Alumni – Page 22

Sasha Chanoff '94, founder and executive director of RefugePoint, and Amy Slaughter, the organization’s chief strategy officer, were named Schwab Foundation/World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneurs of the Year. This honor is bestowed each year by the Schwab Foundation, the World Economic Forum’s sister organization, to identify and recognize the world's leading social entrepreneurs. As awardees, Chanoff and Slaughter join the Schwab Foundation's global community of social entrepreneurs working in more than 70 countries. They will be integrated into World Economic Forum meetings and initiatives and invited to contribute in exchanges with top leaders in business, government, civil society, and media. Makaela…

Kitchen Ceilí and Friends performed at Russell House on Sunday afternoon of Family Weekend. Formed in 1993, Kitchen Ceilí features private lessons teacher Stan Scott PhD '97 on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo; Dora Hast PhD ’94 on vocals, tin whistle, and recorders; and George Wilson on vocals, fiddle, banjo, and guitar. A ceilí (English pronunciation: kā'lē) is a traditional Gaelic social dance or gathering with music. On Sunday, the trio was joined by "Friends"—the Hindustani vocalists of the Rangila Chorus and vocalist/guitarist Sam Scheer—and the group widened their geographic focus, performing not only original and traditional music from Ireland, America,…

Already an actor and blogger, Lynn Chen ’98 is now also a director, with her first feature film, I Will Make You Mine. She wrote about the experience for Filmmaker magazine: “I Just Finished Directing My First Feature Film, Why Do I Feel Like I Have Post-Partum Depression?” The editors note that these low feelings are common for first-time directors but not frequently discussed. Chen, however, is an activist—the ambassador for the National Eating Disorders Association since 2012—and not afraid to tackle emotional content and bring taboo topics to the forefront. “When I was a women's studies/music double major at Wesleyan in 1998, I found…

Nataly Kogan '98 will present a WESeminar, “What I Wish I Knew When I Was a Super-Successful Wesleyan Overachiever” in the Ring Family Center at 2:30 p.m. Sept. 28. Kogan, who at 13 emigrated with her family to the U.S. as a refugee from the former Soviet Union, graduated from Wesleyan with High and University Honors as a CSS major. She achieved early success as a consultant with McKinsey & Co, a venture capitalist at the age of 26, and a tech executive with companies like Microsoft. However, this came at a huge personal cost, she says, and it didn’t have…

On Saturday, Sept. 29, during Family Weekend, Elise Bean ’78 is offering a WESeminar titled: “Congress’ Constitutional Duty to Investigate: One Senator Who Got It Right.” The Washington co-director of the Levin Center at Wayne State University Law School, Bean is the author of Financial Exposure: Carl Levin’s Senate Investigations into Finance and Tax Abuse. At a time when congressional investigations have taken on added urgency in American politics, Bean offers an insider’s portrait of how the world of congressional oversight operates. Drawing on more than 30 years on Capitol Hill, the last 15 at the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on…

In this recurring feature in The Wesleyan Connection, we highlight some of the latest news stories about Wesleyan and our alumni. Recent Wesleyan News The Wall Street Journal: 'The Lost Education of Horace Tate' Review: Civil Rights for Schoolchildren President Michael S. Roth reviews Emory Professor Vanessa Siddle Walker's new book on a previously "unseen network of black educators" across the South, who fought heroically "over many decades for equality and justice." 2. Forbes: Top 25 Liberal Arts Colleges 2018 Wesleyan is featured among Forbes' annual list of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. 3. Hartford Courant: Connecticut Had Significant Role in Tumultuous 1968…

Ian Boyden ’95 received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship of $12,500, one of only 25 such grants for 2019, to support the new translation of poetry and prose from 17 countries into English. Boyden’s fellowship will support his work translating from the poetry collection Minority, written in Chinese by Tibetan poet Tsering Woeser, considered one of China’s most respected living Tibetan writers. In 2013, John Kerry of the U.S. State Department honored Woeser with an International Women of Courage Award. In 2010, the International Women's Media Foundation had given her a Courage in Journalism Award. Boyden, an artist, writer, curator, and…

This summer, bad things happen here, a play directed by Lila Rachel Becker ’12, was featured at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. An MFA student at the University of Iowa, Becker has been paired to work with Eric Marlin—whom she calls “an incredible playwright, a brilliant collaborator”—since she began her graduate work in 2017. She is drawn, she says, to “incendiary” plays—and after producing this one in Iowa last November, a few professors encouraged the partnership to take it around to festivals. Noting that the spare design of bad things happen here made it easy to bring across the ocean to…

Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), a grassroots nonprofit organization directed by Kennedy Odede ’12 and Jessica Posner ’09, has been awarded the 2018 Conrad N. Hilton Foundation's Hilton Humanitarian Prize. Selected by a distinguished panel of independent international jurors, SHOFCO will receive $2 million in unrestricted funding, joining 22 other notable organizations that have received the Hilton Humanitarian Prize over the last two decades. Based in Kibera—one of the largest slums in Africa—SHOFCO was founded by Odede as a teenager in 2004 with 20 cents and a soccer ball. The organization describes its mission as catalyzing large-scale transformation in urban slums…

Sarah Ashkin ’11, Brittany Delany ’09, and Sue Roginski ’87 premiered an evening-length dance work, task, on Aug. 17–18, as part of the summer season at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, Calif., under the umbrella of GROUND SERIES dance collective. Ashkin and Delany, codirectors of GROUND SERIES since 2012, choreographed and performed the piece, with Roginski providing dramaturgical direction. As codirectors, Ashkin and Delany describe their work as "collaborating in using dance performance as a tool of embodied intervention and research." "With our shared background in critical thinking, cultural studies, and artistic risk-taking fostered by the Wesleyan Dance Department, we wanted…

In Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, a New York Times Notable Book of 2013, award-winning journalist Katy Butler ’71 recounted shepherding her parents, Professor Emeritus of History Jeffrey Butler and artist Valerie Butler, through their final illnesses. When Katy’s father suffered a stroke and later was given a pacemaker, the family had no idea that the device would extend his physical life years past his cognitive ability to enjoy it or to function independently. After his death, Katy’s mother declined open heart surgery and chose instead to meet her own death head-on. From…

Wesleyan has announced its 2018 Athletics Hall of Fame class, which will be inducted Friday, Oct. 19, before Homecoming. The ninth class features James Carrier '42, Philip Rockwell '65, Allison Palmer '95, Jed Hoyer '96, Flo Stueck '96, and Herb Kenny. Wesleyan’s Athletics Hall of Fame (HOF), both online and on campus, is filled with entertaining and enlightening accounts of Cardinals past. It features exciting stories of accomplishment, character, perseverance, courage, loyalty, teamwork, and generosity. The HOF was founded in 2006 through the collaborative work of the Athletics Advisory Council, the Athletic Department, and the Office of University Relations and…

Chanoff ’94 Receives Schwab Foundation/World Economic Forum Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award

Alumni-Led Kitchen Ceilí and Friends Performs Traditional Music Spanning Cultures

Chen ’98 Explores Emotions of Directorial Debut for Filmmaker Magazine

Kogan ’98: “What I Wish I Knew When I Was A Super-Successful Wesleyan Overachiever”

Bean ’78 Offers Insider’s Portrait of Congressional Oversight in Book, WESeminar

Wesleyan in the News

Boyden ’95 Awarded NEA Fellowship for Poetry Translations

Director Becker ’12 Brings bad things happen here to Edinburgh Fringe

SHOFCO Recipient of Hilton Humanitarian Prize

Ashkin ’11, Delany ’09, Roginski ’87 Confront White Supremacy through Dance

Butler ’71: Toward a Gentler Death

5 Alumni, 1 Coach to Be Inducted into the Wesleyan Athletics Hall of Fame