberg is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of numerous honors including the 2011 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Eisenberg has published four collections of stories: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997), and Twilight of the Superheroes (2006). Her first two story collections were republished in one volume as The Work (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg (1997). more

Trey Ellis

Assistant Professor - Associate Professor Trey Ellis is an Emmy-nominated screenwriter, an American Book Award Winning novelist, and playwright. He has written screenplays for, among others, Columbia Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, HBO and Showtime. Along with the Emmy nomination, his HBO film, The Tuskegee Airmen, also went on to win a Peabody Award and several NAACP Image Awards. His screenplay for the Showtime film Good Fences, which starred Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover and was produced by Spike Lee, was shortlisted by PEN West for best teleplay and premiered at the Sundance Film festival. more

Courses

Film MFA: Screenwriting I In this introductory workshop on screenwriting, students write several short screenplays over the course of the semester and learn the basics of the craft. Character, action, conflict, story construction, the importance of showing instead of telling, and other essential components are explored.

Liz Engelman

('96SOA) - Liz Engelman is a freelance dramaturg who splits her time between Whidbey Island, WA, and Ely, MN. She has served as the literary director of the McCarter Theatre; the director of new play development at ACT Theatre in Seattle, Washington; literary manager/dramaturg at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre; and assistant literary manager at the Actors Theatre of Louisville. more

James Fenton

Adjunct - James Fenton was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He has worked as political journalist, drama critic, book reviewer, war correspondent, foreign correspondent and columnist. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was Oxford Professor of Poetry for the period 1994-99. In 2007, Fenton was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Fenton’s Selected Poems is published by Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux. more

Shirley Fishman

('97SOA) - Shirley Fishman is the director of play development for the La Jolla Playhouse, where she has also served as dramaturg on Carmen, The Deception, Most Wanted, The Wiz, Culture Clash's Zorro in Hell, The Scottish Play, Palm Beach, Eden Lane, When Grace Comes In, Adoration of the Old Woman, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Diva, I Am My Own Wife (2004 Pulitzer Prize) and Dracula, The Musical. more

Richard Ford

Professor - Richard Ford’s novel Independence Day (1995) was the first book to receive both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The book was the second in his critically acclaimed Bascombe Trilogy, which began with The Sportswriter in 1986. His other works include the novels, A Piece of My Heart (1976), The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) and Wildlife (1990), as well as the short fiction collections Rock Springs (1987) and Women with Men (1998). more

Edwin Frank

Adjunct - Edwin Frank is a poet and critic and the founding and present editor of the New York Review Books Classics series. He is currently working on a history of the twentieth-century novel. more

Sue Frost

Adjunct Assistant Professor - Sue Frost is a founding member of Junkyard Dog Productions (with Randy Adams and Kenny and Marleen Alhadeff) which is dedicated to developing and producing new musicals. Recent projects include the 2010 Tony®, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Award-winning Best Musical Memphis, currently touring the United States, and slated for the West End in 2013. Upcoming new musicals include First Date, Chasing the Song, and Lou Lou. more

Programs

Student Life

Admissions

Support

About

© 2013 Columbia University School of the Arts | 305 Dodge Hall, Mail Code 1808 | 2960 Broadway | New York, NY 10027 | (212) 854-2875 | EMAIL
Columbia University School of the Arts offers MFA degrees in Film, Theatre Arts, Visual Arts, and Writing, an MA degree in Film Studies, a joint JD/MFA degree in Theatre Management & Producing, and a PhD degree in Theatre History, Literature, and Theory.