News
The Columbia University School of the Arts Film Program presented the 32nd Annual Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), a week-long program of screenings, screenplay, and teleplay readings in New York. The celebration will continue with events in Los Angeles from June 11-13, 2019. School of the Arts' Dean Carol Becker, “Welcome to the 32nd Columbia University Film Festival—the culminating event for our MFA Film students. In 1987 when the Festival began, it consisted of only four shorts, followed by a panel discussion. Now the Festival has become a true Columbia tradition,…
The 2019 Firecracker Award for fiction was awarded last week to alumna Casey Plett ‘12 for her novel Little Fish, published by Arsenal Pulp Press.
Seven Columbia faculty members and alumni were recently named 2019 Guggenheim Fellows. The list of awardees includes Poetry Professor Shane McCrae, Visual Arts Professors Suzanne McClelland and Mark Dion, Writing alumni Helen Schulman '86 and Catherine Lacey '10, and Visual Arts alumni Fabienne Lasserre '04 and Aki Sasamoto '07.
In recent theatre news, Columbia swept the 2019 Obie Awards. Adjunct faculty member Leigh Silverman won an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Directing and alumna Heather Alicia Simms ‘96 won an Obie for Performance in two plays by faculty member Lynn Nottage at Signature Theatre, Fabulation, or the Re-education of Undine, and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.
Professor Richard Ford, author of Independence Day, the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, will receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival on August 31, 2019.
Big St. Germain by Jack T. Calk ’19 and directed by Lillian Meredith is the final play to be presented as part of the New Plays Festival 2019 featuring seven new plays by the graduating MFA playwriting class.
Professor Binnie Kirshenbaum’s new novel Rabbits for Food was named An Amazon Best Book of the Month for May 2019 and A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of 2019, and it's out now through SOHO Press.
Nonfiction alumna Marin Sardy '13 releases her debut memoir, The Edge of Every Day, on May 21, 2019 through Penguin Random House.
Fiction alumnus Aaron Hamburger '01 has a new novel, Nirvana is Here, available through Three Rooms Press. An honest story about recovery and coping with both past and present, framed by the meteoric rise and fall of the band Nirvana and the wide-reaching scope of the #metoo movement, Nirvana is Here, explores issues of identity, race, sex, and family with both poignancy and unexpected humor. Intertwining stories are reminiscent of the tenderness and haunting nostalgia of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name blended with the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics.
Halston, a documentary by alumnus Frédéric Tcheng '07 will be released theatrically on May 24th.
BLANKS by Gethsemane Herron-Coward ’19 and directed by Tyler Thomas is the sixth play to be presented as part of the New Plays Festival 2019 featuring seven new plays by the graduating MFA playwriting class.
Organized by Dean Carol Becker and David Henry Hwang, the second annual Columbia University School of the Arts International Play Reading Festival will present readings of three plays by living international playwrights that were not originally written in English alongside conversations with the playwrights and translators.
The Alumni Spotlight is a place to hear from the School of the Arts alumni community about their journeys as artists and creators.
The Little Goddess, written and directed by current student Gauri Adelkar, and Nice Talking to You, written and directed by current student Saim Sadiq, and co-produced by alumnus Joseph Capotorto '18 and alumna Federica Belletti '18 have been shortlisted for the 2019 BAFTA Student Film Awards in the Live Action category.
Chinese Opera and a Modern Drama by Ruoxin Xu ’19 (Playwrighting) and directed by Miriam Grill ’19 (Directing) will be the fifth play presented as part of the New Plays Festival 2019 featuring seven new plays by the graduating MFA playwriting class.