Welcome New Faculty to the 2025/2026 Academic Year

New Full-Time Faculty:

Angie Cruz, Associate Professor, Writing

Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel How Not To Drown in A Glass of Water (2022) was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, shortlisted for The Aspen Words Literary Prize, winner of the Gold Medal, Latino Book Award/The Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Book Award, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize, and chosen for The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 and The Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Fiction. Her novel, Dominicana was the inaugural book pick for GMA book club and shortlisted for The Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, a RUSA Notable book and the winner of the ALA/YALSA Alex Award in fiction. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad and Let It Rain Coffee and the recipient of numerous fellowships, residencies and awards. She's the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the award-winning literary journal, Aster(ix).

James Ijames, Associate Professor, Theatre

Ijames is a Pulitzer Prize winning and Tony Award nominated playwright, a director, and educator. His plays have been produced by Flashpoint Theater Company, Orbiter 3, Theatre Horizon, Wilma Theatre, Theatre Exile, Azuka Theatre (Philadelphia, PA), The National Black Theatre, JACK, The Public Theater (NYC), Hudson Valley Shakespeare Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Definition Theatre, Timeline Theater (Chicago IL) Shotgun Players (Berkeley, CA) and have received development with PlayPenn New Play Conference, The Lark, Playwright's Horizon, Clubbed Thumb, Villanova Theater, Wilma Theater, Azuka Theatre and Victory Garden. James is the 2011 F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Artist recipient, and two Barrymore Awards for Outstanding Direction of a Play for The Brothers Size with Simpatico Theatre Company and Gem of the Ocean with Arden Theatre. James is a 2015 Pew Fellow for Playwriting, the 2015 winner of the Terrance McNally New Play Award for WHITE, the 2015 Kesselring Honorable Mention Prize winner for ....Miz Martha, a 2017 recipient of the Whiting Award, a 2019 Kesselring Prize for Kill Move Paradise, a 2020 and 2022 Steinberg Prize, the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Drama recipient and a 2023 Tony nominee for Best Play for Fat Ham. 

Minhal Baig, Assistant Professor, Film

Baig is a filmmaker. Her latest feature, We Grown Now, about two boys growing up in a Cabrini-Green high rise when a tragedy irrevocably changes their lives, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, awarded the TIFF Changemaker Award and Audience Award at Chicago International Film Festival and received Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Editing nominations for the 2024 Independent Spirit Awards as well as NAACP Image Award nominations for Outstanding Independent Motion Picture and Outstanding Youth Performance. Sony Pictures Classic released in 2024. Her previous feature, Hala, about a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager uncovering a secret about her family, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and was released by Apple.

Hilary Leichter, Assistant Professor, Writing

Leichter is the author of the novels Terrace Story and Temporary, which was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Prize, and was longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Leichter’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, The New York Times, Conjunctions and elsewhere. Her work in Harper’s Magazine won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction. She has been awarded fellowships from Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the summer 2022 Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. Leichter first joined the adjunct faculty at SOA during the Spring 2020 semester.

 
Term Appointments, 2025-2026:
 
Leslie Ayvazian, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre (2025-2026)

Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians won the John Gassner/Outer Critics Circle Award for best new American play, the Roger L. Stevens Award, and second place for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; premiered at the Intiman Theatre directed by Christopher Ashley. Other productions were directed by Lynn Meadow/ MTC, Oskar Eustis/ Trinity Repertory, and Gordon Davidson /Mark Taper Forum. Her play Rosemary and I received an honorable mention from the Susan Smith Blackburn jury. Make Me, directed by Christian Parker, was produced by the Atlantic Theatre. High Dive, directed by David Warren, premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre and then in NYC at the Manhattan Class Company. Her short film Every Three Minutes, starring Olympia Dukakis, was produced by Showtime and won a Telly Award. Her play Deaf Day was produced as a film in Damascus, Syria; it won Best Short Film at the Bahrain Film Festival. Ayvazian recently performed her one woman show Porcupine Girl at the Guggenheim Museum. She has taught the class Creating a Play to dramaturgy students at Columbia for 24 years; this is her second year as acting Concentration Head for Playwriting.

Daphne Arthur, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts (2025-2026)

Arthur is an Afro-Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist. Her work combines painting, sculpture, and drawing with smoke, paint, and clay to compose realist and surrealist scenes that investigate individual and collective history, language, symbolism, and memory. She is the recipient of The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, the Anne Critz fellowship, The Ald Held Fellowship at the American Academy of Rome, the Vermont Studio Center’s Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and The NYFA Queens Art Fund: New Work Grant. Arthur previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Visual Arts Program.

Kenny Rivero, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts (2025-2026)

Rivero’s work, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. Rivero’s work is represented in notable public collections including The Baltimore Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; El Museo del Barrio, New York. NY; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Collection of Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL. Rivero previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Visual Arts Program.
 
Keri Bertino, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2025-2026)

Bertino is a fiction, nonfiction, and humor writer whose work has appeared in Joyland, Topic, BOMB, Electric Literature, The Millions, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology PARENT-SLASH-WRITER: Essays on parenting while writing. Bertino leads courses in writing pedagogy and fiction at the School of the Arts, and will serve as faculty advisor for Columbia Artists/Teachers in AY 24-25. An award-winning educator, Keri has taught creative and academic writing for over 20 years at Baruch College/CUNY and The Cooper Union, as well as in public and independent K-12 settings in Baltimore and New York City. Bertino was first appointed to our adjunct faculty in Spring 2017.

Lars Horn, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2025-2026)

Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the 2020 Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and was named an Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Book Award. The recipient of the Tin House Without Borders Residency and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Writers Workshops, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Horn’s writing has appeared in Granta, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Lars previously served as adjunct faculty during the 2023-24 academic year.

Yasmine Seale, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing (2025-2026)

Seale’s work includes poetry, translation, criticism, and visual art. Among her books are The Annotated Arabian Nights, described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation,” and Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. She was a 2022-23 Fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris, and a 2023-24 Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her translation of The Ring of the Dove by Ibn Hazm, a treatise on the nature of love written in 11th-century Cordoba, is forthcoming from the Library of Arabic Literature. Seale previously held an Adjunct Assistant Professor appointment in the Writing Program.

 
Faculty Promotions:
 
Anelise Chen, Associate Professor, Writing

Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. The experimental novel is a meditation on winning and losing, the perils of perfectionism, and why to keep going when giving up seems preferable. In 2019, she received a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 nomination. Anelise Chen’s latest book, CLAM DOWN, is a hybrid memoir published by One World in 2025. Based on her brief stint as The Paris Review’s “Mollusk Correspondent,” the book looks at metaphors of shell-building and what humans can learn from mollusks about shutting down or opening up in times of crisis and grief. After her divorce, Chen is compelled to examine her own clam-like nature and her “clam-lineage,” including her father who left the family for a decade to write a mysterious software called Shell Computing. Chen’s fiction and essays have appeared recently in The Believer, Conjunctions, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s. Past publication credits include New York Times, NPR, BOMB, New Republic, and The Village Voice. Chen’s next project is about paying attention to nature in urban and suburban spaces, by thinking deeply with street trees, parking lot weeds, invasive species, migrating birds, and buried water ways. Currently, she is involved with various grants through Columbia World Projects, the Climate School, and the Center of Social Difference to further plant literacy in high school students and to develop new, interdisciplinary techniques to bridge scientific and artistic practices.

Sable Smith, Associate Professor, Visual Arts

Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; and MIT List Visual Arts Centers, Cambridge, MA amongst others. She has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters.

Ramin Bahrani, Professor of Professional Practice, Film

Academy Award, BAFTA, WGA and Emmy nominee Ramin Bahrani is the Iranian-American writer, director, and producer of such films as Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo, 99 Homes, The White Tiger and his debut feature documentary, 2nd Chance. His films have won numerous awards around the globe at festivals such as Venice, Cannes and London. For television, Bahrani has directed several TV pilots for studios like USA and Apple. Film critic Roger Ebert proclaimed Bahrani as “the director of the decade” in 2010. Bahrani is a Guggenheim Fellowship winner and his cinematic oeuvre is housed in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Currently Bahrani is adapting and will direct a six-part limited series of John Steinbeck’s seminal novel, The Grapes of Wrath. His latest short documentary premiered at Telluride (2023). As producer, Bahrani’s films include Amir Naderi’s Magic Lantern (Venice, 2018), Alex Camilleri’s Sundance and Spirit-award-winning Maltese debut feature Luzzu (2020, Malta’s Oscar Submission), Alexandre Moratto’s Spirit-award-winning Brazilian debut feature, Socrates (2018) and his Venice-award-winning 7 Prisoners (2021, Netflix), Saim Sadiq’s Cannes and Spirit-award-winning Pakistani debut Joyland (2022), Angus MacLachlan’s Sundance premiere A Little Prayer (2023, Sony Pictures Classics) and Academy Award nominated Joshua Oppenheimer’s forthcoming debut fiction film, The End.

Bogdan Apetri, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Film

A former lawyer in Romania, Bogdan George Apetri graduated from Columbia University's MFA Film Program. He wrote and directed three feature films: Periferic (Outbound), Neidentificat (Unidentified) and Miracol (Miracle). He also co-produced almost twenty feature films. His projects screened and won awards in Venice, Locarno, Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, Tribeca, Warsaw, MOMA, were nominated for Independent Spirit Awards, chosen as New York Times Critics’ Pick, and distributed around the world. 

Peter Jay Fernandez, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre

Fernandez’s acting career spans decades, with roles on and off-Broadway, in regional theater, and in film and television. He was most recently featured on Broadway in All The Way portraying Roy Wilkins, Shoeshiner, and Aaron Henry. He originated the role of Caesar in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean at the Goodman Theater, the role of Curtis Lowe in the premiere of Ben Bettenbender's Bliss at the Rattlestick Theatre Company, and the role of ‘the Oldest Old Man’ in Father Comes Home from the Wars, by Suzan Lori Parks, at the Public Theater. Other work in New York includes: Thunder Knocking On the Door at the Minetta Lane (Audelco Award, Helen Hayes Nomination); George C. Wolfe's Jelly's Last Jamat at the Virginia Theatre; The Merchant of Venice starring Dustin Hoffman, directed by Sir Peter Hall at the Richard Rodgers; Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale, As You Like It, Henry Vlll, Spell #7, and more at Public/Delacorte Theatres; Once Around the City at Second Stage; Phaedra in Delirium at Classic Stage; Checkmates and Red Speedo at the New Federal; Flyin' West at BAM/Majestic; The Tooth of Crime and Angel City at La Mama; and The Pain and the Itch at Playwright's Horizons. He has acted regionally at Long Wharf, McCarter, Hartford Stage, Seattle Rep, ACT (Seattle), Milwaukee Rep, Arena Stage, Alliance, Cincinnati Rep, Old Globe, Cleveland Playhouse and Intiman theaters, among others. Fernandez’s television and film credits include Luke Cage, Brawl in Cell Block 99, Blacklist: The Redemption, Shades of Blue, Gotham, Elementary, The Good Wife, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Damages, Cosby, NY Undercover, The Prosecutors, Funny Valentines, and The Egoists, among other.

David Klass, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre and Film

David Klass has written feature screenplays for all the major studios, including: Kiss the Girls starring Morgan Freeman, Desperate Measures starring Michael Keaton, Walking Tall starring The Rock, and most recently Emperor starring Tommy Lee Jones. David’s TV credits include the Showtime movie In the Time of the Butterflies (starring Salma Hayak, based on the novel by Julia Alvarez), the ABC TV Movie Runaway Virus (based on a Malcom Gladwell article), and working as a writer/producer on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. David’s nineteen published novels include You Don’t Know Me (Farrar Straus Giroux, published in fifteen languages) and Firestorm (FSG)

Blair Singer, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre and Film

Blair Singer is an Emmy-nominated New York-based television writer and playwright. Most recently, he served as the Co-Executive Producer on the final season of Bull on CBS. Prior to that, he was the Co-Executive Producer on the Fox TV show, Filthy Rich, starring Kim Cattrall. He was the Supervising Producer on the Netflix show, What / If, created by Mike Kelley and starring Renée Zellweger, and was the showrunner of the Mark Gordon-produced Youth & Consequences for YouTube Premium, which received a digital Emmy nomination for Best Drama. Other television credits include Weeds, Monk, The Mysteries of Laura, Fairly Legal, Beauty & The Beast, Memphis Beat, Rizzoli & Isles, and The Book of Daniel.