Cynthia RockwellGregory Heller ’04, CEO of American Communities Trust (ACT), was named Urban Innovator of the Week on Feb. 15, by Urban Innovation Exchange (UIX), an initiative to advance urban improvement and highlight those who are on the leading edge of this movement. Begun in 2012 as a three-year project in Detroit and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, UIX is now showcasing talented people from all over the country who are transforming the cities and neighborhoods in which they live. As head of ACT, Heller, who has spent more than 10 years in community development in Philadelphia,…
“The objects in Cameron Rowland’s remarkable show at Artists Space offer a history lesson and an aesthetic experience, intricately fused,” wrote New York Times art critic Roberta Smith in a Jan. 28 article. “Accompanied by terse explanatory captions, they expose some of the troubling inequities in American society, especially concerning its prisons and their use of compulsory inmate labor. The process of grasping the meaning of this work equally involves looking, reading and feeling but its subject is one of the most urgent of our time." In his current show, titled "91020000,” Rowland '11 carefully placed items in the space that were…
Jack of the Red Hearts, a film by director and executive producer Janet Grillo ’80, depicts a family raising a child with autism, as did her first feature, Fly Away. This new work features Famke Janssen (of Taken and X-Men) and AnnaSophia Robb (Carrie Diaries and Soul Surfer). Jack of the Red Hearts has garnered 11 festival awards both in the United States and abroad including the jury award at the inaugural Bentonville Film Festival, co-founded by activist/actor Geena Davis, to promote women and diversity in filmmaking. Jack of the Red Hearts will open in limited theatrical release on Feb. 26, in 25…
The exhibition, Line Dance—The Art of Fly Fishing by Peter Corbin ’68, is now on view at the National Sporting Library and Museum (NSLM), Middleburg, Va., through July 3, 2016. Sporting artist Corbin, who majored in art at Wesleyan and graduated with high honors, notes that he considers himself first a landscape painter, with the sporting matter as a part of the scene. The 15 large paintings—spanning nearly four decades of creativity—are on loan to the NSLM from collectors. Initially an abstract sculptor, Corbin notes that now, as a representational painter, he is still exploring some of the same principals that…
Nicholas Quah ’12 is the subject of “Meet the 26-year-old who's got all the news on podcasting,” an article by Benjamin Miller on Poynter.org. Quah is the creator and full-time blogger at Hot Pod, his newsletter about podcasts, which you can find at nicholasquah.com. It is also hosted at NiemanLab, the site for Harvard’s Neiman Foundation for Journalism. While most media aficionados consider the fall of 2014 to be the time when podcasts gained considerable popularity (Serial—the true crime investigation series on public radio is just one example), Quah had been a fan of podcasts for several years by then: as…
Tufts Medical Center selected Jonathan Bush ’93 to receive the Ellen M. Zane Award for Visionary Leadership. Chairman and CEO of the health care technology company, athenahealth, Bush was cited for “exemplifying visionary and transformational leadership” as well as his "passion for uniting individualized and coordinated patient care with the demands and practicalities of healthcare management.” Bush co-founded athenahealth in 1997. In 2007 it was the most successful initial public offering, and it is now one of the health care information technology industry’s fastest growing companies, considered by many to be industry standard. In announcing the award, President and CEO of…
Shari Runner ’79 was named president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League. Crain’s Chicago Business notes that she is redirecting the purpose of league. “Right now, all the things we support are in turmoil,” Runner told reporter Shia Kapos. “We have an opportunity to change that.” Runner had been interim leader of the Urban League for eight months and had served as senior vice president for strategy and community development a the Urban League since 2010. Previously a banker—vice president of ABN/AMRO Bank and vice president at First National Bank of Chicago—she attributes her move into the nonprofit world to…
Forbes named Jordyn Lexton ’08 and Guy Marcus ’13 to the 2016 “30 under 30” list for 2016, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy highlighted David Lubell ’98 as one of the “40 Under 40." Under the headline, “Todays Brightest Young Stars and The Future Leaders of Everything” Forbes magazine highlighted two Wesleyan alumni in their fifth annual listings of the top 30 young leaders in 20 different categories. From an initial list of 15,000, Jordyn Lexton ’08 made the listing in entrepreneurs. Lexton is the founder of “Drive Change,” which employs previously incarcerated youth, teaching food preparation as well as providing positions in their award-winning culinary vehicle in…
The American Physical Society (APS) named Clara Moskowitz ’05 the Woman Physicist of the Month for December 2015. A senior editor at Scientific American, she was an astronomy and physics double major at Wesleyan. It was in her senior year that she discovered her “favorite part” of her undergraduate career: her thesis. “I was fascinated by science from a very young age,” she says, “but so many people feel separated from science—as though they can’t get it. I realized that I like writing and I like to communicate the concepts for nonscientists.” After earning a graduate degree in science journalism…
Artist Ian Boyden ’95 presented a TEDx talk in September 2015 on his concept of “‘eradicate the self’ self-portraiture.” He expands our understanding of “self” beyond a single individual to include the environment. “Several years ago I was sitting around a bonfire with a bunch of artists and we were talking about self-portraiture when I rashly dismissed it as some sort of narcissistic folly,” he recalled in the talk. “I woke up later that night, sweating, wondering what on earth was I, a person who’d never made a self portrait, even talking about? “Of course, therein lay this challenge: to make…
New York rapper and music producer Khalif Daoud ’11, known professionally as Le1f, was one of the musicians polled by WBUR-Boston and NPR’s Here & Now with the question “What is American music?” “Growing up, the idea of ‘Americana’ as a word was intimidating to me,” he told hosts Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson. “The patriotism behind it, and the American dream, I always related that to whiteness and I didn’t easily see how I fit into that category, that culture. But I came to understand that blues and jazz and rock and roll, and all these other genres, that’s…
Tricia Homer ’03 was selected as one of "40 under 40" by Prince George’s County Social Innovation Fund. The co-founder of HGVenture, a management consulting firm that specializing in nonprofit capacity building and leadership development, she also is chairperson of the College Park Community Foundation Board of Directors, which supports local nonprofits in capacity building. Additionally, she is cochair of the City of College Park Education Advisory Board and is the assistant director of the Office of Community Engagement at the University of Maryland. To recognize her contributions to the lives of multi-ethnic students at the University of Maryland, last…