Visual Arts Alumni
A-Z\ Z-A
Adjunct -
Lara Vapnyar came to the US from Russia in 1994. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Memoirs of a Muse, and two collections of short stories, There Are Jews in My House and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, and Goldberg Prize for Jewish fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, and The New Republic.
more
('08SOA) -
Kaer Vanice is a producer whose latest film, David Garrett’s Ten Stories Tall, stars Ally Sheedy, Josh Hamilton, and Jim Gaffigan and won Best Screenplay at the Rhode Island International Film Festival. Vanice also produced the short films “High Street Plumbing,” which he also edited, and "Warlord," 2008 Grand Jury Prize winner at SXSW Film Festival and 2007 official selection at Rotterdam Film Festival.
more
('04SOA) -
Sergio Umansky is a writer-director from Mexico City. His short film “Here Was the Anthem,” filmed in Mexico, won Best Drama at the Aspen Shortsfest, Best Student Short at the Woodstock Film Festival, the Milos Forman Finishing Fund Award, Second Place Student Live Action over 15 Minutes at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and Best Film at the Columbia University Film Festival. The film showed as part of the New Directors/New Films series at the Lincoln Center, as well as at prestigious film festivals such as Telluride, Sundance and Berlin.
more
('98SOA) -
Darko Tresnjak's Shakespeare credits include Coriolanus, All's Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, A Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles (The Old Globe); All's Well Than Ends Well, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra (Theatre for New Audience); The Merchant of Venice (RSC Complete Works Festival); Twelfth Night (Oregon Shakespeare Festival); The Two Noble Kinsme
more
Adjunct Assistant Professor -
Joseph Travers has been teaching stage combat and creating fights, stunts and action sequences for stage and screen for twenty-five years.
more
('02SOA) -
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned (2009), Wells Tower’s first book of short stories, was a finalist for The Story Prize and was selected by Michiko Kakutani as one of her ten best books of 2009. In 2010, Tower was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” fiction writers, and won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Tower is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, the 2002 Plimpton (Discovery) Prize from The Paris Review and a Henfield Foundation Award.
more
Professor -
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work defies media-based description, as his practice combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum, his exhibition there consisted of a pirate radio (with instructions on how to make one for yourself). Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award.
more
Adjunct -
Hannah Tinti’s short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in 16 countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her best-selling novel, The Good Thief, is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award, winner of the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club’s New Voices Award.
more
('06SOA) -
Chris Teague is a writer, director, cinematographer, and graduate of the MFA program in film at Columbia University. As a cinematographer, he has shot several feature-length documentaries and short films, such as Myna Joseph's Man, John Magary's The Second Line, and Fellipe Barbosa's Salt Kiss, all of which have played at Sundance. His films have also screened at the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, and the Tribeca Film Festival.
more
Professor -
Sarah Sze received her B.A. (1991) from Yale University and M.F.A. (1997) from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Solo shows of her work include the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Malmö Konsthall in Sweden, and the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Sze has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the 48th Venice Biennial, and the Biennale de Lyon 2009. Her work can be found in museums and public collections such as the Solomon R.
more
Adjunct -
Terese Svoboda’s writing includes thirteen books of poetry, fiction, memoir and translation. Tin God, her fourth book of prose, is being reissued this fall. Bohemian Girl, her most recent, was named one of the ten best 2012 Westerns by Booklist.
more
Lecturer -
Kelly Stuart is a playwright and video artist originally from Los Angeles. In LA, some of her productions include The Interpreter of Horror at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, The Square Root of Terrible (a children's musical) at the Mark Taper Forum, and Mayhem and Homewrecker at the Evidence Room. Her plays The Peacock Screams When the Lights Go Out and Furious Blood were produced in San Diego at Sledgehammer Theatre. Stuart has been a member of New Dramatists, which funded residencies and enabled her to present work at The Australian National Playwrights Conference, and The Royal National Studio in London. New York productions include Demonology at Playwrights Horizons, The Life of Spiders at the Culture Project downstairs, and Mayhem at the Summer Play Festival.
more
Courses
Professor -
Mark Strand is the author of twelve books of poems, including Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Man and Camel (2006); New Selected Poems (2007); Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968). He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976).
more
('87SOA) -
Michael Stotts is in his fifth year as managing director of Hartford Stage. During his three-year tenure as managing director at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, Mr. Stotts produced a significant number of new plays, including works by Paula Vogel, Craig Lucas, James Lapine and Julia Cho, among others. Sixteen Wounded by Eliam Kraiem moved to Broadway in 2004, and Cho’s BFE and Lapine’s Fran’s Bed with Mia Farrow subsequently transferred to or were produced at Off-Broadway’s Playwrights Horizons.
more
('95SOA) -
Award-winning director Patrick Stettner established himself with the independent drama The Business of Strangers, about two businesswomen who wreak revenge on a corporate headhunter assumed to have committed rape. Starring Stockard Channing and Julia Stiles, the film won the Special Jury Prize at the Paris Film Festival and the SKYY Prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Stettner earned recognition while at Columbia for his short film, “Flux,” featuring a powerful performance by Allison Janney.
more
Adjunct Professor -
David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics, is a film professor at Columbia University—where he also co-chairs the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation—and an adjunct professor of humanistic studies and art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film at Long Island University.
more
Lecturer -
The films Romance & Cigarettes and Illuminata, both directed by John Turturro, and Luminous Motion and Handsome Harry, both directed by Bette Gordon are among June Stein’s most recent film appearances. She has also appeared in Sidney Lumet’s Q & A, and Tim Robbins' Bob Roberts among others. She recently shot the pilot for Mr. Robbins' (writer/director) Possible Side Effects for Showtime, and appeared in the pilot Like Family for NBC. Off-Broadway, she has originated many roles including the role of Roberta for John Patrick Shanley’s acclaimed Danny and the Deep Blue Sea opposite Mr. Turturro, Beth Henley’s The Miss Firecracker Contest and Am I Blue, Willliam Hoffman's As Is, Donald Margulies Found A Peanut, Milan Stitt’s The Runner Stumbles. She has also participated in Sundance's Theatre Lab.
more
Courses
('99SOA) -
While at Columbia, Joan Stein won the Student Academy Award for Best Narrative Film and the Directors Guild of America’s Student Film Award for her thesis film, “One Day Crossing.” The short film, about a Hungarian Jewish woman who poses as a Christian to save her family during the Holocaust, was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 and chosen by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art for the New Directors/New Films series.
more
('00SOA) -
Julia Solomonoff is a Argentine filmmaker. Her most recent feature film, El Ultimo Verano de la Boyita (The Last Summer of La Boyita) played at the Latin American Film Festival. The first feature that she wrote and directed, Hermanas (Sisters), opened at the Toronto Film Festival. She also has written and directed five short films, Octavo 51, A Day with Angela, Siesta, Scratch and Ahora—which have earned her prestigious awards from the DGA and FIPRESCI.
more
('97SOA) -
Tracy K. Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award, and The Body's Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is also the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Award and a 2005 Whiting Award. She was the Literature protégé in 2009-2011 cycle of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. From 1997 to 1999 Smith was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.
more
© 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.
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.