The School of the Arts Celebrates 60 Years!
2025 marks the 60th anniversary of the School of the Arts. Established by the Trustees of Columbia University in 1965, we remain more dedicated than ever to being a formidable center of art-making and art-education. At Columbia, artists working across all disciplines have the unique opportunity to study and create in a vibrant community, learning alongside one another in one of the world’s greatest cultural capitals: New York City.
This year, we are celebrating the work of incredible artists and scholars from our past and present, across every medium imaginable. From welcoming back illustrious alumni like Joan Jonas ’65 to share reflections on her creative practice and extraordinary career; to seeing our artists shine on global stages, like Jocelyn Bioh ’08 at the Tony Awards and Lin King ’22 at the National Book Awards; to our yearly film festival that has launched filmmakers like Saim Sadiq ’19 to success at Cannes, Venice, and beyond, we will be celebrating this exceptional past as we build our great future.
Please be part of this year of tribute, as we honor and support the work of our talented students, faculty, and alumni, and imagine possibilities for the future. Their stories and artwork are changing the world for the better—as they have for the last 60 years—and will continue to do so in the years to come.
Artist Profiles
ALUMNI THROUGH TIME
Take a closer look at some of our '60s and '70s alums!
Alumni Weekend: October 3-4, 2025
Check out some photos from the weekend below!
Upcoming Events
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Recent Alum News
"Garbo's Queen Christina as Both Lesbian and Chinese," co-authored by Professor Jane Gaines and Film and Media Studies MA alum Yumo Yan '20, along with visiting scholar Junlei Yang, was recently published as part of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video's 50th anniversary special issue, vol.43, no.3, 2026, to commemorate Professor Gaines's seminal article on the enigmatic silent-era film star Greta Garbo and her titular role in Queen Christina (1933), published in the same journal in 1989.
Film alum Annie Ning '25 is a 2026 recipient of the highly prestigious Cary Grant Film Honor from the Princess Grace Foundation, which she was nominated for by Columbia University. Among the runners-up for the award was Undergraduate Film and Media Studies alum María del Mar Rosario (GS '15), who was nominated by 2018 Princess Grace Award winner Rafael Samanez and received a Film Honoraria from the foundation.
'The Going Is Forever' by Elizabeth Metzger '15 Is Forthcoming This September from Milkweed Editions
Tracking the dissolution of a marriage, a son's medical crisis, and the death of a father, The Going Is Forever is about holding on and letting go. Forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on September 15, 2026, the third collection of poetry by Adjunct Assistant Professor Elizabeth Metzger '15 has been deemed "oracular, crystalline, and utterly original" by Maggie Millner, the author of Couplets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).