Discourses

Ideas. Perspectives. A closer look.

14 Bookshelf 16 Student Perspective 18 Strides in STEM 20 Arts & Culture

Laboratory technician Nicole Rondeau ’18 is part of the team of students, faculty, and staff spearheading a campus-run project to monitor coronavirus in wastewater to keep the community safe during the pandemic.

Bookshelf

Books by Barnard Authors

by Isabella Pechaty ’23

NONFICTION

Spirited: Cocktails From Around the World

by Adrienne Stillman Krausz ’08 Drawing from a worldwide community of bartenders and cocktail devotees, Stillman has compiled one of the most exhaustive beverage almanacs to date. Stillman, who personally tested and perfected every recipe, documents each beverage with its history, heritage, and photo, creating an indispensable mixology dictionary.

Seeing Like an Activist: Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement

by Erin Pineda ’06 Pineda reexamines the legacy of the civil rights movement through a contemporary lens and points out how it is often used to silence new generations of activists. Pineda argues that holding up the methods of the civil rights movement as the gold standard overgeneralizes the practices of civil disobedience and political participation that served activists decades ago and can continue to serve activists today.

Nostalgia After Apartheid: Disillusionment, Youth, and Democracy in South Africa

by Amber R. Reed ’05 Reed considers one of the unexpected outcomes following the institution of the South African democracy: a “nostalgia” felt by Black residents for some aspects of apartheid life in rural Eastern Cape. She offers a new viewpoint on how poorly enacted systems of democracy coupled with economic shortcomings of the post-apartheid state affected the rural Black population, resulting in many residents seeing South African democracy as a repression of their own African customs.

Rarities of These Lands: Art, Trade, and Diplomacy in the Dutch Republic

by Claudia Swan ’86 Swan tracks the variety of foreign products that traveled in and out of Dutch hands during the Netherlands’ political and economic height of the 17th century. As the republic gained independence from Spain, the Dutch strove to establish a new national identity through the many exotic goods — “rarities,” they called them — they traded with Middle Eastern countries.

Preserving Neighborhoods: How Urban Policy and Community Strategy Shape Baltimore and Brooklyn

by Aaron Passell, Associate Director of Urban Studies Challenging the idea that historic preservation is exclusively an elite project that causes gentrification, professor and urban sociologist Passell investigates distinct processes of preservation through two case studies of Brooklyn and Baltimore. Passell’s work is born out of an interest in the intersection of social life and urban environments and how historic preservation, in particular, can facilitate resistance to change and foster investment in neglected neighborhoods.

Weaving Modernism: Postwar Tapestry Between Paris and New York

by K.L.H. Wells ’05 With modernism quickly becoming the dominant aesthetic after World War II, Wells examines how tapestry in France helped promote this change in style, capturing the attention of artists from Picasso to Matisse. Offering new abstract artists an established medium to create and distribute their work, tapestry found its way into modern homes and offices across America and France. Inside the book, readers can examine works by such notable artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Josef Albers, and Frank Stella.

Two American Crusades: Actors and Factors in the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism

by Marian K. Leighton ’64 Informed by decades of working closely with the

United States intelligence community, Leighton details America’s complicated involvement in conflicts across the 20th and 21st centuries. The book treats the Cold War and the global war on terrorism as interlinked conflicts — inseparable from each other and from historical and international contexts — shedding light on why peace continues to evade American foreign policymakers.

Simply Julia: 100 Easy Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food

by Julia Turshen ’07 Turshen uses her experience as a private chef and as a New York Times bestselling cookbook author to share her holistic philosophy on home cooking. Turshen amasses a variety of delicious, soulful, and low-maintenance recipes to prepare in your own kitchen. Complete with the chef’s tips on everything from buttermilk to menu planning, the cookbook provides ample ideas for the aspiring home cook.

Making Milton: Print, Authorship, Afterlives

by Marissa Nicosia ’07 (with Emma Depledge and John S. Garrison) Nicosia and her co-editors have compiled 14 original essays examining the rise of John Milton — best known for his epic poem “Paradise Lost” — to becoming one of the most widely accepted contemporary thinkers and writers of the 17th century. The essays study Milton’s work by looking at how it came into existence, positing that the means of production and distribution significantly influenced how he wrote and how his writing was then received.

A Regarded Self: Caribbean Women and the Ethics of Disorderly Being

by Kaiama L. Glover, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies Professor Glover details a new way to study and understand the protagonists of Caribbean women writers. She challenges the notion that these writers and their characters are inseparable from their community and seeks to establish a new literary identity of “the regarded self.” Highlighting how these female characters define their identities in radical, sometimes uncomfortable ways, Glover provides a fresh look at women in Caribbean literature.

The Polio Pioneer

by Linda Elovitz Marshall ’71 Children’s author Marshall follows the life and legacy of Dr. Jonas Salk, one of the most influential American physicians of the 20th century. Featuring colorful illustrations and accessible language, Marshall’s book turns attention to the role of vaccination in our society as she explains Dr. Salk’s many contributions to the influenza vaccine, the polio vaccine, and the medical community in general.

FICTION

The Comeback

by Elizabeth Lee ’08 Lee (under the name E. L. Shen) tells the story of Maxine Chen, a middle schooler struggling with maintaining a perfect identity both within the high-pressure world of figure skating and in the scrutinizing environment of being a Chinese American at her New York school. Maxine’s story of finding friendship and community in the face of grueling competition and racism will inspire an audience of young readers.

POETRY

Qorbanot: Offerings

by Alisha Kaplan ’11 Taking its title from the Hebrew word for “sacrificial offerings,” Kaplan’s book examines, through poetry, the timeworn concept of sacrifice. In this joint effort with visual artist Tobi Aaron Kahn, Kaplan muses on the traditional, historical, and intimate ramifications of sacrifice through the legacy of Holocaust survivors and the Orthodox Judaism religion. B

Student Perspective

The Changemaker

Audrey McNeal ’24 has canvassed for Sen. Raphael Warnock, campaigned for Stacey Abrams, and confirmed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at the DNC. She’s only a first-year, and she’s just getting started

by Mary Cunningham

In early January, all eyes were on Georgia. After the Senate race was too close to call in November, Georgians returned to polling sites to cast their ballots once more. The stakes were high: The outcome of the election would determine the majority in the Senate. In the days leading up to the election, Audrey McNeal ’24, serving as a campaign intern for Reverend Raphael Warnock, was busy organizing and conducting outreach to people all over the country through emailing and phone banking. The goal was to mobilize the youth vote. “We’re not up next, we’re up now,” says McNeal, whose work has centered on increasing political engagement among the young and making her own voice heard.

But galvanizing her peers to take action is nothing new for the 19-year-old, who has stepped up time and time again to serve her community. Last year, she ran to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, not only winning the most votes in her home district but also becoming the youngest elected delegate from her district. And in 2018, she interned with Stacey Abrams during her gubernatorial run.

McNeal grew up in a historically red county outside of metro Atlanta. When she reached high school, she noticed that few of her peers were having bipartisan conversations. While there was a sizable Young Republican Club, the Young Democrats’ presence was very meager, recalls McNeal. “I thought to myself, if we don’t start political conversations, especially in a world where the media we consume is already very catered to our beliefs, then some people would just never know to change their minds about some things or at least strengthen their own political beliefs by encountering the other argument or the other side.”

Recognizing the need to foster more open dialogue around politics, McNeal founded Political Converse, a club to bring Democrats and Republicans together to engage in civil debates and explore bipartisan solutions. Along with this effort, McNeal co-founded Stronger Together with a local university professor to advocate for students of color in counties across Georgia by pushing for initiatives like a Senate study committee on educational development. She also participated in American Legion Auxiliary Girls Nation, a weeklong program to introduce teenage girls to public service, and the Model Atlanta Regional Commission, for which she served as the chair for the natural resources committee. These collective experiences are what cemented McNeal’s interest in politics. “I realized I wanted to dedicate my life and my career to be in service to something that’s greater than myself,” she says.

Now, McNeal is determined to get more young people to participate in the

“I think historically young people have really been the change that we’ve wanted to see in America.”

political process; she wants them to know that their voice and their vote have power. “I think historically young people have really been the change that we’ve wanted to see in America,” remarks McNeal.

McNeal’s passion for youth engagement prompted her to run for delegate in her home state of Georgia in March 2020. She recognized the important role 18- to 24-year-olds play in the election cycle, especially in red states like Georgia. “I thought that I could propel people to vote,” she says, and after running a successful online campaign — McNeal notes that instead of going door to door, she went email to email — she was elected as a delegate to the 2020 Democratic National Convention (held virtually as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic). In August, she joined delegates across the country to confirm Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democratic Party platform. “Just me being a part of confirming someone like Kamala Harris, who is the first person of color and first woman vice president, was really amazing and profound,” she remarks.

After the convention, McNeal realized there was still critical work to be done, particularly in her home state. As the runoff election was heating up, she landed an internship working for Reverend Raphael Warnock’s campaign. A key factor of the race was communicating the stakes of the election to young people and securing their votes. “It was really interesting seeing young people so touched from not only people in our state but people from all over the nation — just using social media to say like, look, the whole country really is counting on you, like you can make a difference and change the majority in the Senate,” recalls McNeal.

Despite the uphill battle, McNeal and her team were determined to give it their all. They conducted outreach across the country, encouraging people to contribute whatever they could to support the campaign. “I guess the underdog mentality helped us know that every call, every text message, every door that we canvassed really did matter,” says McNeal.

And their hard work paid off: On January 6, 2021, Warnock clinched the victory, along with fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff. (Warnock is the first African American senator, and Ossoff the first Jewish senator, from the state of Georgia.) “They were a very dynamic duo, and they stood for a lot of hope for the people of Georgia. I mean the significance is really uncanny,” McNeal notes.

While McNeal is still determining her career path — law school or a position as a public servant are possibilities — she knows she wants to be a political science major. She’s already taken quite a few poli sci classes — including Intro to American Politics, The American Presidency, and, as her First-Year Seminar, Writing American Lives — and is looking forward to exploring more of the department’s offerings during her time at Barnard. And her political aspirations extend beyond the campus gates. She also wants to take advantage of her time in New York City by participating in advocacy efforts and getting more policy experience, possibly by working for a state or local official.

For now, she continues her political involvement through projects like the Partnership for Southern Equity Youth Initiative KTSE (“Keep That Same Energy”), firmly rooted in the belief that young people can spark meaningful change. “They challenge systems and they change them, which I think is a really powerful thing, being a young person in politics,” she says. “It’s our place to call out our society and be the change that we want to see.” B

Strides in STEM

was timed to coincide with the reopening of campus to students this winter. Many campuses nationwide, including Columbia’s, have recently initiated similar wastewater efforts, because infected people typically shed the coronavirus from both ends. Because the virus’s genetic material shows up in human waste, signaling a past or current infection, testing the waters can catch cases potentially missed by nasalswab testing or before those results come in. This project, funded by the President’s Office, required the overnight development of new collaborative relationships and close partnerships among various members of the campus community, many of whom previously had only a passing acquaintance. But another highlight particularly pleases Mailloux and Miranda: the core involvement of Rondeau, a post-baccalaureate laboratory technician, and a half-dozen current student researchers who help retrieve sample bottles and do most of the filtering, concentrating, and analysis of decontaminated

samples in the lab.

“They literally do the dirty work, and they’re doing it for themselves, for their friends, and for the College. And that has just been really nice to see,” says Miranda, who carved out time from his schedule last fall to lead the team in developing a safe and streamlined set of laboratory procedures. Cell and molecular biology major Lina Ariyan ’22 was among those putting in many hours of work early on, even commuting from Rockland County during winter recess to test lab procedures (naturally, the team has, at all times, adhered to required coronavirus risk-reduction guidelines). To detect coronavirus genetic material in the samples, the team modified the same gold-standard method recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analyzing nasal-swab samples, a technology called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR.

Ariyan and Rondeau perform professional-level laboratory biology for the project, Miranda says; it’s work that is typically performed by people with graduate degrees. “This isn’t the expert team that most places have,” he adds. “They have really stepped up to do high-quality science in pretty stressful times.”

The project’s day-to-day procedures are so efficient that a report of the lab results on samples — collected on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings — is emailed by dinnertime that same day to the College’s pandemic response team of experts, who oversee coronavirus testing, contact tracing, and quarantining on campus. Mailloux, Miranda, and their group of researchers create the reports, highlighting time trends in rising, falling, or steady concentrations of the virus detected in wastewater. This real-time data helps the pandemic response team make informed decisions.

The coronavirus wastewater-monitoring idea was the brainchild of Mailloux, a groundwater microbiology specialist who has helped run similar community health projects for many years in Bangladesh, where groundwater was sampled for fecal matter and naturally occurring arsenic. Last summer, Mailloux — aware of the Miranda Lab’s expertise in virology — asked Miranda, “Is anyone PCRing coronavirus at Barnard? If not, what would we need to do this?” Miranda determined that such a campus-run project was feasible, although some tensionrelieving humor was unavoidable. “It became a running joke when I talked with

Testing the Waters

A campus-run project to monitor coronavirus in wastewater is part of a multipronged effort to keep the community safe during the COVID-19 pandemic

by Robin Lloyd

On a chilly Tuesday morning in early January, Nicole Rondeau ’18 jumped on her bicycle and pedaled from her South Harlem apartment up the 110th Street hill to meet at Altschul Hall with Barnard plumber Oliver Rose, co-chair of the Environmental Science Department Brian Mailloux, and assistant professor of biology JJ Miranda. Their mission that morning? Brave the basements of campus buildings to retrieve sewage samples on the first official day of an unflinching project to monitor wastewater for the virus that causes COVID-19.

This ongoing effort has provided administrators with valuable snapshots of campus health for more than four months now, adding another layer of data to mandatory nasal-swab test results and numerous other efforts to protect the Barnard community during the global health crisis. The project’s launch

people in my lab and classes,” Miranda says. “I’d say, ‘Brian Mailloux wants to measure coronavirus in poop water. But if he wants help, I’ll do it.’”

Once the project was green-lit in the fall, the team inadvertently tackled the toughest scenario first, choosing to test their analytic procedures, called an assay, first on wastewater from a communal academic building rather than a dormitory. “In a dormitory, you have toilets, kitchen sinks, showers, and washing machines generating a mix of wastewater,” Miranda says. “And the fecal matter of interest there is diluted and relatively easy to handle. A communal building, however, only has toilets, more or less.” As a result, the output from the building was much more concentrated than it needed to be, at least at the start of the semester. “It turned out we had set the bar higher than we needed to,” Miranda says. The issue resolved over time since more people started to use the building — and its entire plumbing system — as the semester proceeded.

Currently, the team focuses on six buildings, chosen to represent meaningful slices of the student, staff, and faculty population. Wi-Fi-enabled automated pumps, installed with Rose’s help at the traps in each building’s wastewater outflow pipe, turn on periodically for 24-hour sessions three times a week. If weather makes it dicey for team members to get to campus, Mailloux can turn the pumps on and off remotely using his smartphone. In each building, the pumps deliver material from the outflow through tubing to a pre-labeled glass bottle housed inside a miniature refrigerator that keeps intact any virus that is present. The vessels hold a composite sample, which provides an average picture of the health of everyone who worked, visited, or lived in the building during the previous 24 hours. Team members retrieve the full bottles, placing them in a rolling cooler and swapping in pre-labeled empty bottles for the next day’s collection.

Mailloux, Rondeau, and Rose lug the cooler to an Altschul biology department teaching lab that is now dedicated to the wastewater monitoring project to avoid any cross-contamination. There, Rondeau sets the bottles in a hot-water bath for an hour, which inactivates the viruses and bacteria in the samples but doesn’t degrade the virus’s structure.

At noon, a student joins Rondeau; donning green lab coats and goggles, they begin processing the material, filtering and concentrating the liquid from 40 milliliters to 200 microliters. Finally, the pair performs the PCR analysis to test for the presence of the coronavirus. In the late afternoon, Rondeau emails her results to the project’s team for the final report.

“It’s really encouraging when we see a couple of days or weeks go by during which everything is staying clean,” Mailloux says, meaning that Rondeau’s lab analysis detects no coronavirus in recent samples taken from all six buildings.

Down the line, Miranda plans to expand the project’s data analysis to test for new variants of the virus that may or may not make it more transmissible or deadly. And although Miranda did not envision that his virology know-how would be put into the service of a campus wastewater monitoring project, he and all the team members take pride in the project. “This is why we do science. Everyone is putting their expertise together to make something useful and tangible for the community,” Miranda says.

The project is set to continue as long as it is necessary. As Ariyan puts it: “For the sake of the world, I hope the project ends sooner rather than later. But as long as it is ongoing, I would definitely love to stay on and work on this.” B

This page, left: Janet Vo ’22 removes a sample bottle from the refrigerator to bring for analysis and adds a new sterile bottle to prepare for the next sample. Below: Professor Brian Mailloux examines a sample of wastewater that was just collected.

Opposite page: Professor JJ Miranda and Abigail Schreier ’21 analyze wastewater sample data.

Arts & Culture

Athena Film Festival Goes Virtual

This year, the festival transformed its signature event into a virtual program, streaming a record number of films about women leaders directly to viewers’ devices

by Lauren Mahncke

The 11th annual Athena Film Festival — co-founded by Barnard’s Athena Center for Leadership and Women and Hollywood — might not have welcomed the usual crowds to its annual celebration this year, but it did break new barriers, reaching a global audience with its robust programming. Streaming over 75 films directly into viewers’ living rooms, this first-ever virtual festival responded to the past year’s unique challenges while celebrating women’s efforts to solve them.

The festival — held throughout March in honor of Women’s History Month — celebrated fearless women in leadership roles, with over 89% of the films directed by people who identify as women or nonbinary and over 50% of directors identifying as people of color. The virtual format provided audiences with the opportunity to watch shorts and feature-length films anywhere in the United States, including Hawaii and Puerto Rico, in addition to viewing prerecorded panels and conversations.

“I am so proud of how the festival team pivoted our operations and programming to be responsive to this moment and to leverage the opportunities that emerged from a virtual format,” says Umbreen Bhatti ’00, Constance Hess Williams ’66 Director of the Athena Center. “Year-over-year, this signature event continues to grow, connect with new audiences, engage more filmmakers, and advance the conversation around gender equity.”

The festival kicked off on March 1 with the U.S. premiere of Tracey Deer’s Beans, a coming-of-age story that highlighted often-marginalized Indigenous voices by exploring the 1990 Oka Crisis. And there was plenty more to see, with a curated lineup that offered nine shorts programs, more than 20 panels and Q&As, and a slate of documentary and narrative features.

As we’ve grappled with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, resiliency has become all the more important. The festival shined a spotlight on this very topic through their program area Resilience Through Uncertainty, showcasing films about women leading with compassion and perseverance through the most difficult circumstances. Julia Scotti: Funny That Way tackles the complexities of gender dysphoria, identity, and healing with the story of comedian Rick Scotti, whose gender awakening at age 47 led to hormonal treatments, surgery, and a new identity as Julia Scotti — and the loss of her family, friends, and career. Susan Sandler’s documentary tracks Julia’s comedic comeback, life on the road, and reunion with her children, bringing a bit of laughter and relief to a year that has challenged us all.

For far too long, women have been sidelined or underrepresented in the sciences. The Making It Happen: Women in STEM program area, supported by the festival’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, helps right this wrong with films like Picture a Scientist. Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney’s documentary features scientific luminaries that overcame sexism, institutionalized discrimination, and more to help make science more diverse and equitable.

Unapologetic, directed by Ashley O’Shay, bravely tackles another epidemic that continues to plague America: institutionalized racism and police brutality. The documentary, which follows abolitionists Janaé and Bella as they work within the Movement for Black Lives in Chicago, received this year’s Breakthrough Award. The $25,000 award, sponsored by Netflix, recognizes first- and secondtime filmmakers whose film hasn’t received U.S. distribution.

While this year’s virtual festival may have come to a close, the program lives on as a year-round educational platform, advancing women in film. The Parity Pipeline Continued on page 86

Fierce Compassion

Women’s stories of “love, resilience, and joy” drive the Athena Film Festival’s most ardent supporter

by June D. Bell

Regina K. Scully’s perfect weekend is spent in the dark. She’s happiest in a movie theater soaking up film after film. A lifelong cinephile, she’s drawn to what she calls “DNA changers,” documentaries and narratives that radically and enduringly transform viewers’ perspectives.

Making those types of movies is the mission of her organization, Artemis Rising Foundation, which has produced more than 200 films on themes such as social justice, recovery, and healing. Scully was the executive producer of The Invisible War, which dug deep into sexual assault in the military, as well as I Am Evidence, which took an unsparing look at how the extreme backlog of untested rape kits affects victims. Both won Emmys.

The Artemis Rising Foundation is also the largest supporter of Barnard’s Athena Film Festival, which this spring celebrated its 11th anniversary. “Without Regina’s commitment — her early and sustained commitment — the festival would not exist,” says Melissa Silverstein, the festival’s artistic director and co-founder. “She wanted to support and invest in the Festival, publicly. She is deeply committed to women philanthropists using their resources and voices to create change and inspire others.”

Scully’s generous donations over the past decade provide critical, general operating support that sustains the festival from year to year and bolsters its work to educate, connect, and empower women filmmakers. “It is Regina’s leadership and loyal commitment that undergird all of our efforts each year and allow us to grow and thrive,” says Victoria Lesourd, Chief of Staff at the Athena Center, who manages the festival and works on its annual fundraising.

Scully is not a Barnard alumna (Georgetown is her alma mater), but she admires how Barnard nurtures and empowers women. “I have a real affinity and fondness for this school,” she says.

The Athena Film Festival highlights cinema that focuses on women’s leadership and showcases women’s creativity as producers, directors, and writers, an aim that resonates with Scully. “I love the emphasis on female storytelling and women behind the lens. Athena’s mission is in great alignment” with that of Artemis, she says.

Scully notes that the Athena Film Festival and the Artemis Rising Foundation are both named for deities. Artemis, she says, is “the goddess of fierce compassion, and to me, the greatest stories are told through a compassionate lens.”

That compassion extends to her most recent documentary, What Would Sophia Loren Do?, which was screened at the 2021 Athena Film Festival and is available on Netflix. The short initially appears to be a valentine to Scully’s mother, Nancy Kulik, who idolizes the iconic Italian actress. But in a compact 32 minutes, the film also dips into a bottomless well of heartache and grief. Nonetheless, “it is a recovery film,” Scully says. “It’s about love, resilience, and joy.”

Fifteen other films produced by the Artemis Rising Foundation have screened at the Athena Film Festival. Attendees at the first festival, in 2011, viewed Miss Representation, a documentary exploring the subtle and overt media and cultural factors that discourage women from pursuing leadership roles. Scully was the film’s executive producer.

Silverstein credits Scully’s support with empowering female directors and producers as they find and raise their unique voices.

“All the images in our culture have been white and male,” she says. “Now, it’s all about disrupting the status quo and bringing in new storytellers, because stories are how we connect with one another.” Thanks in no small part to Scully’s generosity, she says, the Athena Film Festival showcases a world “where women are front and center, unapologetically.” B

Her Leading Role

Susan Rovner ’91, P’23 spent more than two decades creating some of America’s favorite shows. Now she’s taking the creative reins at one of the country’s largest entertainment companies

Susan Rovner ’91, P’23 can’t recall a day when she didn’t love television. As a kid growing up on Long Island in the late ’70s, she would scramble downstairs, flick on the tube, and sit transfixed by spine-tingling episodes of The Twilight Zone or giggle along to the slapstick antics of Larry, Moe, and Curly in the Three Stooges shorts. As family lore has it, her mother once encountered a young Rovner draped over the television set completely asleep. When she asked what her daughter was doing, a bleary-eyed Rovner reportedly replied, “I wanted to be on TV.” Rovner may never have starred in a TV show herself, but her work has very likely been beamed into your home: Gossip Girl, Everwood, Westworld, One Tree Hill, You, 2 Broke Girls, and Cold Case — to name just a few — are all projects she has shepherded in her two decades as one of the most respected names in the business, most recently as president of Warner Bros. Television (WBTV). Last fall, she landed her most ambitious role to date, as chairman of entertainment content for NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a title that puts her at the creative helm of an empire that includes seven television networks — NBC, Bravo, E!, Oxygen, Syfy, Universal Kids, and USA — and the network’s year-old streaming service, Peacock. For Rovner, the promotion is a capstone to a career defined by hard work and an ardent love of the medium. “I approach everything that I do in television as a fan, not a critic,” she says. “[My shows have] really run the gamut, but I loved them all so equally. I think my approach to all of it was, ‘How do I help make this show the best it can be?’”

Rovner’s on the phone from California, where she lives with her mom, husband, and three kids (two are college-aged and attend Barnard and Columbia; the youngest is still in high school). Rovner joins NBCUniversal at a critical moment in television history, one that in the past year saw production grind to a halt and advertising dollars plummet during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are broader existential questions too, especially as streaming ventures continue to gobble up traditional television audiences, and Hollywood faces a reckoning over racial and gender inequality, encapsulated by hashtags like #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite.

Rovner’s new role places her squarely at the center of some of these issues, but her colleagues and collaborators point to her ability to thrive in what can be, at times, a turbulent and toxic industry. As Greg Berlanti, the Golden Globe-nominated writer, director, and producer behind series like Dawson’s Creek, Everwood, and You, puts it, “Television has been forever changing. [Susan’s] been a real constant.”

As a child and young adult, however, Rovner didn’t know that a career in television was a possibility. She grew up in a lower-middle-class household just outside of New York City (“My full name is Susan Rosner Rovner and I’m from

by Anna Fixsen ’13JRN

Roslyn, Long Island,” she quips); not working was never an option. “I think my work ethic and so much of what defines me is because I’ve just always had to,” she says.

So when she enrolled at Barnard in 1987 as a math major, television was nowhere on her radar. “I knew that I wanted to be in an environment that would let me find my voice, that would let me speak,” she recalls. Rovner switched to a political economics major her junior year, while working waitress and retail jobs to support herself. After graduating in 1991, she intended to go work for the Federal Reserve Bank, but Rovner remembers, “I had this moment of truly freaking out and being like, ‘Do I want to do this for the rest of my life? I don’t think I do.’”

She decided to take a leap of faith and move to Los Angeles, giving herself three months to find a job. If she couldn’t, Rovner reasoned, she would simply move back to New York. “I wish I could say there was a direct plan — there wasn’t,” she laughs.

Once in L.A., Rovner made a friend who happened to work at the Fox Broadcasting Company. Rovner’s mind was blown. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is amazing. You do this?’” she recalls. “I didn’t leave her alone until she helped me find a job.” The friend came through. Rovner secured an interview for a personal assistant job on the movie side of an agency called Triad Artists. “I gave the interview of my life,” Rovner says. Though she had zero Hollywood experience under her belt, Rovner’s business acumen and math background impressed her would-be boss, and she landed the job. It was far from glamorous, “[Susan] prioritizes filled with typical PA tasks like picking up the phone, making photocopies, and running errands, but a the storytelling, and whole new world was opening up to her, and she was getting exposure to big-name writers and producers. she has her pulse on how She was hungry for more. Rovner spent a total of two years in the agency to work with artists in a world before moving to a production company that made TV movies in 1994. “It was sort of production way that allows them to boot camp because it was very small and we did everything,” she explains. By the mid-’90s, Rovner expand their imagination.” was moving up, in both her career and her life. She was offered a job at ABC in 1996 to work on movies for television. The following year, she married her husband, Robert Rovner, a television writer and producer also from the New York area (they met on a blind date in Los Angeles). Disney acquired ABC, and Rovner — by then the executive director of her department — felt she needed a change. In 1998, an opportunity came up to be the director of drama development at WBTV. It was a step back, in terms of both title and pay, but something told Rovner it was the right move. “I was terrified,” she says, “[but] my heart told me to take the job, and it was the best thing I ever did.”

Rovner thrived at WBTV. Throughout the early-to-mid 2000s, she worked with writers and producers on shows like The O.C., Cold Case, and Everwood and collaborated with noted producers and directors, including J.J. Abrams and Jerry Bruckheimer. Still, being a woman in Hollywood was no cakewalk. “You know, it was really, really hard,” Rovner says of those early years. “There was a ton of sexism. There was also very much a belief that you could not be both a mother and an executive. And I really didn’t have a ton of women that I was close to ahead of me to look at who had done it.” A women’s conference at Time Warner (WBTV’s parent company) in 2010 marked a turning point. There, Rovner learned about something called “the Tiara Syndrome,”

Clockwise from top: The Rev, airing on USA Network; American Auto, picked up by NBC for the 2021-2022 season; Mr. Mayor, airing on NBC.

Susan Rovner (right) as a Barnard student with a friend; during her tenure at Warner Bros. Television, Rovner developed Gossip Girl (center) for the CW Network and Westworld (right) for HBO. a phrase coined to describe a woman’s tendency to work hard hoping to be “crowned” with a raise or a promotion. “Unfortunately, that’s not how the world works,” Rovner says. “I loved it [at Warner Bros.], but I was stuck. And all these men around me were getting promoted,” she continues. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to tell them what I want. I’ve got to demand it.’” Post-epiphany, Rovner took charge of her destiny. In 2010, after eight years as senior vice president of drama development for WBTV, she was named the executive vice president of development. Four years later, she added co-president of Warner Horizon Scripted Television to that title. And in 2019, after more than two decades at the company, she was elevated to joint president, a role that included overseeing scripted series across the five major American broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the CW Television Network) and streaming platforms, including Apple TV+, Netflix, and Hulu.

Advocating for herself may have been a new concept for Rovner, but her collaborators also point to her unwavering advocacy for people and ideas she believes in. Writer and producer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa recalls struggling to get a movie based on the Archie comic books off the ground. After fits and starts, he wound up pitching it to Rovner at WBTV as a television series. “I walked into her office, and before I even said what I was there for, she said, ‘I love your writing, I love the Archie comic-book characters. We’re going to make the show, and it’s going to be a monster hit,’” Aguirre-Sacasa remembers.

That meeting set the series Riverdale into motion, which, after airing on the CW, became one of Netflix’s most popular series worldwide. Says Aguirre-Sacasa, “Susan saw Riverdale before anyone else did — meaning she saw the potential in the idea.”

Berlanti, the writer-producer, says Rovner encouraged diverse voices before “inclusivity” became a Hollywood catchphrase. “Ten, 15, 20 years ago … it was still pretty much a given that most stories would be from a straight, white, cisgendered male point of view,” he says. “And the reason that this [more diverse] kind of storytelling became so ascendant is because of executives like Susan.”

Ava DuVernay, the Academy Award-nominated director, writer, and producer, has worked on numerous projects with Rovner over the years, notably on the critically acclaimed series Queen Sugar. DuVernay describes the experience as a “nourishing” one, in part because Rovner gave her complete creative latitude. “She prioritizes the storytelling, and she has her pulse on how to work with

artists in a way that allows them to expand their imagination,” DuVernay says. “And when artists expand their imagination, they’re able to come up with ideas that feel fresh and execute them in ways that they would want to see. She plants those seeds.”

Indeed, nurturing a positive corporate culture is the first thing on Rovner’s to-do list (a paper list she literally keeps in her home office) while at NBCUniversal. She wants to create an environment in which “there’s collaboration, that we can treat each other with mutual respect that we embrace different points of view, and that we’re inclusive and have a diverse body [of employees],” she says. Rovner is also looking to grow and define the content strategy for Peacock, the streaming service that NBCUniversal launched last July (there are also premium, paid-subscription tiers). Even as she grows Peacock, she hopes to keep the company’s traditional TV channels (known as linear networks), such as NBC and USA, healthy by continuing to serve their audiences and seeking out compelling programming. The challenges are formidable — How do you get a fan of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta, say, to sign up for Peacock? — but Rovner is excited to reveal more about her game plan in the coming months. Already under her tenure, the company has announced it’s ordered The Best Man: The Final Chapters, a spinoff series based on Malcolm D. Lee’s 1999 rom-com, to stream on Peacock, and La Brea, a drama about a sinkhole upending a family of Angelenos, for NBC this fall. Which brings her to the final item on her list: to win. “It’s sort of a joke, but not,” she says. “I want to have the best shows, I want to have shows that resonate with our audience, I want to get great ratings, and I want to make a lot of money for the company.”

As Rovner makes good on that plan — between countless video calls, making sure her kids are set for their remote school days, and walks through the neighborhood — she still remains a fervent television fanatic, one who thinks that Sex and the City represents perfect television and has even been known to incorporate Barnard into the plotline of Riverdale. “She’s not just a great executive, she’s a great mom and a great wife and really is doing it all,” Berlanti reflects. “Supergirl is one of our shows together, and, you know, it’s very true of her.” B

DATA DRIVEN

When Galina Datskovsky ’83 was a student at Barnard, she was one of the few undergraduates in her class to major in computer science and often the only woman in her courses across the street at Columbia. She remembers it being a somewhat solitary experience. “It was kind of an interesting thing to be at Barnard but not to be at Barnard,” she says. A lot has changed since then. Computer science has become a tremendously popular major nationwide: The number of undergraduates majoring in computer science more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, according to The New York Times, to the point where From teaching robotics to demand for spots in classes often exceeds supply. And though women overall still earn bachelor’s building AI technology, these degrees in computer science at far lower rates than men do, at Barnard it has become one of the College’s three Barnard alumnae cracked top 10 most popular majors, right up there with perennial favorites like economics and English. The the code to successful careers College only recently moved the major in-house with the launch of its Computer Science Program in 2019, in computer science but for decades, alumnae have followed their passion for the discipline regardless, during and after their by Kira Goldenberg ’07 time at Barnard. Within the College, that includes the Athena Digital Design Agency, which launched in 2015 under the When Galina Datskovsky ’83 was a student at Barnard, she was one auspices of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies. of the few undergraduates in her class to major in computer science The agency — its apt tagline: “Think Bold. Code Bold. and often the only woman in her courses across the street at Columbia.

Be Bold.” — offers coding classes and a professional She remembers it being a somewhat solitary experience. “It was kind of an website-building business that serves real-world interesting thing to be at Barnard but not to be at Barnard,” she says. clients. At Columbia, students have long been able A lot has changed since then. Computer science has become a tremendously to complete the major, and by 2017, the number of popular major nationwide: The number of undergraduates majoring in computer faculty advising Barnard students had jumped from science more than doubled from 2013 to 2017, according to The New York Times, to one to three to meet the growing demand.the point where demand for spots in classes often exceeds supply.

And of course, in the world at large, Barnard alumnae And though women overall still earn bachelor’s degrees in computer science at pursue their dreams wherever they lead, following far lower rates than men do, at Barnard it has become one of the College’s top 10 the College ethos of “majoring in unafraid.” most popular majors, right up there with perennial favorites like economics and We spoke to three alumnae from across the decades English. The College only recently moved the major in-house with the launch of its who have done just that. Computer Science Program in 2019, but for decades, alumnae have followed their passion for the discipline regardless, during and after their time at Barnard.

Within the College, that includes the Athena Digital Design Agency, which launched in 2015 under the auspices of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies. The agency — its apt tagline: “Think Bold. Code Bold. Be Bold.” — offers coding workshops and professional web-development services to real-world clients. Through Columbia, students have long been able to complete the major, and by 2017, the number of faculty advising Barnard students had increased from one to three to meet the growing demand.

And of course, in the world at large, Barnard alumnae pursue their dreams wherever they lead, following the College ethos of “majoring in unafraid.”

We spoke to three alumnae from across the decades who have done just that.

Galina Datskovsky ’83

Galina Datskovsky knew she wanted to be a computer scientist by the time she graduated from high school at age 15 and started at Barnard. Her parents and two older brothers had all pursued careers in STEM. “I knew from the day I set foot in the door, that’s what I wanted to do,” says Datskovsky, a technology expert who specializes in fields such as compliance, information governance, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. Datskovsky graduated from Barnard in just three years and immediately entered a Ph.D. program at Columbia, where she studied natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence that seeks to improve computers’ ability to understand the complexity of spoken language. She went on to do stints at IBM and Bell Labs before joining forces with a couple of friends in the late ’80s to start a company, MDY Advanced Technologies, that tracked and organized documents, one of the earliest moves toward digital record-keeping in a world that was still overwhelmingly analog.

“We were ahead of our time, and that gave us a competitive advantage,” says Datskovsky, pausing to lift up her terrier, Luke — the latest in a long line of pets named after Star Wars characters — so he could say hello. When her company was sold to CA Technologies, then one of the largest tech companies in the world, Datskovsky went to work for them, running the informational governance business there.

“That job was very planning-intensive, organizationally intensive, because of all the timezone differences, cultural differences, and an extremely travel-intensive job,” she explains. Her husband, whom she met when she was a senior at Barnard and he was a first-year Ph.D. candidate, had a travel-heavy job too. One year, they both randomly overlapped in Switzerland on Valentine’s Day.

Eventually, Datskovsky says, CA was sold, and then sold again to HP, and she finally grew tired of the jet-setting life. She decided it was time to give her notice.

“That was my first time leaving a job without having anything lined up,” she says. She moved into consulting for technology startups, and one of them, VaporStream, eventually brought her on as CEO. The company offers clients — from financial services and

governments to healthcare companies and higher “When you say no man is an education institutions — a secure messaging system island ... I think I really have that meets a variety of security regulations and to put Barnard into that.” She compliance rules. “Even if your chats are secure, your says that the scholarship the privacy is not there,” she says. For example, encrypted College gave her allowed her texting apps like WhatsApp protect the content of user to build an innovative career messages, but the company still collects individual in technology development. metadata on its users, like where they are texting from and where their texts are going. VaporStream, Datskovsky says, only collects metadata in aggregate, preventing the company from being able to identify individual users. It also prevents other potential privacy violations, like screenshots or forwarding, which allows businesses to remain fully in control of their communications.

Through all her adventures, Datskovsky never forgets her roots; her family emigrated as refugees from Russia in 1976. They were allowed to carry $250 per person.

“I remember going to a store with my mother and thinking, ‘I’d love to have that candy or those potato chips,’ but I’d never ask her for it, because I knew she needed real food,” she recalls. “When you say no man is an island ... I think I really have to put Barnard into that.” She says that the scholarship the College gave her allowed her to build an innovative career in technology development, working with earlier technologies that paved the way for the systems in use across the world today.

“I am eternally and forever grateful to Barnard,” she says. “The fact that I was able to get this education. ... How much more can you do for somebody? Everything else was gravy.”

Cecily Morrison ’02

Cecily Morrison, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, didn’t originally set out to devote her career to inclusive design-oriented artificial intelligence. She majored at Barnard in ethnomusicology.

“I was determined to have a career in the arts,” she says.

Still, she feels that her time in Morningside Heights helped forge her into the research scientist that she ultimately became — one focused on building AI technologies to help people who are blind understand who is around them. “It wasn’t necessarily one particular skill that I learned — it was having my thinking challenged and stretched, which has prepared me for a career of challenging myself and challenging others,” Morrison says. “Is this really the right thing? Is this something we could think about in a different way?”

Her journey from undergrad to Microsoft began with a Fulbright scholarship in Hungary, where she remained for two additional years to teach English. Her students all looked at individual computer screens set against the classroom wall, which felt counterintuitive to the interaction and communication required for language learning. It was that frustration that first turned her attention to technology development.

“Not having a handle on technology means I didn’t really control the interactions my students were having in classes,” she says. “In order to have technology in the classroom, I then had to adopt particular ways of teaching that didn’t reflect the goals that I wanted.”

In pursuit of more

“It wasn’t necessarily one useful technologies, Morrison earned a Ph.D. particular skill that I learned in computer science from the University of — it was having my thinking Cambridge and went on to help the U.K.’s National challenged and stretched, Health Service look at the implementation of which has prepared me for a technology to support care in mental health. She career of challenging myself then brought her health tech expertise to Microsoft and challenging others.” Research. In her current role at the company, Morrison uses an inclusive design perspective — which seeks to correct mismatches between people’s needs and their environment — and her team works to improve accessibility for people living with disabilities.

“The choices that we make often inadvertently change that environment, and they can include or they can exclude,” she says. “Are we fundamentally changing someone’s access to the world by the decisions that we make?”

With those principles in mind, Morrison has specifically directed her attention to developing tools to help people who are blind, including one of her own children, understand their social environment. Her work incorporates stakeholders throughout the process as she develops both physical products and the algorithms that will run them. This participation is crucial, because watching future users interact with the prototypes both reveals what features need adding or tweaking and improves the accuracy of the AI algorithms the devices depend on.

One example, called Project Tokyo, involves a headset equipped with cameras and sensors that feed data to a computer and helps people who are blind or have low vision by using sounds to alert wearers to people’s identities and locations in their vicinity. If the bystander is someone in the headset’s facial recognition system, it will say that person’s name into

the wearer’s ear. This functionality enhances the wearer’s ability to proactively approach others rather than having to wait for someone to come and identify themselves and start a conversation, Morrison explains. During that development process, the team came to realize that children often see adults at chest height, meaning they had to build the device in a way to prompt younger users to lift their heads to be able to employ the facial recognition technology. If a system is well built, she says, its users aren’t always aware of how they are using technology to expand their own capabilities.

“They might say, ‘It makes me feel like I have freedom’ or ‘It makes me feel like I can just be,’” she says.

After years of living and working in the U.K., Morrison has a clipped accent that’s not British, exactly, but is a far cry from her Boston roots. Her ambiguous speech patterns become a game with the kids who pilot her work.

“Lots of kids who are blind like this game, because they like accents, and they can never guess [mine],” she laughs.

But continually eschewing assumptions is what drives Morrison, an ethos of inclusivity that she dates back to her undergrad days.

For Morrison, Barnard is a place where “people from different perspectives on the world were constantly challenging each other.” Needless to say, she was predisposed to think about what the world felt like for others, providing the perfect foundation for her own path in life.

Danah Screen ’15

Danah Screen was officially a biology major. But she couldn’t ignore the siren song of computer science.

“In my house, ‘computer science’ was like fixing the desktop and getting it up and running,” she says. But she’d loved being on the robotics team in high school, so she ended up auditing a bunch of computer science classes unofficially at Barnard, sitting quietly in the back of various lecture halls. Once, Screen almost got caught when a TA asked her what discussion section she was in, but another student came over with a question, and she bolted. “It got to the point where I would take notes sometimes in class, and if a friend would miss it, I’d be like, ‘Here are the notes,’ and my friend would be like, ‘Why are you like this?’” Screen laughs, then continues, “What you’re passionate about always finds a way to come back full circle.”

The transition started while Screen was still at Barnard: She applied to be assistant coach of the robotics team at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. She landed the role, working with students in the F.I.R.S.T. Tech Challenge, a robotics competition for students in grades 7-12 in which they went head-to-head designing, building, and programming a robot, the same extracurricular she’d loved participating in during her own high school experience. At Horace Mann, she aimed to be both supportive and to cultivate a spirit of independence in her students so that, on game day, they knew they could depend on one another. Her enthusiasm was contagious.

“In March of my senior year, they offered me a full-time job,” she says. “But in the back of my head, I was like, ‘I should apply to grad school for biomedical engineering.” She took her quandary to Elida Martinez-Gaynor, Screen’s mentor in the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP). (CSTEP provides yearly support and opportunities for a cohort of students of color from New York State who are pursuing careers in STEM-related fields.) Martinez-Gaynor told her to take a leap of faith and accept the job, Screen recalls. She stayed at Horace Mann for five years, becoming so beloved that a student described what would typically be a stressful period cramming before a competition as “one of the most fantastic weekends of my life.”

This ability to motivate students to work with enthusiasm is a central part of Screen’s

operating philosophy: Everyone waiting to speak to her on Zoom encounters this Maya Angelou quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

To that end, Screen also involved her Horace Mann students in running camps for local children in Barbados and Rwanda, both projects aimed at expanding access to robotics education. She watched as camp participants felt their worlds widen.

“These kids are just as brilliant. They should have all the opportunities as my students in the States,” she says. It’s a passion first ignited by an undergrad experience teaching in a school in Harlem: “A lot of who I am as a teacher, as an educator, as a global contributor, comes from my Barnard experience.”

Screen, who earned a master’s degree in computer science from Fordham in 2020, moved over to Dalton at the start of the current school year. There, as the head of the robotics program, she

co-teaches the coding half of the curriculum, working with a colleague who has expertise in building the physical components of robots. She is also the interim chair of the school’s engineering department. As such, she had to plan how to keep students who are used to collaborating in-person on builds engaged throughout the remote fall trimester, mailing them prototyping kits. Most students returned to on-site schooling in early 2021.

“It’s been so nice to see some of my students in person. I was like, ‘I’ve never seen you outside of a Zoom box,’” she says.

She’s hopeful that, by summer, there will be plenty of enthusiasm shared among her students for upcoming robotics competitions, delayed a few months by the pandemic. Well, that and some Barnard spirit.

“I talk about Barnard all the time,” she says. “I tell all my students: If I could do college again, I would.” B

“What you’re passionate about always finds a way to come back full circle.”

COMP SCI IN DEMAND

Barnard’s computer science program launched only in January 2019, but the burgeoning offering — which brought the major oncampus for the first time — is firing on all cylinders. It’s one of the College’s most popular majors, graduating more than 30 students in 2020 and on track to see an even higher number graduate in 2021. Much of that rapid scaling is thanks to Rebecca Wright, the program director and Druckenmiller Professor of Computer

Science. After adding a second full-time faculty member and a couple of faculty fellows, she is pushing to integrate the discipline more broadly on the campus. That includes courses, like one on privacy, that are geared toward both computer science majors and non-CS majors: The final project can be technical, such as coding-based, but it can also be theoretical, like a research paper. Completed projects have ranged from looking at surveillance in humanitarian protections to a deep dive into the Patriot Act. More coding-minded students have built programs that simplify privacy terms and conditions or dissect data breaches. Students also have the opportunity to be Computing Fellows, who attach to specific courses to assist students and professors, lead computational projects, and teach workshops. For example, Wright says, embedding Computing Fellows in an intro-level neuroscience lecture allows the students in the class to learn about the power of computation tools to analyze data more efficiently. “They’ll learn a little bit of coding if they’re not familiar,” Wright says of the students with access to Computing Fellows, who are based in the Vagelos Computational Science Center. “But it’s mostly to show them in a meaningful way, in a fun way, in an accessible way that computing is valuable and useful, and it’s something they could learn to do.” The Computer Science Program has also launched a distinguished lecture series and holds talks and events — currently all online due to COVID-19 — open to alumnae and to the broader community. Recent topics included the future of social media and cybersecurity. Additionally, Wright notes, in summer 2020, nine Barnard students were able to participate in mentored research projects that “gave our students the tools they need to envision and create a new and better normal as we move forward, rather than returning to the old normal.” That included projects on qualitative data analysis, internet usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, and building a data-sharing system. Despite the challenges posed by the all-remote learning environment, the students were able to successfully collaborate with each other and faculty. “For those students, we’ve really focused on developing community and providing academic support as well as the curricular offerings,” Wright says. “I think they very much appreciate having a center of activity on the Barnard campus.” B

SKETCHBOOK

A glimpse inside the creative world of The New Yorker cartoonist AMY HWANG ’00

When Amy Hwang ’00 started drawing cartoons as a freshman for the Columbia Daily Spectator, little did she know that this extracurricular activity would one day develop into a full-time profession. After graduating from Barnard with a B.A. in architecture, Hwang found a job working for an architecture firm. On a whim, she sent in her first cartoons to The New Yorker via snail mail, but it wasn’t until her late 20s that she pursued cartooning seriously. Since then, she’s built up an impressive portfolio, with her work regularly featured in the pages of The New Yorker as well as other outlets, including in the weekly emails of Usual Wines and in EatingWell magazine.

Hwang’s cartoons are often inspired by personal experience, and at the heart of each one, you find a candor and playfulness that underscore the nuances of everyday realities. “I think cartoonists are good at seeing the world in a way that cuts to the truth of a matter. We see incongruences and bring them to life,” Hwang explained in her 2019 TEDxYale talk. And her work has garnered industry recognition: The National Cartoonists Society presented Hwang with the 2019 Silver Reuben Award for Best in Gag Cartoons. We asked Hwang to complete our Sketchbook questionnaire for a little insight into her creative process.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

My daily thoughts and observations.

Which classes at Barnard most informed your work?

Pulling all-nighters in the architecture studio reinforced my appreciation for sleep. The opposing concepts of misery and comfort are common to my cartoons.

What is your creative process like?

My process is a combination of brainstorming ideas and then finessing them up to the last minute. It helps to have the urgency of a deadline to come up with ideas, but I also like to have enough time to let them gestate. Then I look at them later with fresh eyes to see if they were funny to begin with.

How would you describe your style or aesthetic (in 3-5 adjectives)?

Soft, flat, and gray.

What is your favorite project or piece, and why?

I don’t have a favorite piece, but I can say that my more popular cartoons are not necessarily my favorites except that they earn more money in royalties.

Where would I have found you sketching or making artwork on campus?

In the back row of Schermerhorn 501 during an art history lecture, at the library, or in an actual art class.

What do you listen to while at work in your studio?

My answer to this varies day to day. Sometimes I listen to music — usually without words. Sometimes I have a television show or movie on in the background — something with a lot of words so I don’t have to look at the screen. I do not listen to podcasts because I find them too distracting.

Who is at your dream dinner party?

Other cartoonists. I don’t get to see cartoonist friends in person much, due to the nature of our work and because I live outside the city and have very little free time.

What artwork was on your dorm wall?

I had postcards of Edward Hopper paintings, a postcard of a sculpture by Duane Hanson (Woman with Dog), and one or two Sam Gross cat cartoons torn from a New Yorker daily calendar.

What’s your guilty pleasure?

Procrastination. I am not talking about procrastinating doing something like watching a movie. I wouldn’t be able to handle that level of guilt. I reorganize cabinets or complete a minor home improvement when I procrastinate.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Having the freedom to do what I want on my own terms.

What is your favorite place to see art?

For me, it is less about the place — NYC has many great museums — and more about having the space to see the art. I dislike crowds of people in museums.

Which living person do you most admire?

I have no idea. I do admire the younger generation, though, because I think positive change can happen with them.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Being a full-time cartoonist is an extravagance.

What is your current state of mind?

Usually I have an “I can do it” attitude with a veneer of calm, but sometimes I need to scream into a pillow.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Making it to every next day is a greater achievement than the one before. The culmination of my life to this point is the greatest achievement, for me. That is, until I’m dead.

Where would you most like to live?

I like where I live right now in Westchester. It’s not perfect, but I don’t think any place is. If my circumstances permitted, I would like to live in Taipei.

What is your most treasured possession?

I’ve been living with a baby/toddler/small child for the past 10 years — I’m not overwhelmingly attached to any material possessions. Everything I need is easily replaced with money, which is also replaceable. I suppose my home insurance policy is important to me, should I encounter widespread damage to my possessions.

Who are your heroes in real life?

Moms.

What is your motto?

“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.” It’s by Ralph Waldo Emerson. B

BARNARD REUNION REIMAGINED

JUNE 2-5, 2021

From engaging lectures with distinguished faculty to enriching social experiences, Reunion Reimagined 2021 is an opportunity for you to safely reconnect online with Barnard, your classmates, and alumnae across geography and generations.

LEARN MORE AND REGISTER AT REUNION.BARNARD.EDU