Purchase Fall-Winter 2013

Purchase College maga zine | think wide open

fall / winter 2013

PLUS:

IMAGE MAKERS: Purchase Alumni Gain Widespread Attention Making Pictures THE GLOBAL VILLAGE of Purchase College WHEN WORK IS PLAY The Fine Art of Gaming Technology

Table of Contents Pursuits

1

Image Makers

6

[ this moment ]

in Time

By Thomas J. Schwarz

The Global Village of Purchase College

12

News Briefs

16

Dear Friends: Purchase College has an energy that is often difficult to describe in words. In this issue of PURCHASE magazine, we see examples of that energy—exceptionally creative, uniquely talented, and highly intelligent—in action. It comes to life visually in the story called “Image Makers.”

The same is true of “When Work Is Play,” a story about alumni who’ve turned their passion for video games into satisfying and successful careers, a few of whom create captivating educational or socially responsible games.

When Work Is Play–The Fine Art of Gaming Technology 20 Alumni in Action

25

Your Donations at Work

32

Neuberger Museum of Art

33

The Performing Arts Center

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COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: Camille Seaman ‘92 The Last Iceberg • Looking at the Icebergs near Franklin Island, Antarctica, 2006 (Detail)

Editor: Sandy Dylak, director, Communications & Creative Services Managing Editor: Kristi McKee, editorial services manager, Communications & Creative Services Editorial Coordinator: Nancy Diaz

And, what better reflects our motto, Think Wide Open, than our worldwide connections? “The Global Village of Purchase College” demonstrates a community with no bounds. In less than 50 years, Purchase College has opened doors in every corner of the world. With students, faculty, and alumni working, studying, performing, learning, and researching in dozens of different countries, and countless faculty members and students arriving on campus from every corner of the world each academic year, Purchase College is truly a global village.

I am particularly proud of the achievements and accomplishments of our faculty, alumni, and students reported in this issue. Every day, a Purchase College community member is making the news, ranking among the best, or leading the way.

We are truly unique—as an institution, as a community, and as individuals. As we maintain an international track record for academic excellence and creative pursuit, we are, at the same time, mindful and appreciative of our freedoms, resources, and surroundings.

I hope you find this issue of PURCHASE magazine inspiring. Much of what our students, alumni, faculty, and staff are able to accomplish is very much due to the generosity of friends and family. The funding we receive from our dedicated patrons and donors has a tremendous impact on our ability to remain a leading liberal arts and sciences college, and an exceptional center of discovery and exploration for the visual and performing arts.

Design: Scott W. Santoro, Worksight.com

With the reopening of the Neuberger Museum of Art, an exhilarating season set for the Performing Arts Center, and a new provost, the year ahead is one to anticipate eagerly.

Purchase magazine is published biannually by the Office of Communications & Creative Services, in collaboration with the Office of Institutional Advancement at Purchase College.

Yours very truly,

Purchase College, State University of New York 735 Anderson Hill Road Purchase, NY 10577-1400 Phone: (914) 251-6054 Fax: (914) 251-6047 Email: alumni@purchase.edu

Thomas J. Schwarz President

PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes SCHOOL OF THE ARTS Matt Bollinger, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition on view in March and April 2013 at Galerie Zürcher in New York City.

Noah Breuer, Art+Design, had an article written about his work in conjunction with the Gowanus Studios Printshop; it was posted on Printeresting on April 1, 2013.

Lenora Champagne, Theatre and Performance, was in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation’s Liguria Study Center for a month in March and April 2013, developing a project that responds to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

On Dec. 1, 2012, Champagne gave a talk, “Into the Lenora Light,” on the work of playwright Maria Irene Fornes to Champagne the Images of Women in American Literature study group in Tokyo, Japan. Sponsored by the Institute for Research in Language and Culture at Tsuda College, the talk was part of Champagne’s 2012–13 Fulbright activities. She also performed in The Record by 600 Highwaymen at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn in February 2013.

Donna Dennis, Art+Design, had a show, Donna Dennis: Coney Night Maze, on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art from June 7 to Sept. 15, 2013.

Johannes DeYoung, Art+Design, had a show at the Jeff Bailey Gallery in New York City, alongside Joshua Marsh’s work AS IF, on view from March 29 to May 5, 2013.

Suzanne Farrin, Music (conservatory director), was one of the composers chosen as an ICElab collaborator for 2014. From 500 applications, six projects were selected; Farrin’s project is an opera based on the love poetry of Michelangelo.

Connected, the debut novel written by Joseph Ferry, Music, won second place in the General Fiction category at the San Francisco Book Festival. Ferry released Connected, the first CD on his new label, Ferry LLC, as a companion piece for the book. The CD features reggae legend Rita Marley. Ferry toured as a bassist with Purchase College studio production alum Joey Ray’s band locally in Peekskill at the Beanrunner Café and at the National Hotel in Montgomery, NY, as well as at a special benefit for the Parkinson’s Foundation hosted by Michael J. Fox. They performed in Los Angeles in July 2013 as well.

Suzanne Farrin

Welcome to New Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Barry Pearson After an extensive national search and screening process, Purchase College selected Barry Pearson to serve as the new provost and vice president for academic affairs. In July, Pearson joined Purchase from Millikin University in Decatur, IL, where he had served as the univerBarry Pearson sity’s vice president for academic affairs for the past three years. Pearson began his career at Millikin in 1989, holding the positions of artistic director and then associate professor and chair of its Department of Theatre and Dance, director of the university’s Kirkland Fine Arts Center, and dean of the College of Fine Arts.

Pearson has a comprehensive background in administration and management of academic programs, curriculum development, and budget planning. In addition to his academic and administrative achievements, Pearson’s professional directing work includes premieres of new plays in Chicago and of American classics in Texas and Michigan, including a re-edited version for the stage of Eugene O’Neill’s play A Touch of the Poet. Pearson also collaborated on original music scores for Sam Shepard’s play The Tooth of Crime and an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

“Purchase College will benefit from the range and scope of Barry’s knowledge and experience and his respect for and understanding of what we do here,” says President Schwarz. “I have no doubt that he will be collaborative and receptive to all of the college’s programs and interests.”

Jon Gordon, Music, has self-published a memoir, For Sue. Prior to its 2012 publication, Gordon had taken Theresa Benaquist’s memoir-writing class at Purchase. The publication has received extensive praise and has been picked up by Chimbarazu Press.

Karen Guancione, Art+Design, participated in the production of Cuatro Corridos, a chamber opera, which had its premiere in May 2013 at the Conrad Prebys Music Center/Experimental Theater at the University of California, San Diego.

Jean Freebury, Dance, staged Merce Cunningham’s August Pace MinEvent for the 92nd Street Y/Harkness Dance Center’s “Fridays at Noon” on April 5, 2013, at the 92nd Street Y. The three duets were performed by Conservatory of Dance students Oliver Greene-Cramer, Ariel Dorsey, Zachary Enquist, Lieneke Matte, Jessica Miller, Matthew Perez, and Kenna Tuski.

Maria Guralnik, Arts Management, gave a presentation on a panel devoted to teaching community engagement at the annual Association of Arts Administration Educators conference in March 2013 in New Orleans. Her presentation focused on the intersection of arts advocacy and community engagement. Guralnik also recently team-taught a distance-learning seminar on arts finance and funding as part of the recently launched certified performing arts executive program offered by the graduate program in arts administration at the University of New Orleans in association with Arts Northwest and the National Association of Performing Arts Managers and Agents.

Kate Gilmore, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition, Kate Gilmore: Body of Work, on view at MOCA Cleveland from March 16 to June 9, 2013.

Gilmore’s work was also included in the show Only a Signal Shown at Southern Exposure in San Francisco from Feb. 1 to March 9, 2013, and No Sun without Shadow at the Lu Magnus Gallery in New York City from Feb. 27 to March 2, 2013.

Gerard Hecht, Music, was invited by renowned opera star Cynthia Haymon to give a master class in opera arias and art song literature at the School of Music, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Haymon is a faculty member. Hecht worked with nine students during a three-hour class, emphasizing foreign-language diction and role interpretation. He has been invited to return next semester.

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PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes Susanna Heller, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition, Phantom Pain, on view from March 15 to April 20, 2013, at the Magnan Metz Gallery in New York City.

Christine Hiebert, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition, Space for the Mark: New Drawings by Christine Hiebert, at Gallery Joe in Philadelphia from March 16 to April Susanna Heller 27, 2013. Her work was also presented in two group exhibitions: Time on Our Hands: Selections of Work by 2012 VCCA Fellows, at the Eckhaus Gallery, Kutztown University, Kutztown, PA, from March 28 to April 28, 2013, and in the traveling show Art=Text=Art: Works by Contemporary Artists, most recently at Hafnarborg | The Hafnarfjör’ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Hafnarfjör’ur, Iceland, from May 18 to June 23, 2013.

Ryan Homsey, Music, and the Minnesota Ballet were awarded a Live Music for Dance Minnesota grant. The Minnesota Ballet commissioned the composer to write a 20-minute, multimovement work for string quartet and live electronics; it will Ryan Homsey have its premiere in October 2013 at the DECC Symphony Hall in Duluth, MN. The work is underwritten by the American Composers Forum’s Live Music for Dance Minnesota program in partnership with NewMusicUSA, with funds provided by the McKnight Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Sharon Horvath, Art+Design, has been awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar grant for 2013–14. She will spend four months of her 2013–14 sabbatical in India as a Fulbright-Nehru senior researcher studying Ragamala, a tradition of miniature painting dating back to the 16th century, to complete her research project, “Ranj and Rasa: The Compression of Emotion and Sensuality through Color in Kangra Ragamala Paintings.” Her work was included in a group exhibition, Elective Affinities, Paintings, and Prints, held from May 9 to June 6, 2013, at VanDeb Editions in New York City.

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John Lehr, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition, John Lehr: Low Relief, on view from Feb. 22 to March 23, 2013, at the Kate Werble Gallery in New York City. In May 2013, Artforum published Michael Wilson’s review of the exhibition.

Cynthia Lin, Art+Design, was part of a three-person show, Borderline: Depictions of Skin, at Garis & Hahn in New York City from March 28 to April 27, 2013. On April 10, she participated in an artists’ panel discussion held in conjunction with the exhibition. In addition, an exhibition of her work, Drawings of Skin, was featured in the upper lobby of the Performing Arts Center through August 2013.

Steven Lubin, Music, was awarded an honorary membership in the Harvard chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society for “lifelong services to the liberal arts and sciences” at his alma mater’s commencement exercises on May 30, 2013. The Bronx Council on the Arts announced that Lubin is the recipient of a BRIO Award for a Chopin recording. The award includes a cash prize and a performance opportunity. Last winter, Lubin toured East Asia with the Taipei Symphony, performing a Mozart concerto as well as a solo recital in Tokyo.

James McElwaine, Music (emeritus), received the Senator Emeritus Award on May 3, 2013, at SUNY’s university faculty senate plenary dinner in Syracuse, NY. This award honors outstanding service to the statewide senate, in several capacities, over 10 or more years. McElwaine is the seventh recipient of this award, which was instituted in 2002. Later in May, McElwaine, with Keith Landa, director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center (TLTC), and Paul Thayer, New Media, a TLTC instructional designer, were invited to present at the 22nd Annual Conference on Instruction and Technology at SUNY-IT in Utica, NY, on May 22, 2013. Their presentation was “Gestural Melody: New Learning Tools for Musical Composition,” for which they received a 2012 Innovative Instruction Technology grant.

Rosalind Newman, Dance, received the Hong Kong Dance Alliance Award 2012 for the production of Maze, a work she co-created and co-choreographed. The work for 11 dancers had its premiere in Hong Kong in June 2012 and was presented in March 2013 at the Guangdong Dance Festival in China.

Sharon Horvath

Stuart Isacoff, Music, was a judge in the American Pianists Association’s classical fellowship competition in Indianapolis, IN, awarding a prize valued at $100,000. In April, Isacoff moderated a panel with composer Michael Harrison, cellist Maya Beiser, and filmmaker Bill Morrison at the New York Institute of Technology Auditorium on Broadway. Additionally, he gave a lecture on his book Temperament at the Newburyport (MA) Literary Festival in April. In May Isacoff gave a lecture-recital on his book A Natural History of the Piano, a master class at the University of Washington in Seattle, and a lecture-recital at Oregon State University.

On March 22, 2013, the Wall Street Journal Book Review published an article written by Isacoff in which he highlighted five of the best books about the musician in society.

Aaron Krach

Julian Kreimer, Art+Design, curated a show, Part of the Story, on view at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City from March 20 to May 12, 2013.

Aaron Krach, Art+Design, was included in the group exhibition I Killed My Father, I Ate Human Flesh, I Quiver with Joy: An Obsession with Pier Paolo Pasolini, on view from Feb. 22 to March 23, 2013, at the Allegra LaViola Gallery in New York City. The New York Times published a review of the exhibition on March 7, 2013.

Rachel Owens, Art+Design, had a show, Soft Edges, on view from March 22 to April 16, 2013, at the Track 13 Gallery at Cummins Station in Nashville, TN. She also had a sculpture, Inveterate Composition for Clare (2011), installed at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville from March 18 to Aug. 1, 2013. Owens curated an exhibition, Collider, on view at the ZieherSmith Gallery in New York from April 26 to May 24, 2013.

Ted Piltzecker, Music, performed in March 2013 in Atlanta with Tyrone Jackson on piano, Robert Dickson on bass, and Justin Chesarek on drums at Steve’s Live Music and the Atlanta Lovers of Music Association. He also gave a master class at Emory University. Piltzecker led students from Hartsdale’s Woodlands High School last spring in the Great Potential Program with a focus on the rudiments of composition and technology.

Eli Wolf-Christensen and Sean McVerry, students from the studio composition program, served as interns. In June 2013, Piltzecker performed, taught, and premiered new work at the China Conservatory in Beijing and at the China Conservatory in Wuhan with marimbist Jianpeng Feng.

PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes Janine Polak, Art+Design, the communications, events, and special projects manager at the School of Art+Design, had a solo exhibition, Shoulder Touch, at Sardine in Brooklyn from April 13 to May 12, 2013.

Pamela Prather, Theatre Arts, served as vocal and dialect coach for Houston’s Tony Award–winning Alley Theatre’s production of The Elephant Man, directed by Gregory Boyd, and was also selected to be a presenter at the national Voice and Speech Trainers Association conference in Minneapolis last summer.

Michael Puryear, Art+Design, presented a lecture on his work at the Renwick Gallery’s Grand Salon in April 2013 as part of the James Renwick Alliance Distinguished Artist Series 2013, as well as an interactive techniques demonstration at the Center for Creative Woodworking in Rockville, MD. He was also included in a group exhibition, Furniture with Soul II, in June and July 2013 at Gallery NAGA in Boston.

Christopher Robbins, Art+Design, gave two artist’s talks in March, presenting “Design Paradigms + Practices” at Parsons/The New School for Design and the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. Robbins also participated in “Who Gets to Speak Up? A Candid Conversation about Collaboration and Participation with Huong Ngo, Christopher Robbins, and Kerry Downe,” part of the conversation series Fucking Up: Learning from Mistakes in Art and Education, at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.

Carol Walker, Dance (dean emerita), Stephanie Tooman, Dance, and Kevin Wynn, Dance, were hosted by the Beijing Dance Academy as guest faculty in residence in the Modern Dance Center in Beijing, China, in March 2013. Walker gave six presentations on American modern dance history and contemporary dance to all students, faculty, staff, and invited guests; taught improvisation to the level 1 students; and conducted seminar/workshops with the faculty. Tooman taught the Graham technique to all the students, and phrases from the Graham repertory to level 2 students. Wynn taught the Kevin Wynn technique to all the students, and modern partnering to those in level 3. The final night included an informal showing of the work accomplished during the two weeks with all the students in the Modern Dance Center.

Jo Ann Walters, Art+Design, was recently interviewed by Michael Serra in the online publication Ahorn Magazine. An image from Walters’ series Dog Town, Prisoners Cleaning the Great Mississippi River Road after the Flood, Alton, Illinois, 2008, was published on Jan. 30, 2013, by Prison Photography, an online publication concerned with the image, incarceration, representation, media, social justice, and responsible photography.

Murray Zimiles, Art+Design, had a solo exhibition of recent paintings and pastels, Movement and Light, at the Berta Walker Gallery in Provincetown, MA, from Aug. 16 to Sept. 8, 2013.

David Grill ’86 Wins Second Emmy Award of His Career

SCHOOL OF LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES Photo by Chad Kraus

Grill earned his BFA in theatre design at Purchase College in 1986 and has taught at Purchase since 1998.

Michael Torlen, Art+Design (emeritus), had a solo show, Michael Torlen Seamarks: 2006–2012, on view from Feb. 12 to 28, 2013, at the Fisher Hall Gallery at the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, NY. The Miranda Arts Project Space in Port Chester, NY, also exhibited his work in a group exhibition, Solidary/Solitary: The Artist at Work, on view from Feb. 16 to March 16, 2013.

Sarah Walker, Art+Design, had two solo exhibitions in New York City last spring. Drift was on view from Jan. 23 to March 3, 2013, at Artifact, and Planet X at the Pierogi Gallery from March 22 to April 21. Her work was included in a group exhibition, Approaching Infinity: The Richard Green Collection of Meticulous Abstraction, from Jan. 26 to May 5, 2013, at the Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA.

Robert Swainston, Art+Design, received a research fellowship from Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium and an emergency grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York, this past year. His work was included in the group exhibitions Do It (Outside) at the Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; Lithography: Here & Now at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City; and Brooklyn Prints at St. Joseph College in Brooklyn.

David Grill ’86, co-coordinator of the theater design/technology program and part-time professor, reached a new level in his already storied career, winning the 2013 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lighting Design/Lighting Direction for a Variety Special for his work as lighting David Grill director on the Super Bowl XLVII Halftime Show featuring Beyoncé. Remarkably, Grill was also nominated this year for his work as lighting director on the PBS’ Great Performances presentation Andrea Bocelli: Love In Portofino.

He was previously nominated in 2008 and 2012, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Lighting Direction in 2002 for his work on the XIX Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

Jeffrey Taylor, Arts Management, was a featured speaker at the Second Annual Summit to Success at Tiffin University in Ohio in February 2013, presenting “Bon Voyage: The Art of Making Your First Real Job a Global Experience” on international entrepreneurship. Taylor’s research on a highly controversial painting was featured in the April 2013 issue of the Art Newspaper in the article “Was Hungarian Star Artist an Anti-Semite?

Row over Whether ‘Blood Libel’ Painting Is by Mihály Munkácsy.”

Shemeem Burney Abbas, Political Science, successfully completed a documentary film, From the Melody Queen to the Muslim Madonna, for the National Endowment for the Humanities, with Professor Fawzia-Afzal Khan, director of gender studies at Montclair University and the producer of the film. Abbas was a consultant for this project.

Karen Baird, Political Science and Gender Studies, presented “Women’s Rights, Women’s Health, Women’s Lives” at the forum “Human Rights at Home and Abroad” at the Osilas Gallery at Concordia College in Bronxville, NY, in March. Baird also presented a paper, “Agendas and Disadvantaged Populations: A Theoretical Framework,” at the Western Political Science Association conference in March in Hollywood, CA, where she chaired the panel “Theorizing Intersectionality” and served on the Karen Baird panel “Global and Comparative Perspectives on Intersectionality.”

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PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes Eugene Callahan, Economics, published “Chicken Soup for the Out-ofStep Scholar’s Soul” with Peter Leeson in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in November 2012. Callahan was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to attend a summer workshop at Duke University on the history of political economy.

Jonathan Callahan, College Writing, had a book, The Consummation of Dirk, published in April 2013. The collection of short stories won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction.

Jan Robert Factor, Biology, attended a lecture at the Norwalk Maritime Center given by Sylvia Earle, a pioneer in underwater exploration who has worked with National Geographic for many years. Factor attended the lecture with a group of students from Coral Reef Biology and Ecology, his winter-term course held in Roatan, Costa Rica. After the lecture, they had the opportunity to meet Earle and tell her about their experiences in Roatan, where she was instrumental in establishing a marine sanctuary.

Jared Kirby, Physical Education, was the fight director for the Folding Chair Classical Theatre’s production of Hamlet, which ran in April 2013 at the Access Theatre in New York City. Kirby is also the fight director for the Purchase College Stage Combat Club’s production of Aggressive Negotiations, which is a compilation of fight scenes ranging from Shakespeare to The Princess Bride. It ran at the end of April at Purchase and the beginning of May in New York City. In the summer of 2013 he fight-directed productions of Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), King Lear, and Three Musketeers, and taught at the Jared Kirby “Art of Combat NYC Intensive” in July 2013.

Mary Kosut, Media, Society, and the Arts, was invited to present a public talk on her current research, “Artification: Human Bodies and Honey Bees,” at the Montserrat School of Art in Beverly, MA, in March 2013.

Kosut and Lisa Jean Moore, Sociology and Gender Studies, are co-authors of the book chapter “Bees, Borders, and Bombs: A Social Account of Weaponizing and Theorizing Bees,” included in Animals and War: Studies of Europe and North America, published by Brill in December 2012. In February 2013, Kosut and Moore presented a talk, “Honeybees Pollinating New York City: On the Material Cultures of an Insect,” at “Mattering: Feminism, Science, and Materialism,” a CUNY Graduate Center conference.

George Kraemer, Environmental Studies and Biology, recently presented four papers in collaboration with University of Connecticut colleagues at three conferences. They offered “Bait Worm Packaging as a Conduit for Organism Introductions: Research and Outreach Lead to Policy Considerations” at the 18th International Conference on Aquatic Invasive Species, Ontario, Canada; “Nutrient Bioextraction via Seaweed Aquaculture in Long Island Sound and the Urbanized Bronx River Estuaries” at the Long Island Sound Research Conference, Port Jefferson, NY; and “Comparison of LED and Fluorescent Lighting in the Culture of Wild and Green Mutant Strains of Gracilaria tikvahiae” and “Opportunities and Challenges for the Developing Seaweed Culture Industry in New England” at the Northeast Algal Society’s annual meeting in Mystic, CT. A work of art by Steve Lambert, New Media, Capitalism Works for Me! True/False, was featured on the cover of SocialText, an academic journal on critical theory and political practice, and reviewed in Sculpture magazine.

Recently, he launched actipedia.org, a collaborative project between the P U R C HA S E | 4

New Academic Chairs and Directors for 2013–14 Steven Lam, the new director of the School of Art+Design, is a curator, artist, and educator who had been the associate dean of the School of Art at the Cooper Union since 2008. He has an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught performance art and sound theory in the Art History and Theory Department at the School of Visual Arts, at the Cooper Union, and in numerous institutions in California.

James Undercofler comes to Purchase from his current position as the artistic director of the National Orchestral Institute at the University of Maryland to serve as the chair of the arts management program. Before his position at James Maryland, he was professor of arts administraUndercofler tion at Drexel University, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and dean of the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. A French horn player, Undercofler holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Yale University and extensive post-master’s study at the University of Connecticut.

Ross Daly will serve as chair of the School of Humanities for a three-year term. He began teaching at Purchase as a visiting assistant professor in 2007–08 following a national search, and earned tenure in 2012–13. He had been coordinator of the journalism board of Ross Daly study since 2008. Daly received his BA from the University of Minnesota and his MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he graduated summa cum laude. Before coming to Purchase, he gained a wealth of experience as a print journalist, including 10 years at Newsday, where he served as both news editor and national/state editor. Daly and his Newsday staff received a Pulitzer Prize for “Spot News” coverage of the TWA flight 800 disaster in 1997.

nonprofit Center for Artistic Activism (of which Lambert is the codirector) and the Yes Lab. Actipedia is an open-access, user-generated database of creative activism.

Lambert led a workshop with the Center for Artistic Activism in Nairobi, Kenya, with healthcare advocates from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

Susan G. Letcher, Environmental Studies, presented a seminar, “Evolutionary History Shapes Ecological Assembly Rules: Phylogenetic Community Structure during Tropical Forest Succession,” at Binghamton University on March 8, 2013.

Shaka McGlotten, Media, Society, and the Arts, gave four public lectures in the spring of 2013. At Grinnell College, he presented “On Not Hooking Up” and discussed the smartphone hook-up app Grindr and the ways men

PURSUITS/Faculty news & notes use it for purposes other than sex. In February at the 10th Anniversary Activist Scholarship Conference, “Abriendo Brecha,” at the University of Texas, Austin, McGlotten presented a hybrid collaboration with Israeli composer Amit Gilutz. McGlotten and Gilutz offered another version of this work at the “Homonationalism and Pinkwashing” conference at the CUNY Grad Center in April. McGlotten presented his new project, “The Political Aesthetics of Drag,” at Bowdoin College in March 2013.

Jeanine Meyer, Mathematics/Computer Science and New Media, had several articles published in jsmag for Javascript professionals: “Fade In and Fade Out” in May 2013; “Moving Pictures” in April; “Creating a Jigsaw Game” in March; “Opening and Closing Windows” in February, and “Chasing an Image” in January.

Jason Pine, Media, Society, and the Arts, gave three invited presentations in February and March 2013: “Methlabs and Alchemical Ontology in the U.S. Heartland” at the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Anthropology in February; “Qualities of ‘Economic Performance’ in Alternative Economies” at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York City, also in February; and “Methlabs, Alchemical Ontology, and Homespun Worlds” in March as part of the Social Anthropological Program Seminar Series at Harvard University.

Edward Pomerantz, Screenwriting, premiered his short film, La Comida, which he wrote and directed, at the Montclair Film Festival in New Jersey in April 2013.

Andrew Salomon, Journalism, had an article, “Growth in Performance Capture Helping Gaming Actors Weather Slump,” published by Backstage in February 2013.

Rachel Simon, Gender Studies, gave talks, readings, and workshops in April 2013 for National Poetry Month at the Bronxville Public Library, the Larchmont Public Library, the Falmouth (MA) Library, Joel Barlow High School in Ridgefield, CT, the Scarsdale Jewish Community Center, and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Brooke Singer, New Media, was in residence at the Helsinki International Artist Programme, one of the largest international residency centers in Finland, in July and August 2013. In June, she presented a performance in conjunction with the exhibition Strange Invitation, organized by the

Professor Paul Siegel Receives Major Grant Paul Siegel, assistant professor of psychology, together with Bradley Peterson, a clinical psychologist and director of the Center for Developmental Neuropsychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute of Columbia University, received a $465,000, two-year research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health and a $60,000, two-year NARSAD Young Investigator grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation to research a new way of treating anxiety disorders. The potential new treatment to be tested will focus on reducing anxiety and fear with subliminal stimuli, a twist on the treatment of phobias. Siegel has been testing his subliminal stimulus hypothesis in his Purchase College laboratory for seven years.

Franklin Street Works Gallery in Stamford, CT. In April, she presented work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, in the event Artistic Research Science Fair, part of the Art in the Long View series. She exhibited photography from her Sites Unseen project at the Contemporary Art Galleries at UConn in the exhibition Gatsby Revisited in the Age of the One Percent from March 13 to April 19, 2013.

Joanne Kivela Tillotson, Biology, and colleague Stephanie McCann’s second edition of their Anatomy Flashcards was released in April 2013 by Kaplan Publishing.

Sarah Warren, Art History, saw her book Mikhail Larionov and the Cultural Politics of Late Imperial Russia published in April 2013 by Ashgate Press.

She delivered a paper, “Liberating the Italian Colony on the Neva: Italian Futurism and the Cultural Politics of the Late Russian Empire,” at “Alternative Modernisms: An International Conference” in Cardiff, Wales, in May 2013. Warren also received a James Renwick Senior Smithsonian Fellowship for September 2013–June 2014. Warren’s project is Craft between Modernism and Counterculture: Rhinebeck and the Studio Craft Movement.

Mary Alice Williams, Journalism, was a contributing interviewer in the three-night series produced by National Geographic called The 80s: The Decade That Made Us. The series ran in April 2013 on the National Geographic channel.

SCHOOL OF LIBERAL STUDIES & CONTINUING EDUCATION Andrew Bernstein, Philosophy, participated in a debate with Dinesh D’Souza, “Is Christianity Good or Bad for Mankind?” on Feb. 8, 2013, at the University of Texas in Austin.

Edmund Cionek, Music History, moderated the 17th Annual “New Composers” forum, “Rhythm and Ritual,” in the summer of 2013 at the Bar Harbor Music Festival, and attended the world premiere of his Rockin’ in Rhythm and Ritual by the piano-percussion duo Synchronicity. Forthcoming recordings include The Lullaby Project with the Ridgefield Symphony. He continues to be a member of the College Music Society National Advisory Board in Music Composition.

Judith Dupré, Writing and Humanities, presented a lecture, “Opening Your Eyes to This Place,” in April 2013 at Fairfield University, in conjunction with the university’s Cities Initiative, a two-year, multidisciplinary investigation of urban issues.

R. David Seabrook, Business and Economics, is working with the Harvard Business School and Harvard Business Publishing on their Core Curriculum project. Seabrook’s focus is on business strategy. The Core Curriculum project is a strategic new product line of course materials consisting of core readings, interactive illustrations, and simulations for a worldwide audience of business school students.

Roger Tsai, Mathematics, has seen a surge of interest in his work on 3D geometric/robotics vision, computational vision, and data analytics, as reflected in the newest Google scholar data. As of Feb. 18, 2013, the number of scholarly documents or Web links that reference his work had jumped to 10,509. Commercial companies such as Hunter Engineering Corp., Callaway Golf Company, and Matlab use his work in improving products and instruments.

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The photography program at Purchase emphasizes the medium as a fine art and instructs students in both traditional and digital processes. With a solid background in the conceptual and the technical, these photography alumni make pictures personally and commercially that are sure to astound.

By Kristi McKee

Top: The Lovely Monster Over the Farm, Nebraska, 2012, The Big Cloud series Bottom: Breaching Iceberg, Greenland, Aug. 8, 2008, The Last Iceberg series © Camille Seaman

CAMILLE SEAMAN Camille Seaman ’92 has gained widespread recognition for her photographs of the environment—of icebergs at the ends of the Earth and super storm cells in the U.S. Midwest’s Tornado Alley.

She was both a TED fellow in 2011 and a TED senior fellow in 2013. (TED is a renowned nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread the ideas of “the world’s most inspired thinkers.”)

Seaman was recently awarded a prestigious John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University for 2013–14.

Amazingly, she didn’t start taking pictures seriously, with intent, until she was 32 years old.

Seaman answered an internal call to action. She describes an overwhelming feeling inside her akin to turning on a light switch.

Without any real plan in mind, she decided to document her experience on Earth. She began making pictures during tourist trips on icebreaker ships in the Arctic, and photographed her first iceberg near Antarctica in 2003.

Recalling her time at Purchase College in class with the late Jan Groover, a renowned photographer, Seaman explains, “I sat in her class and didn’t understand a word of what she was trying to communicate about photography. And I swear it wasn’t until ten years later that one day it hit me: ‘That’s what that was!’” She laughs, grateful that she stuck it out. She also credits John Cohen, professor emeritus of visual arts, with teaching her social responsibility—how it’s a gift if people allow you to photograph them.

She paraphrases, “They’re giving you something. Don’t feel that you have the right to take anything.” To this day, she never speaks of “taking” or “shooting,” preferring instead the expression “making” pictures or photographs.

At first, magazine editors considered her work fine art and referred her to galleries, yet gallery directors felt it was too photojournalistic. Unwilling to compromise, she vowed to remain true to herself and continued to make pictures her way. It wasn’t long before both the magazines and the galleries started to call her. Demand for her work exploded in 2007 once the United Nations declared climate change to be real. Unwittingly and in breathtaking fashion, she had created archival images against which an iceberg’s demise could be compared. (continued)

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Now she’s storm-chasing in the Midwest, documenting super cells in formation with awe-inspiring results. “The storms are part of our landscape, and as harsh as this might seem, I want people to understand that we’re really blessed; we wouldn’t have the fertile Great Plains without these storms. There’s beauty in this. There’s something much bigger happening and we’re part of it.”

MATTHEW ALBANESE Matthew Albanese ’05 works as a fashion photographer for Barneys New York. In 2008, he began photographing miniature landscape models that he had painstakingly created, resulting in a body of work called Strange Worlds.

In 2011, select photos from this project were included in an exhibition called Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, and the entire series has been published in a catalogue with an essay by David Revere McFadden, the museum’s chief curator and vice president for programs and collections.

Q Why did you choose this piece (right center) in particular? What do you want readers to know about you?

A The Train Wreck is a very dark image seen in a very specific and beautiful quality of light. I took everything into consideration, from the time of day to how the fire and explosions reflect off the wreckage. When it comes to my work I am a total control freak!

Q What are you most proud of in your work as a photographer?

A I take the most pride when I know I have inspired someone like me to get out and make something and chase his or her dreams.

Q What is your fondest memory of Purchase?

A My favorite part of Purchase was the supportive and interdisciplinary environment. I was able to create daring and exciting documentary video work as a photography major—an experience that still resonates with me to this day. I always tell people that Purchase was one of the best decisions I could have made in my life as a career artist.

Top: In the process of creating Train Wreck Middle: Train Wreck, 2013, digital C print Bottom: How to Breathe Underwater, 2012, digital C print ©Matthew Albanese P U R C HA S E | 7

Photo by Jan Dams

KRIS GRAVES As an associate photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Kris Graves ’04 photographs the works in the museum’s collection for publications and archives. His freelance work includes running a fine-art printing service, publishing photography monographs, and lecturing. He’s on the Leadership Council for the Young Photographers Alliance and serves as the vice president of the New York chapter of the American Society of Picture Professionals.

Q Why did you choose this piece (below) in particular? What do you want readers to know about you?

A I photographed this Mister Softee truck while visiting another Purchase grad (Michael Lampell ’01) in 2004, about a month after I graduated. I had never been to that part of Astoria before. I am from Queens and fell in love with the neighborhood, and now it is my local park. I chose this photo because I remain connected to everyone I went to school with, as much as I can. The connection is important, and it can help you make art. I have visited Purchase friends in Berlin, Bermuda, London, Madrid, and many other places, and I have made photographs that I love in all of those places.

Q What are you most proud of in your work as a photographer?

A I am most proud that people enjoy the work I am producing.

I am proud that many of the people I went to school with are staying involved with the art world and carving out their piece of it. Purchase is a gem, and I surround myself with the people I met there (students and professors) and the young people who are currently attending.

“I am proud that many of the people I went to school with are staying involved with the art world and carving out their piece of it.”

Top: Unexplained, Malmo, Sweden, 2011 Middle: From Long Island City, New York, 2011 Bottom: Mister Softee, Astoria, New York, 2004 ©Kris Graves

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JASON HANASIK Jason Hanasik ’03 leads the North America Digital Creative team for Gap. He creates videos and photographs for Gap’s social and paid media buys, art directs the multiscreen video walls in the company’s newest flagship store at 34th Street and Broadway in Manhattan, and constructs the musical playlists for all Gap stores in the U.S. and Canada. This year, his work was included in the Outwin Boochever National Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Q What are you currently working on?

A In my personal work, I am currently working on a short film that looks at expectation and identity as it relates to Holocaust survivors, as well as the layout and design of my first monograph.

The monograph will contain my two most recent long-term photo and video projects, I Slowly Watched Him Disappear and He Opened Up Somewhere along the Eastern Shore.

Q Why did you choose this piece (below) in particular? What do you want readers to know about you?

A While I have created a considerable amount of work since this portrait was made in 2002—my junior year at Purchase—it remains a centerpiece in my larger portfolio of works. This image of my parents, Jeff and Jackie Hanasik, contains almost all of the concerns I have as a maker and thinker producing and playing with and in culture. Growing up in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, I was inundated by narrow views of masculinity and femininity and the conservative religious right. Although my family traveled up and down the East Coast a lot when I was a kid, it was not until I entered my twenties and moved to New York for undergrad and then San Francisco for my grad degree that I realized how much I was beholden to suffocating ideas about gender presentation, sexuality, and family dynamics. As my work has matured, I’ve been able to investigate these earlier experiences, locate them in culture, and embark on new projects that explode them open.

Ultimately, I hope to ask questions that motivate viewers to locate and examine similarly closed perspectives in themselves.

Q What are you most proud of in your work as a photographer?

A I was exhibiting my graduate thesis project, He Opened Up Somewhere along the Eastern Shore, at +Kris Graves Projects when I noticed a woman crying softly. I went over, introduced myself, and asked if she was all right. With tears in her eyes, she looked up at me and said, “My son recently returned from Iraq and well, he just didn’t seem right and I could not understand what was going on. Tonight, after looking at your project, I think I understand what he is going through. Thank you.” That moment, knowing that the work had been “seen,” is hands down my proudest personal moment.

Top: Steven, Two-Faced, 2008 Bottom: Steven in a Bed of Flowers, 2008 (both from the project He Opened Up Somewhere along the Eastern Shore) Right: Jeff and Jackie, 2002 ©Jason Hanasik

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ZOEANN MURPHY Zoeann Murphy ’03 is a video producer for the Washington Post. She produces magazine-style video stories for The Fold, a daily news-wrap show on PostTV, the newspaper’s newly launched video arm. Her short documentary, Hidden Blessings: What Irene Taught Me about HIV Prevention, won the Humanitarian Award at the My Hero International Film Festival in 2012. She recently earned an MA in new media photojournalism at the Corcoran College of Art + Design.

Q What are you most proud of in your work as a photographer?

A I’ve been excited about the democratization of photography. Since leaving Purchase I’ve been teaching participatory photography workshops to communities that want to tell their own stories with their own photos and words. In 2007, I curated a major exhibit of participatory work at the New York State Museum. I’ve also facilitated workshops in India and Thailand.

Q Why did you choose this piece (below) in particular? What do you want readers to know about you?

A I love to travel. This photo was taken in Harmandir Sahib, India.

Q What is your fondest memory of Purchase?

A What I loved most about Purchase were the people. I made some of my closest friends at Purchase and I still love them madly. And of course there is JoAnn Walters [associate professor, Art+Design], who seriously shaped the way I see.

Top: Bagan Balloons, Burma, 2013 Middle: Pilgrimage, Gandan Monastery, Tibet, 2007 Left: Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, 2007 ©Zoeann Murphy

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LIZZY SULLIVAN Born in Chile and raised in Brooklyn, Lizzy Sullivan ’02 is an independent photographer who specializes in celebrity portraiture and fashion photography. She began her career interning at the Pace/MacGill gallery and with artist Chuck Close, then spent seven years at the New York Post shooting breaking news and fashion features.

She recently moved to Los Angeles and signed with Getty Images.

Q What are you currently working on?

A For my personal work, I studied Bruce Davidson and Garry Winogrand in college so I have a trained eye for street photography. I enjoy exploring new areas and documenting all of the various creatures I encounter when I am not on assignment.

Q Why did you choose this piece (right) in particular? What do you want readers to know about you?

A I suppose I chose this particular work because it best represented a day of total chaos and terror that was happening all around me and in an instant I was able to compose a picture of pure silence. It was the ConEd explosion in NYC in 2007. One of my biggest regrets as a photographer was not being in New York during 9/11.… I was actually in my dorm room at Purchase watching the horror unfold on my TV. So in 2007, when I heard there was a mysterious explosion near 40th Street, I grabbed my camera and ran for it. I wasn’t going to stop until I got close enough to understand and document the scene.

Q What are you most proud of in your work as a photographer?

A I am most proud of the amount of access I have been able to obtain as a young female photographer. I am extremely proud of all women photographers in the field for, in my eyes, they are the bravest.

Top: Con Ed Explosion NYC, 2007 Left: Suzan Band, Brooklyn, NY, 2012 ©www.lizzysullivan.com

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l a b o l G The e g a l l i e V s a h c r u P of e g e l l o C

Purchase students with Professor Ross Daly (far right) in the south of France.

One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.

—henry miller

By David McKay Wilson

Students, Faculty, and Alumni Amplify the Connection between Purchase and the World

Purchase faculty hail from around the world as well. This fall, the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences welcomes a number of new international professors, including Ager Gondra-Astigarraga, from Spain’s Basque country, who is teaching Spanish; India natives Gaura Narayan, teaching English literature, and Shruti Rajagopalan, teaching economics; and Turkish scholar Hakan Topal, teaching new media.

Ravi Rajan, dean of the School of the Arts at Purchase College, designs large-scale exhibitions. This summer, Rajan worked his way through Europe, spending two weeks at the Venice Biennale installing Alfredo Jaar’s sculptural piece at the Chilean pavilion. He stopped in Basel, Switzerland, for a week, and then in Arles, France, “It’s important for our students to get exposure to another country for two weeks, collaborating with Jaar on more installations. or to meet those from other countries,” says Suzanne Kessler, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “So many people are Along the way, he visited Milan, Italy, in hopes of developing a working internationally now, with the ease at which people fly partnership between Purchase College and the Istituto Europeo di around.”

Design. Then he was off to São Paulo, Brazil.

“The international piece is hugely important,” says Rajan, who came to Purchase 12 years ago and became dean in 2012. “The dialogue in the arts today is much more global. So to succeed, you need exchanges and experiences, and proficiency with other languages and cultures, to deepen your understanding on the global stage.”

The School of the Arts at Purchase has drawn a number of visiting professors from around the world for the new school year. From Poland, Jakub Ciupin ´ski joins the Conservatory of Music in studio

So it goes at the globally networked campus of Purchase College, with faculty conducting research, performing, and making connections around the world, students studying abroad, and international students and scholars coming to Purchase to further their education.

The Path Is Open—To, From, and Beyond Among the visiting scholars who arrived for a year of study at Purchase this fall is Chinese artist Sun Xin. An associate professor at Capital Normal University in Beijing, and a specialist in contemporary Western art, Sun is the recipient of a prestigious Chinese government grant. Through the fellowship program, Chinese scholars spend a year with experts in their field. Professor Xin—a practicing artist and art historian, who has written on Western art and translated several books on Western art history—chose to study at Purchase with art history professor Michael Lobel.

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Purchase students Michael Steck (literature) and Steven Brown (arts management), along with Professor Elise Lemire, visited Tokyo to participate in Technos International Week, followed by a week of touring across Japan.

This year, more than 200 Purchase College students will travel abroad to study. Shown here: Students visit Plaza de Mayo and Caminito, Argentina, and an amphitheater in Italy.

composition and production. Lenka Pichlíková from the Czech Republic will be teaching theatre and performance. And New York native Daniel Bauer, who lives and works in Israel, returns to the United States as a visiting professor in the School of Art+Design.

While some faculty members are drawn to Purchase from faraway corners of the globe, many others travel the world to perform, conduct research, and lead students on extraordinary educational experiences.

This summer, adjunct professor of philosophy Suzanne Ironbiter took 16 students on a six-week journey to Dharamsala, India, to study wood painting at the Norbulingka Institute and trek on the Tibetan plateau, where they had the extraordinary opportunity to meet privately with the Dalai Lama. (See details on page 14.)

During January intersession, Jan Factor, a professor of biology, takes students to the island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras to study the biology and ecology of one of the world’s most impressive coral reefs. Students learn to scuba dive and, by the end of the program, they go as deep as 100 feet to explore a shipwreck and the organisms that make their home in it. “I give underwater quizzes,” says Factor. “Students get a slate to write on, and we put little markers next to different kinds of coral or sponges. But it doesn’t work so well with fish.”

Students also go overseas to perform. A group mostly composed of Purchase musicians—the Empire Quintet—traveled with lecturer James Austin Smith to South Africa to play at the Stellenbosch International Chamber Music Festival. Smith, an acclaimed oboist, had twice performed at the festival. Organizers asked if he wanted to bring a group to the 2013 event. The quintet—with Purchase students Kristen McGuire, Joshua Hall, Lorenzo Kleine, and Andre

Gratto—played several works, including the world premiere of a composition written by Purchase alumnus Michael Ladouceur.

They also played in the festival orchestra, hung out with South African music students, and heard Bishop Desmond Tutu provide narration for an orchestral performance one night. The festival takes place at Stellenbosch University, which was a hotbed of separatism during the nation’s apartheid era, when South African blacks were prohibited from studying classical music.

“For those two weeks, people of every color are studying and performing,” says Smith. “Our students got to be part of that history.”

South America beckons Paula Halperin, assistant professor of history and cinema studies, who was born in Argentina and grew up in Brazil when her parents, both academics, had to flee the repressive Argentinian government. She returned to South America this past summer to continue her research into the tumultuous times in Argentina in the 1970s. Her research focuses on Latin American cinema and television in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the national governments and major corporations controlled the media and projected national values in movie theatres and on home television screens.

Throughout her visit, she conducted research in video archives, gave talks, caught up with old friends, and reached out to her colleagues at universities in Rio de Janeiro about establishing a program similar to the Purchase College summer program now conducted in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Marc Brudzinksi, assistant professor of language and culture. With Rio the site of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, international attention will increasingly be focused on South America’s biggest nation. She thinks it will be a good time for Purchase students to travel there to study. “I’d like our students to appreciate the complexity of the Brazilian culture,” she says. “The nations [Brazil and Argentina] have similar histories, but at the same time, developed in a very different way. I’d really like students to know about it.”

Delving deep into an Italian city’s cultural life has been the focus of Jason Pine’s research. Pine, assistant professor of media, society, and the arts, gave lectures in Germany and Italy this summer on his analysis of the relationship between organized crime and the neomelodica music scene in the city of Naples. His findings, detailed in his 2012 book, The Art of Making Do in Naples, examine the Neapolitan underworld with the keen eye of an anthropologist and the edge of an investigative journalist.

Above: Purchase student scuba diving in Honduras. Right: Four Purchase students from the Empire Quartet.

German-born choreographer Wallie Wolfgruber, director of the Conservatory of Dance, says it’s important for dancers to gain international experience. This fall, 15 juniors are studying abroad in P U R C HA S E | 13

Israel is a popular study-abroad destination for Purchase students.

Professor Robin Lynch with students at the Picasso Museum and at a fortification in Antibes, France.

Rotterdam, London, Amsterdam, Beijing, Hong Kong, Australia, and Taipai. Nine foreign students, meanwhile, were on an exchange in Purchase.

Eighteen students from the Purchase Dance Company traveled to perform in Taipei in 2012. When the Nederlands Dans Theater toured the U.S., and performed at the Purchase Performing Arts Center in April, the company conducted a master class for Purchase dancers. International dance faculty include Nellie Van Bommel of France, Rosanna Seravalli of Italy, and Joseph Marlbrough, former principal dancer of L’Opera de Lausanne, in Switzerland.

“We are preparing our students to be world citizens and we aim to mirror the professional dance world,” she says. “Students make contacts that last a lifetime. We want to be part of the world scene.”

For Ross Daly, associate professor of journalism and chair of the School of Humanities, Europe has long provided material for his reporting—be it in East Berlin in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell or in Prague in the 1990s, chronicling the flourishing of free enterprise during the Velvet Revolution.

This summer, he took a group of students to Antibes, in the south of France, to teach journalism on foreign soil. Students stayed with host families and were sent out on assignments in the community.

They studied French and then each researched three assignments: a travel story, a story about his or her host family, and a story that explored a socioeconomic issue in Antibes. That required asking questions and communicating, even though some of the students spoke rudimentary French.

“You can’t skim the surface when you are a journalist,” Daly says.

“It’s hard anyway, but having to speak the language adds another layer of complexity. Professionally, this can happen all the time when you are a foreign correspondent. Students were a bit skeptical that they could pull it off, but they did some really great work.”

According to journalism student Jackson Chen ’14, “When you first plan for the trip, you think you won’t be able to communicate,” says Chen. “But then you learn that it’s possible with body language, broken English, and broken French. As real as it is, it’s manageable.”

The study-abroad experience is often a life-changing one. Amy Crehore ’13, a literature major, studied in Barcelona, Spain, in the Estudios Hispánicos program in the spring of 2012. The program, developed at SUNY Oswego, is open to all SUNY students. She P U R C HA S E | 14

lived with a Spanish host family, immersing herself in the language and culture—both at school and back at her home away from home.

Crehore is now applying for a Fulbright scholarship so she can return to teach English through a program sponsored by the government. Her career goals are focused on becoming a New York City schoolteacher in the city’s Teaching Fellows program.

“Studying abroad totally changed my trajectory,” she said. “Five months in Spain was a taste, but not quite enough. I was really dragging my heels when I left. I wanted to stay. I knew it would become a second home for me.”

An Audience with His Holiness A group of 16 Purchase College students was honored in June to be granted a private audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet.

The students—participating in a summer study-abroad program led by Suzanne Ironbiter, adjunct professor of philosophy—had been attending a four-day teaching session with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, and were then granted a private audience, at which he told them, “Our religion is about love and compassion, and the practice of nonviolence.”

“This was a huge honor and something that just doesn’t happen very often,” says Deirdre Sato, director of international programs and services at Purchase College. “One of the students even got a press pass and was allowed to take photos of His Holiness, which is quite unusual.”

The students—who applied for the opportunity to participate—were studying under the direction of master artisans in wood painting and Thangka painting at the Norbulingka Institute in northern India. The group was also studying Tibetan Buddhist philosophy with Professor Ironbiter.

Purchase College students enjoy studying and touring in India (left), Japan (center), and Madrid (right).

Emily Bishop ’12, an organizer for the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign for the Onondaga Nation, studied Argentina’s Dirty War in Buenos Aires in the summer of 2012 with assistant professors Marc Brudzinski and Veronica Perera. The war occurred in the 1970s, when the military dictatorship snuffed out the political left and tried to eliminate any resistance to the state. Bishop met with the mothers and grandmothers of children who disappeared during those years. She and other student organizers also visited a housing cooperative developed by squatters who took over abandoned buildings and worked together to make a community in their new homes.

In the summers of 2010 and 2011, Bishop developed a water project along the Amazon in Ecuador for an indigenous community.

She wrote a grant proposal to obtain funding for the project’s materials, and then worked with the municipal government and a local school to install it. It became the subject of her senior thesis and the foundation of her work today with New York’s indigenous people in the upstate Onondaga Nation. “I learned how to be an ally, so I could come home and get to know the people who have been part of my community since I was a child,” says Bishop, who grew up in Syracuse.

Yolandri Vargas ’15, has explored her own ethnic heritage through study abroad. The daughter of parents who emigrated from Peru and the Dominican Republic, Vargas studied in both nations during her time at Purchase. In June 2012, she traveled to Peru with International Studies Abroad to work with youths, ages 7 to 15, who were no longer living with their families.

In the spring of 2013, she studied at the Pontifica Universidad Catholica Madre y Minestra in Santiago, Dominican Republic, taking courses in Latin American women writers, dance, sociology, and urban and rural social movements. In both countries, she lived with host families.

“In college, it’s important to find out who you are, where you come from, and where you want to go,” said Vargas, who is majoring in gender studies and sociology. “I learned to live in the moment. And sometimes you have to work hard to live in the moment.”

GLOBAL LEARNING GOES VIRTUAL Not every Purchase student can study abroad. But many can participate in classes with students at overseas campuses through the college’s Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) program.

Since 2005, when the program first brought Purchase students together with students in Ireland and Turkey, the COIL program has provided access to courses co-taught by professors from Purchase and those at overseas campuses in what might be called a globally networked classroom. The COIL Center moved to the SUNY Global Center in midtown Manhattan in 2010.

“There is so much opportunity for technology to complement more-traditional study abroad,” says Keith Landa, director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center. “These online experiences more and more model the kinds of environments these students will go out into. They provide an opportunity for intercultural experiences that, due to time or financial constraints, some students can’t have by studying abroad.”

PURCHASE STUDIES ABROAD About 15 percent of Purchase’s class of 2012 studied overseas, according to Deirdre Sato, director of international programs and services. Nearly 200 of the college’s 4,000 undergraduates are expected to study abroad in 2013–14, with many attending programs at 17 partner universities on three continents.

This fall, about 120 international students from 35 countries—30 of whom are pursuing graduate degrees— matriculated at Purchase.

At Purchase, students have an array of opportunities to study abroad. The college administers short-term programs—during summer and winter breaks—with expeditions to Argentina, China, Costa Rica, France, Honduras, India, Israel, Italy, and Spain. An extensive study-abroad exchange program offers eligible students the chance to take courses overseas at a host institution for a semester or a year while remaining enrolled full time at Purchase College. Among locations around the world, Purchase partners with host institutions throughout Europe as well as Perth, Australia; Beijing, China; Mexico City, Mexico; and Taipei, Taiwan.

In addition, through the State University of New York exchange program, eligible Purchase College students may take advantage of hundreds of programs offered in over 60 countries.

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NewsBriefs Purchase Makes the Grade Purchase was named one of the “Top 10 Public Liberal Arts Colleges in the Nation” by U.S. News & World Report’s 2014 edition of Best Colleges, which annually ranks institutions of higher education in an effort to help thousands of parents trying to determine which schools best suit their college-bound children. This high accolade was announced in September, on the heels of Purchase being listed in the 2014 edition of The Fiske Guide to Colleges, and in The Princeton Review’s 2014 edition of its annual college guide, The Best 378 Colleges.

According to the 2014 U.S. News & World Report rankings, Purchase is one of only two public institutions in New York to make the first-tier list of 180 best liberal arts colleges in the country.

“When we look at how Purchase is consistently recognized by these prestigious national ranking systems, we see the strength of our mission revealed. Ours is an institution driven to advance open-minded engagement, academic excellence, and creative process. The environment here is unique and supportive—dedicated to ensuring our students’ academic and personal success, as well as opening doors to professional opportunities,” says Thomas J. Schwarz, president of Purchase College.

F irst National Youth Orchestra Trained at Purchase This Summer The first National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America (NYO-USA) prepared for a global tour by taking part in a rigorous training residency held on campus this summer. The musicians’ time at Purchase culminated on July 11, when world-renowned conductor Valery Gergiev led the NYO-USA in its inaugural performance at Purchase’s Performing Arts Center (PAC) to rave critical reviews. The program featured acclaimed violinist Joshua Bell.

The National Youth Orchestra of the USA, created by Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, is a major new, tuition-free initiative that brought together 120 of the most talented orchestral players ages 16–19 from across the country. Following an extensive audition process, the young musicians (representing 42 states and more than 100 cities and towns) were selected by the institute as being among the finest nationwide.

During their residency, which ran from June 30 through July 11, orchestra members occupied the PAC and the Conservatory of Music’s rehearsal studios for training, rehearsals, and mentoring led by section leaders from top American orchestras.

Purchase is a key partner in this new Carnegie initiative, and the NYO-USA marks the beginning of an ongoing connection in which the two organizations will share resources and explore collaborations in support of their missions and the advancement of their mutual educational goals.

“The partnership between Purchase College and Carnegie Hall began about two years ago, when we received a call from Carnegie Hall seeing if we had an interest in this project,” says Harry McFadden, director of the PAC. P U R C HA S E | 16

Valery Gergiev at SUNY Purchase for his first rehearsal with NYOUSA. Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director, and longtime friend of Gergiev’s, Clive Gillinson introduced the maestro to the orchestra.

Immediately after the Purchase concert, the orchestra headed off on tour, making its debut at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on Saturday, July 13.

The NYO-USA, along with Maestro Gergiev and Joshua Bell, then headed overseas for two concerts in Gergiev’s home country—in Moscow at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory and in St. Petersburg at the recently opened Mariinsky II Theater.

Valery Gergiev and Joshua Bell rehearse with the orchestra.

The orchestra’s first tour culminated with a concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall on July 21 as part of the BBC Proms, the world’s largest classical musical festival.

Lauren Britton ’14 Selected for Best of SUNY Student Art Exhibition Among the works selected for this year’s Best of SUNY Student Art Exhibition was a painting by Purchase student Lauren Britton, a double major in painting and drawing and art history.

Britton received an honorable mention for her painting Sinking Ship from 2012. The Lauren Britton, Sinking Ship, 2012, acrylic and boat in the three-by-fouroil on canvas, 3 x 4 ft., courtesy of the artist foot painting is an allegory for the self, an ongoing theme in her work at the time. “Sometimes the boat was floating along, sometimes it was sinking, and sometimes it had capsized altogether. The struggle in these paintings was often to keep the boat afloat,” she says.

According to SUNY’s chancellor, Nancy Zimpher, “the Best of SUNY art exhibition showcases works created by our top student artists from colleges and universities across New York over the past year.” The exhibition was on view through September 15 at the New York State Museum in Albany.

Lauren Britton ‘14

NewsBriefs J andon Business of the Arts Distinguished Lecture Series Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1990 to 2006, was the inaugural speaker in the Jandon Business of the Arts Distinguished Lecture Series at Purchase in May. This new, endowed lecture series was made possible with support from the Donald Cecil family in celebration of Donald Cecil’s 85th birthday. The annual lecture is designed to enhance the arts management program at Joseph Volpe Purchase. The Cecil family endowment also established the Jandon Business of the Arts Student Achievement Award, to be presented annually to a student majoring in the BA arts management program.

Known for their efforts to bring educational and cultural opportunities to disadvantaged young people, Jane and Donald Cecil have been an extraordinary force in improving the quality of life for families throughout the New York metropolitan area. Among their many contributions, the Cecils started the Jandon Scholars program, which provides educational funding for low-income, high-achieving students in Westchester County. They also established the Jandon Foundation Scholarship in Acting and the Jandon Theatre Production Fund at Purchase College, and created the Writing through the Arts Program at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

c ommencement 2013 The 41st annual Purchase College commencement took place on Friday, May 17, 2013, at the Westchester County Center in White Plains, NY. The commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient was renowned historian Eric Foner.

Photographer Gregory Crewdson ’85 and Jessica Hentoff ’77, artistic/executive director of Circus Day Foundation/Circus Harmony, were honored as distinguished alumni.

SUNY Chancellor’s Awards for Student Excellence were presented to Christina Blankenship, Michael Clark, and Amy Crehore, who were honored for their exceptional academic and extracurricular achievements.

Juliana Novello served as the 2013 senior commencement speaker.

President Schwarz with 2013 Student Chancellor’s Award recipients: (L–R) Amy Crehore (literature), Michael Clark (dance), and Christina Blankenship (liberal arts, focusing on dance and journalism).

Volpe, the featured speaker, has had a long and distinguished career in the world of the performing arts. He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Opera, where he spent 42 years working in various capacities, rising rapidly from apprentice carpenter to managerial positions; he eventually became the first head of the Met Opera to be chosen from the in-house ranks of the company.

According to Volpe, “the business of the arts requires real-world solutions by the next generation of arts leaders. I look forward to participating in the SUNY Purchase Jandon Business of the Arts Lecture Series to encourage students to take on the challenges of the present and future for a life in the arts.”

The Purchase College arts management program has been a growing and increasingly successful academic endeavor for the last several years. This BA program is preparing a new generation of engaged managers by emphasizing critical inquiry, creative thinking, and core skills to produce, promote, and support the arts and entertainment industry.

Purchase Dance Company Performs in NYC For the Purchase Dance Company, opening night at its first full New York City season was a huge success. Performing in front of a full house at New York Live Arts in Chelsea, the dancers opened their run on May 22, with evening performances through May 25.

“It was a historic moment for the Purchase College Conservatory of Dance,” says Wallie Wolfgruber, director of the conservatory. “The experience was exhilarating for our student performers. They did a wonderful job in front of a full audience, including many distinguished members of the dance world, such as choreographers Bill T. Jones and Purchase College alumnus Kyle Abraham ’00.”

Of special note, Kyle Abraham was among 24 creative individuals to be named a 2013 MacArthur Fellow. Often called the “Genius Award,” the prestigiuos honor comes with a stipend of $625,000 to be paid over five years. The award comes with no stipulations, providing maximum freedom for recipients to follow their own creative vision. The Pittsburch native is the founder of his own company, Abraham.In.Motion, and several Purchase alumni have performed with his company, including Addison Reese ‘11, Rena Butler ‘11, Chalvar Monteiro ‘10, Amer Parker ‘07, Hsiao Jou Tang ‘08, and Connie Shiau ‘12.

Claire Jamison ’13 Wins Patricia Kerr Ross Award Claire Jamison ’13 was selected to receive the 2013 Patricia Kerr Ross Award in the arts.

The award is given to a stuClaire Jamison ‘13 dent, or shared among several students, for demonstrating excellence, originality, and promise in the arts. It is intended to bridge SUNY study in the arts and entry into a professional career in the arts.

According to Jamison, who graduated with a BFA in acting, “Every play I’ve worked on, every scene in class, has given me new challenges, or the chance to work on continuing challenges. In the end, the biggest achievement is just getting to that point when you can fully trust yourself and honor your process of working.”

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NewsBriefs Purchase Ranks Number Ten According to a special feature in the May 29 issue of the Hollywood Reporter, Purchase College ranks number 10 on a list of the “Top 25 Dramatic Arts Schools and Programs in the World.” The ranking, says the magazine’s editors, is based on a recent poll of active casting directors across the globe. The Purchase College listing notes that “after four years, the cream of SUNY’s BFA actors get to audition for more than 300 agents, producers and casting directors in NYC and L.A.” “The style these actors have is unique,” adds Casting Society of America’s Monika Mikkelsen.

MFA Students Chosen for Prestigious Optic Nerve 15 Video Arts Festival Graduate students Samantha Harmon and Juwon Lee are among the 14 artists whose work was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami to be featured in Optic Nerve 15, an annual festival of short videos by artists. Harmon and Lee are pursuing degrees in the MFA visual arts program in the School of Art+Design.

“This kind of success is typical for our alumni, but less common for students still in school,” says the dean of the School of the Arts, Ravi Rajan. “Faye Hirsh, senior editor of Art in America and the coordinator of our MFA Still from Juwon Lee’s work Hidden Stories visual arts program, encourof Super Mario Bros. aged the students to apply for the festival as part of the learning experience of being a working artist. We were delighted to learn that not one, but two of our students were selected for this curated festival.”

Studio Production Majors Finish First Competing against music recording schools and programs across the country, a team of Purchase Conservatory of Music studio production majors received the grand prize in Shure, Inc.’s Fantastic Scholastic Recording Competition.

With the first-place award, Shure is donating nearly $12,000 in much-needed, high-end microphones and other recording equipment to the studio production program and Purchase Studios.

Faculty advisor and lecturer Silas Brown led the team of five production students, with the support of Peter Denenberg, assistant professor of music and chair of the studio production program.

Brown and Denenberg are co-directors of Purchase Studios.

Team members included Trevor Fedele, Pat Linehan, Josh Pleeter, Brendan Willams, and Joe Yonkers, who recorded Purchase studio composition major Sean McVerry and his band Coyote Campus performing McVerry’s song “Soviet Union.”

“We are especially proud that this was a Purchase-wide effort,” says Brown. “There are students involved representing our studio proLasersaur workshop duction and studio composition departments, but members of the band are also jazz studies, film studies, and new-media majors.”

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Go Panthers

• Purchase baseball standout Michael Sarni is the NCAA’s Division III statistical champion for stolen bases per game. He swiped 44 bags in the spring 2013 season.

• Panther alumni Miller Lulow ‘13 turned professional following a

sterling senior campaign this past spring, where he was named the 2013 Skyline Conference Pitcher of the Year, the Skyline ScholarAthlete of the Year, and an All-Region performer. He later joined the Taos Blizzard in Taos, NM, primarily as an everyday reliever.

• Baseball star Ronald Echavarria finished the season for the

Panthers by taking home 2013 ECAC Division III Metro Baseball Player of the Year honors. The designated hitter and outfielder registered the third-highest batting average in all of Division III (.478), and led Purchase in home runs (7) and runs batted in (35).

He was also named an ABCA and D3 Baseball.com All-American, and the Skyline Conference Player of the Year.

• The spring season saw the Panthers’ men’s tennis team reach the

Skyline Conference quarterfinals and the men’s baseball team reel off a 20-win season on the way to a conference playoff berth.

Winners on the courts and fields, Purchase athletes also stood out in the classroom—four were named SUNY Chancellor’s Scholar-Athlete Award winners, 42 were named to the Skyline Academic Honor Roll, and 39 more were named Purchase ScholarAthletes, boasting a 3.5 GPA or above.

Purchase alum Taylor Edelmann ’13 was featured in OUT magazine’s sports section, alongside diver Greg Louganis, Billy Bean (MLB), Wade Davis (NFL), and other notable LGBT male athletes. A rising star on the Purchase Women’s volleyball team, Edelmann switched teams and genders in 2012—and was later voted captain of the men’s volleyball team.

J azz Fans Enjoy Two Free Summer Concerts Pete Malinverni, director of jazz studies at Purchase College and a popular recording artist, headlined the first of two free jazz concerts this summer. Also featuring saxophonist Steve Wilson, professor of jazz studies, and vocalist Afua Monk, the concert, held on July 25, showcased American spirituals.

Pete Malinverni

Bill Charlap

The second event, on Aug. 8, featured two-time Grammy nominee Bill Charlap and his wife, the world-renowned jazz pianist Renee Rosnes. The two often collaborate in a duo piano setting.

Purchase Writers Center Entering its third year, the Writers Center at Purchase College welcomes two fellows. Professor Sun Xin, who teaches art history at Capital Normal University in Beijing, is a visiting scholar at Purchase, studying with Michael Lobel, professor of art history and director of the MA program in modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory; Maurizio Calbi, professor of English and Anglophone literature at the University of Salerno in Italy, joins the center as an Affiliated International Scholar. Professor Calbi is pursuing research on Shakespeare and film. The Writers Center also has a new interim director: Ross Daly, professor of journalism and chair of the School of Humanities at Purchase.

NewsBriefs The first two groups of Writers Center Fellows are thriving; they are publishing books, poems, stories, and critical essays—work that took shape during their time at the Writers Center.

Sarah Pawliczak ’13 Receives Prestigious Student of the Year Award The Central New York chapter of the American Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) named Sarah Pawliczak ’13 as the 2013 Central New York Chapter Student of the Year.

Selected from a pool of candidates Sarah Pawliczak ‘13 across upstate New York, Vermont, and north central Pennsylvania, Pawliczak was officially honored in May at the Westchester GIS User Group meeting, held at Purchase. Stephen DeGloria, PhD, national president of the ASPRS, presented the award.

According to Ryan Taylor, PhD, professor of environmental studies at Purchase, “This award is a first for our college and it represents significant recognition by the professional geospatial community.

Sarah’s work in geographic information systems (GIS) and remotely sensed datasets is impressive, and well deserving of the honor.”

Pawliczak says she plans to attend graduate school and hopes ultimately to apply her skills to enhance environmental policy.

Praising the environmental studies program, she says, “Our professors are passionate, not only about their unique areas of study and teaching, but also about their students. They are committed to helping us figure out which areas ‘click’ for us and encourage us to use those ‘clicks’ to develop individualized approaches in our own research.”

CollectiVE Action Archive in the Passage Gallery The Purchase College new media program, in conjunction with Franklin Street Works, a contemporary art space in Stamford, CT, presented a group exhibition, Collective Action Archive, at the Passage Gallery at Purchase College in September. Curated and coordinated by Purchase faculty and students along with the Franklin Street Works team, the exhibition kicked off the gallery’s 2013 season. The show featured ephemera, documentation, and publications such as photos, videos, zines, and books from more than 30 artist collectives from across the U.S., including Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Pittsburgh, PA, WinstonSalem, NC, and San Francisco, CA. Collectives included in this exhibition were: ABC No Rio, Artists against Apartheid, Big Tent, Conflict Kitchen, Critical Making, Fierce Pussy, Floating Lab Collective, Futurefarmers, Guerrilla Girls, Guffey Hollow, Howling Mob Society, Illegal Art, Just Seeds, Kitchen Sink, Knifeandfork, Lucky Pierre, M12 Studio, Meme Rider Media Team, National Bitter Melon Council, Okay Mountain Collective, Paper Tiger TV, Philly Stake, Preemptive Media, Publication Studio, Regional Relationships, Second Front, Students of the African Diaspora, subRosa, Temporary Services, the Pinky Show, W.A.G.E., and Work Progress Collective.

At Purchase the Collective Action Archive exhibition team included associate professor of new media Brooke Singer, with interns Stephen Barakat, Gina Mischianti, Bonnie Moncada, and Diogo Sales.

Second Annual Backstage Legends and Masters Award Given to Legendary Scenic Artist Arnold Abramson The Broadway Technical Theatre History Project at Purchase honored scenic artist Arnold Abramson with the second annual Backstage Legends and Masters Award on April 22, 2013. One of the past century’s most influential scenic artists, Abramson has painted more than 600 Broadway production sets, including the original version of The King and I; My Fair Lady; 42nd Street; Annie; Hello, Dolly; Sunday in the Park with George; Camelot; Sweeney Todd; The Sound of Music; Evita; Cats; and Bells Are Ringing.

Dan Hanessian, an associate professor of technical direction and Arnold Abramson production management in the design/technology program of the Conservatory of Theatre Arts, launched the Backstage Legends and Masters program last year. According to Hanessian, the program focuses on individuals who have been central to the realization of Broadway productions for many years but are not typically provided recognition through the Tony or Drama Desk Awards. Presented by the Broadway Technical Theatre History Project, the Backstage Legends and Masters event was webcast live and also archived for future viewing.

Purchase Jazz Orchestra Performed in NYC Last spring, the Purchase Jazz Orchestra (PJO) once again performed at renowned jazz venues in New York City.

A 17-piece big band composed of superbly talented students from the Conservatory of Music’s jazz studies program, the PJO performs jazz from every era—from staples such as pieces by Ellington and Basie to more-modern works by today’s leading composers and arrangers such as McNeely, Clayton, Abene, and Schneider.

Since 2009, the Purchase Jazz Orchestra has been performing at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Lincoln Center. In April, the group appeared for two shows with special guest Steve Wilson on alto saxophone. Wilson is a lecturer in the jazz studies program. The PJO also performed—with renowned trumpet player and Purchase professor Jon Faddis as a guest soloist—at Greenwich Village’s legendary jazz club the Blue Note.

Playing these venues affords the students invaluable experience, according to Conservatory of Music professor Todd Coolman, the Grammy Award–winning jazz bassist who conducts the group.

“They perform for a real audience of bona fide jazz fans who are there by choice rather than coincidence. That audience is demanding and they expect excellence to be on display at venues of this reputation,” Coolman says.

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When

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the fine art of gaming technology

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Jonathan Cook ’08 (BA, new media) failed to see the point of his high school calculus curriculum, so he paid little attention and wrote games on his TI-83 calculator instead. It was just more fun. “The irony of not paying attention in class in order to program computer games isn’t lost on me,” he says.

With a new-media degree in hand and his eyes fixed on the gaming industry, Cook headed to the West Coast—San Francisco and Los Angeles are main hubs in video game production—where he landed a job at CrowdStar, early in the company’s trajectory toward becoming a leader in mobile and social gaming. Cook quickly worked his way up to running his own gaming studio there and helped create Crowdstar’s Facebook megahit Happy Aquarium.

Released in 2009, it currently has 7.9 million “likes.”

educators integrate curricular games into the classroom. Even former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has gotten into the game. She conceived of iCivics, a game that teaches civics lessons to middle school and ninth-grade students. And in 2012, CNN Money added “video game designer” to its list of six “Best New Jobs in America,” with an expected 10-year job growth rate of over 32 percent.

While an intense passion for gaming is a given, those who choose careers in the industry also tend to have similar aptitudes, including flexibility and adaptability, as well as the ability to collaborate, communicate effectively, and work well under pressure. Whether they are working as game designers, programmers, artists, writers, or business executives—for large “triple A” corporations or small independent firms, or as entrepreneurs—the Purchase experience amply prepares those wishing to work in the world of play.

The genesis of the video game industry dates back to the 1970s— when kids stood for hours at the arcade pumping quarters into a game cabinet to fight space invaders or asteroids. The 1980s saw the invasion of Atari consoles in living rooms across the country.

The expansion of the industry since then has been remarkable.

In 2012, video game content, hardware, and accessories generated $20.77 billion in sales, and video and computer companies directly or indirectly employed more than 120,000 people in 34 states.

Families play together, corporations use games to train workers, the medical industry incorporates them into patient therapy, and

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Crowdstar’s Happy Aquarium Facebook game, with 7.9 million players.

Level Up Your Mind With several years of valuable experience under his belt, Jonathan Cook and a colleague recently left Crowdstar to begin a new venture, about which Cook is unable to reveal many details while he’s raising capital. He and his partner share an ongoing passion to combine education with gaming to help kids push through what might be perceived as boring or pointless material. “I like to think of this approach as an attempt to ‘level up your mind,’ with the benefit of keeping what you have gained as opposed to losing it when you stop playing,” he says.

At Purchase, he enjoyed both the constant, creative problem-solving and the do-it-yourself culture of the new-media major. Peter Ohring, associate professor of mathematics/computer science and new media, explains, “Many students bring a passion for gaming to Purchase, but the students who end up as game designers are also interested in being ‘makers’—not everyone’s a maker.”

“I found the whole experience an excellent environment to develop ambitions, concepts, and an overall sense of self-direction,” Cook notes. When working for a “scrappy game startup,” having a strong foundation in the visual arts and music is a valuable skill as well. “I have worked with some amazingly talented artists, and being able to communicate with them from an artistic background has proven to be immensely powerful when it comes to creating a unified game vision,” he explains.

Gamers for Good Nathaniel McClure makes games for a living. “I hope I put smiles on people’s faces, but that wasn’t enough. I don’t want to sound corny or cliché, but I want to help people, to be engaged in my community. I want to be someone who shows up.” He mulled over ways to do it, then finally decided to employ his experience in the video game industry and start a nonprofit arm of Scientifically Proven Entertainment called GM4G, or Game Makers 4 Good.

McClure had experienced long hospital stays as a child following an accident, so he wanted to provide an escape for others in the same situation. He launched Health Packs in 2013, a video game donation program that places game systems in hospitals and rehab units for those who are bedridden or recovering. He writes, “The goal of GM4G is to educate parents, gamers, and the population on the positive effects of interactive engagement while also being a resource for information about age-appropriate content.”

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Cook hopes to combine the lessons from Purchase with those from CrowdStar—fail fast, seize opportunity quickly, push the limits when you hit them, and learn how to scale and delegate—as he enters the world of entrepreneurial gaming.

The world of Sonic the Hedgehog captured the imagination of Ian Cofino ’09 (BFA graphic design) when he was a child. The seeds of his eventual journey into the video game industry were planted as he dreamed of creating his own worlds. Once at Purchase, all doubt about the field he would enter vanished when he fell into motion graphics and video work. “I really felt like I found an art form that I clicked with,” he says.

In one of Scientifically Proven Entertainment’s first video games, Rock of the Dead, the player kills zombies and aliens with guitars and drums.

The Trashers mobile app, created by SPE, won the “Best App Ever” award in the Kids Game of the Year category in 2011.

Now a user-interface designer at 2K Sports, a major producer of console, PC, and handheld games with titles such as NBA2K and MLB2K, Cofino is responsible for presenting game information as a realistic simulation of a major network sports broadcast. Employing his motion graphics skills, he creates the onscreen displays of scores, stats, and updates as well as cinematic transitions and preand postgame scenes.

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Living the Dream While in middle school, Mike Murphy ‘08 (BA, journalism) developed an interest in writing from reading gaming magazines. He entered Purchase, majored in journalism, and interned at NBC’s Dateline his senior year.

His goal was to land a position in the NBC Page Program after graduation.

Unfortunately, the recession dried up many newspaper jobs and Murphy failed to get into the program. “This left me wondering how to keep myself writing and not get rusty,” he says.

Merely looking to keep his writing skills sharp, he applied for jobs with small game websites. GamerNode.com picked him up and he’s now a senior editor. According to Murphy, much of his success is due to his role as editor-in-chief of his Web journalism class at Purchase. “I really feel it gave me an advantage over others looking to get a start in games journalism, and it’s allowed me to help a lot of GamerNode’s writers grow through my edits,” he says. In a field as competitive as his, Murphy believes the keys to success are “passion, determination, and patience.” He adds, “This job has been some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life.”

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Cofino’s interest in gaming has expanded into filmmaking as well.

What began as a short film for his senior project at Purchase developed into the full-length documentary, I Got Next. The film follows elite players of Street Fighter II as they compete in tournaments across the U.S., offering unique insight into a fervent segment of the gaming community. The film is available on hulu.com.

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For Cofino, the ability to work as part of a team with direction is imperative in the gaming business. He’s also learned that ego can get in the way of client- or team-based work. “You have to be affable and willing to compromise, even mediate if the situation arises, and I think the right attitude towards the work and your peers plays a huge role,” he explains.

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Elevating Play Gameplay. Rule sets. Emergent complexity.

Keith Burgun ’01–’06 and Blake Reynolds ’08 (MusB), ’10 (MM, studio production) expound on their approach to video game design; their knowledge is deep and their passion intense. Motivated by what they perceive as the lack of challenging gameplay found in many video games currently available, the pair is on a mission: to help elevate video gaming from a sometimes “brain-dead” activity to one that enriches the mind. Two and half years in the making, their new game, Auro, will be released in November 2013.

Burgun and Reynolds met in 2006 in an orchestration class in the Conservatory of Music’s studio composition program. The two became fast friends and eventually business partners in Dinofarm Games, an independent game development company. Their first game, 100 Rogues, for the iOS platform, was a critical hit. Leveraging that credibility, they’ve gone “all in” with Auro.

“We don’t have a lot of resources and we’re mostly doing this on elbow grease and midnight oil. As an artist and musician, I’ve dumped two and half years of massive artistic resources into this project. The sacrifice is great, but we hope that it will eventually pay off. It is undoubtedly entrepreneurship in the purest sense,” Reynolds says. While the artistic presentation of blockbuster games fascinates him, he often finds that “the gameplay tends to be stale and boring.” In his role at Dinofarm, he has applied polished artistic assets to Auro.

As a game designer, Burgun draws inspiration from the serious, competitive strategy he finds in both the designer board games popular in Europe and rogue-like video games—an obscure, 30-year-old genre whose main hook is randomly generated content, meaning it’s never the same game twice. He finds fault with expensive games that users beat in a weekend and then cast aside. “Have you heard of the expression, ‘Easy to learn, difficult to master’?

Chess is a good example; that’s like the holy grail of game design,” he explains. “So that’s our mission, to marry a really attractive and accessible presentation with mechanisms and gameplay interactions that are interesting, deep, and can withstand years of play.”

As a critic, that’s just what Murphy looks for in a game. “Ultimately, all games need to have fun and engaging gameplay in order for them to work. It has to be playable, otherwise it’ll either bore me to death or drive me into a ‘ragequit,’” he explains.

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The Rise of IndIE Gaming Small, independent game designers such as Dinofarm are riding the wave created by the accessibility of social media and mobile platforms. A simple $100 gaming license allows anyone to distribute games through Apple’s App Store, for example. Without a budget for the extravagant animation, celebrity voiceovers, and massive marketing campaigns of the triple-A industry, independent designers are left to compete where they can: on gameplay. This reflects the era in game design before technology allowed for much else.

“It’s kind of come full circle. We don’t have the resources to compete on that axis, so we can circumvent them by making an interesting play experience,” says Reynolds.

Cook describes the world of social, mobile, and independent game production as “the Wild West, compared to traditional video games—there’s a lot of room to create a successful game with a much smaller team, and the game itself is oftentimes able to step out of the boundaries that would normally confine your average PC or console game.”

The flip side of course is that indie game designers require a broad set of skills that encompass branding, marketing, publishing, social media, and more. “What’s happening in the indie game industry is similar to the change in the music industry: you must be able to market yourself, to put yourself out there, be willing to use Kickstarter to fundraise. It requires social skills, confidence, and understanding of the new model of arts marketing,” says Ohring.

Burgun and Reynolds plan to spread the word about Auro through a vast network of contacts. “It’s all guerilla; the development is guerilla, the marketing is guerilla,” says Reynolds. “But that’s the world we live in. Even if we had a million dollars for marketing, what would we spend that on? We have a better shot because of our connections,” adds Burgun.

Screen shots of Auro, Dinofarm’s new mobile app.

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Nathaniel McClure ’00 (BA, economics) has experienced gaming from many perspectives. He spent six years at the industry behemoth Activision working mainly on the Call of Duty franchise, one of the most successful titles ever created. McClure got his start there after 9/11, when many of the acting roles he had been getting in L.A. dried up. Shopping around for a new opportunity, he landed a job as a game tester and it clicked: he knew immediately that the industry was for him.

“Activision was like college; it was like a six-year, hands-on education with the best people in the business,” he explains. He was proud of his work there and grateful for the experience, but “I reached a point in my own maturity where I wanted to test myself— to put together a team and see if we could make a game that people will like.” He also hoped to circumvent the strict hierarchy and creative bottlenecks sometimes found at larger corporations.

One of his first game ventures, Real Heroes: Firefighters, borrowed the first-person, shooter style of Call of Duty, but its gameplay glorified firefighters who shot water instead of bullets. “We wanted to make a first-person cinematic game, but the hook had to be something different. My grandfather was a fire chief for 30 years— these are the people who show up and put themselves in danger when everyone else runs in the other direction,” he says.

The game was a huge success for McClure’s first studio, Epicenter.

Tax incentives lured him from L.A. to Detroit, where the selfdescribed “serial entrepreneur” opened his current independent game studio, Scientifically Proven Entertainment (SPE). In 2011, it collaborated with the Discovery Channel to develop the first title for Xbox 360/Wii/PS3 ever made in Michigan, the Man vs. Wild game. Later that same year, Trashers, its very first iOS/Android game, won the Best App Ever Award in the category Kids’ Game of the Year.

SPE’s latest title, Blood of the Werewolf, was just released in September. Following a series of publishing deals that went sour and a threatened bankruptcy, McClure decided to make his independent venture even more so by publishing Blood of the Werewolf himself. He was thrilled when his 12 employees agreed; they spent a year developing the game. “We’ve been eating a lot of Wonder Bread and ramen. You get paid when pay is available and we take other work when we can to keep the lights on, but it’s been incredible. We own every part of the game. We’re very excited,” he says.

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The Next Level Murphy sees continued success in the future of mobile, social, and open-source markets, and while he believes the triple-A industry isn’t going away, it is bloated. “There are too many companies spending too much on development to make triple-A games that they really shouldn’t be making, or aren’t going about making intelligently,” he says.

In his book Game Design Theory: A New Philosophy for Understanding Games, Burgun applies to game design what he learned about music theory at Purchase. “I’m trying to build a set of guidelines or principles for building good games in the same way we have for music, storytelling, and art. Just because it’s a creative thing doesn’t mean there aren’t rules or principles that will help you do it better,” he explains.

“It’s an exciting time to be in the industry,” Burgun says, and he and Reynolds agree that while indie video game production may present a tough lifestyle, it’s a rewarding career choice. They’re both confident about Dinofarm’s future, and Burgun adds, “For what it’s worth, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than making video games. So if I had to live this way [scraping by] forever, as long as I could still make games, I would probably still choose to do it.”

Despite the obstacles he’s endured, McClure loves the path he’s chosen. “I want to show my children and my employees that you can create the job you love. Don’t settle. I’ve encountered hard times, but I can’t wait to go to work every day.”

Are you an alumnus working in the gaming industry?

Email us and tell us your story: alumni@purchase.edu

Dear Alumni and Friends: This issue of PURCHASE magazine highlights “Image Makers.”

The advent of digital camera technology and services such as Instagram have made many of us (including me) amateur photographers, but Purchase’s photography program gives students the solid background in the conceptual and technical aspects of the fine art of photography, and our alumni are trailblazing the field.

The magazine also highlights Purchase as the center of a global village. Our faculty, students, and alumni work across the world making connections, conducting research, teaching, learning from other cultures, studying abroad, and performing.

Take some time this year to visit the campus, attend one of the Alumni Association’s events, and be sure to join us on Facebook, Twitter (@purchasealumni ), or LinkedIn. There are so many ways to get reconnected and network with your fellow alumni.

Help us to grow our online communities and share in our common experiences as Purchase alumni.

Many of our endeavors, and the important initiatives of student scholarships and faculty development, are supported with the generosity of fellow alumni through the Purchase Fund. If you have already given a gift to this year’s fund, I thank you for your contribution. If you have never given, I encourage you to join me as a donor to the Purchase Fund. Every little bit counts. To find out more about the fund, go http://www.purchase.edu/ giving/ and click on “Purchase Fund.” You can even give online.

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Larry Isaacs, MD (biology), was appointed an assistant clinical professor of surgery at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine for 2013–16.

Jeff Salkin

Jeff Salkin (sociology) is back in the Northeast after a decade-long sojourn in Georgia. He now serves as the rabbi at Temple Beth Am in Bayonne, NJ, and spends most of his time lecturing around the country and writing. His most recent book is The Gods Are Broken! The Hidden Legacy of Abraham, published by Jewish Lights. Salkin blogs at jewishjournal.com/martini_judaism.

Donald Margulies (visual arts) is having two major New York play revivals in the 2013–14 season: The Model Apartment at Primary Stages in September and Dinner with Friends at the Roundabout in January. His latest play, The Country House, will have its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles next June before opening on Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Friedman Theatre during the 2014–15 season.

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Robert Daraio (design tech) is running for a second term as a member of the board of trustees in the Village of Ossining, NY. After 33 years as a broadcast television engineer, he became a local representative at the Newspaper Guild of New York in 2012. Daraio graduated with an MA from the CUNY Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies in 2011, and is a U.S. Coast Guard licensed master of near-coastal 50-ton vessels.

Please stay in touch by sending professional and personal news for “Alumni in Action,” as well as updated addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses, to alumni@purchase.edu.

Do you have any suggestions about how we can better connect with your fellow alumni? Let us know. I look forward to hearing from you and am honored to serve as your president.

in Action

Paul Feldstein

Robert Daraio

Paul Feldstein (literature) is a literary agent and publishing consultant based in Northern Ireland. In addition to representing writers, he consults for a variety of clients, including Barnes & Noble NOOK UK. Feldstein moved to Ireland in 2007 with his Irish wife Susan, who is also his partner in the agency.

Susan represents writers and does ghostwriting and editing for a wide range of clients. The Feldstein Agency can be reached at thefeldsteinagency.co.uk.

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Jeffrey S. Putman, ‘96 President, Purchase College Alumni Association, Inc. jeffrey.putman@purchase.edu

Recently, one of Putman’s photos was selected by a panel of judges as a winner of the #LoveNYC Instagram Contest from the City of New York, representing the Bronx. The photo will be displayed in a digital exhibition at the New York Public Library, as well as on the City of New York’s official social media outlets. In addition, Putman, along with the four other winners, will serve as official City of New York Instagram photo ambassadors.

Justine Blau (literature) has just published a memoir, Scattered, her vivid account of growing up chronically homeless in 1960s-era Manhattan with her delusional mother and her two older brothers. She finds unlikely salvation through the relationships she builds in the tumult of a Westchester group home for children. Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, described Scattered as “deeply compelling.” The book, published by Hand Whistle Press, is available from Amazon. com in paperback and on Kindle. The first chapter is available at justinehopeblau.com.

Terri Kinney (psychology) received her PhD from Yale University in 1986. She did addiction neurobiology research at Yale Medical School until 2006, when she moved to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In January 2013, Kinney became a professor of psychology at the University of Houston; she says she hopes to find outstanding graduate students. She is married and has two children. Her daughter graduated from college and recently married, and her son began college this fall.

Peter Kurz

Peter Kurz (political science) enjoyed an illustrious college career as the catcher for the Purchase Burnouts softball team. He was recently elected the president of the Israel Association of Baseball and led the Israeli national team to second place in the World Baseball Classic qualifiers. In his spare time, Kurz works as the vice president for marketing and exports for Merhav, a manufacturer of bath and kitchen products in Israel. He holds an MBA and reports that he has three wonderful grown children and a loving wife.

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Carol Joy Packer (literature) happily retired from the New York City Department of Education at age 55, after teaching high school English and English as a second language for 27 years. Two years ago, she relocated to Lake Worth, FL, in Palm Beach County, where she revels and plays golf.

Larry Robinson (literature) writes about classic movies for the “Enjoy!” section of the Poughkeepsie Journal in Dutchess County, NY. He credits Ron Mottram, one of his Purchase professors, for encouraging his interest in film, especially Westerns.

1981

Brazil, and directs the Orchestra Barroca da UNIRIO. Recently the university received a grant to buy instruments for the orchestra. Last year it was awarded a grant to produce a series of concerts portraying the most common human emotions. It was a success, Rónai reports, with full houses and enthusiastic responses. The orchestra’s plans for 2014 include a joint concert with the Baroque Orchestra from the Amazon, the only other stable baroque orchestra in Brazil.

Allyson C. Johnson (music) completed two seasons as a film editor on NBC’s Smash and is moving on to edit Us & Them, a new sitcom, for Fox.

1983

Pedro de Alcantara (music) has published a new book with Oxford University Press: the second edition, completely rewritten and redesigned, of Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique. This year will also mark the first time one of his books has been published in Estonian! He lives in Paris and travels the world giving concerts, classes, and workshops.

Stephen Markowitz (psychology) worked as a financial consultant for more than 20 years. For the past Curtis Kasefang (design decade, he has been building a national entertainLeigh Dillon (acting) maintains a private practice in tech) recently completed ment company, Party Hats Entertainment (partyManhattan; in 2013 she coached Liev Schreiber work on the Zachary Scott hats.org), which specializes in bringing a “party (preproduction) for Larry David’s Clear History Theatre in Austin, TX. He hats” decorating activity to groups at special (HBO) and Aksel Hennie for The Last Knights (starnotes that the opening of events; the concept was named a “Smart Idea” by ring Morgan Freeman and Clive Owen). She was the this beautiful and ecoEntrepreneur magazine. Markowitz and his wife, on-set dialect coach for Felicity Jones for the drama nomical theatre is a water- who have three children, recently bought a country True Story and for Jena Malone and the rest of the shed moment in the life of resort, Hidden Valley Retreat and Spa, in California. cast of the thriller Angelica, set in Victorian England. this emerging professional “Purchase was a wonderful time in my life,” he Curtis Kasefang Currently, Dillon is working on The Equalizer (Sony/ theatre company. writes, “and it was terrific to return for this year’s Columbia), directed by Antoine Fuqua, coaching Kasefang was the project 30th anniversary events on campus.” the cast in dialects and the Russian language. leader and designed the lighting and sound systems. Also in Austin he opened the new home of C. J. Henning (literature) has published several books, now available on Amazon.com Kindle, in the the PBS show Austin City Limits, a facility that is David S. Bathory (psychology) was the keynote both a television studio and a live-music venue. past year. The titles are Whirlwind Sage and the speaker on healthcare systems and models at the Arbushi Wars, Tiathan Eiula and the War of the Seven Carole Stewart McDonnell (literature) has made Ninth International Conference on Economics and Fortresses, Wormwood, On the Morning of the First Tangent’s recommended reading list with her Administration, held in June 2013 in Bucharest, Day, and The Complete Poetry of C. J. Henning. steamfunk story “A Cry for Hire,” which appeared Romania. Three of his articles will be published this Within the next few months she will add Common in the Fantastic Stories of the Imagination anthology. year in the International Journal of Applied Behavioral Sense, or Who’s That Sitting in My Pew, A House Her second novel, The Constant Tower, was pubEconomics; they outline applications of his theory Divided, and The Comstock Chronicles, which is an lished in June 2013 by Wildside. It’s a fantasy novel. of relational dynamics. autobiography.

Linus Coraggio Brant (visual arts) has been active in Mark Patnode (visual arts) is a working artist, Harlem, where he designed a sculpture garden for whose painting “Meridian to State Street” was Marissa Chibas (acting) presented a short film she La Maison d’Art gallery at 259 West 132nd Street; accepted into the 33rd Annual Birren National Color wrote, directed, and performed in at the San Diego the gallery also features his totemic metal sculpAward Show. To see more about Mark, visit Latino Film Festival in March 2013. Her solo show tures and wild mosaics. Another backyard Harlem marktheartist.com.

Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary has been present- brownstone hotspot is the home of Bill Jennings ed at REDCAT in Los Angeles, at the Daryl Roth ’86 (film), who commissioned Brant to create a 20’ x Theatre in New York, in Miami, in Guadalajara, 9’ welded-wall relief of African mask heads and an Mexico, and at the Edinburgh Fringe. She runs an apocalyptic cityscape that Jennings likens to the Peter Fogel (acting) is an initiative, Duende CalArts, that celebrates Latino movie Metropolis. award-winning humorist, culture at CalArts, where she is on the Theater author, copywriter, and Brian Drillinger (acting) is the creative director of School faculty. motivational business the Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica, speaker. Whether he is Linda McCauley Freeman (literature) and her husCA. He produced the feature Hello Herman, starring doing stand-up comedy band, Chester Freeman, headlined a show at Bard Norman Reedus, which was shown at the 2012 shows or delivering corpo- College’s famous Spiegeltent in August 2013, and Hollywood Film Festival and won an award for rate presentations, he is plan to teach swing dance on a 75-day Holland social relevance at the 2013 Monaco Charity Film using the skills he learned America cruise through Asia and the South Pacific.

Festival. It is now available on iTunes and On at Purchase. Presently, Their company, Got2Lindy Dance Studios, holds Demand. Drillinger is currently living and teaching Fogel is the touring star of regular group classes in Kingston, NY. They specialacting in Yonkers, NY. Peter Fogel the hit New York comedy ize in the Lindy Hop and private lessons in any style My Mother’s Italian…My Max VanDerBeek (music) is a performer and educafor wedding couples. Visit them at got2lindy.

Father’s Jewish…and I’m in Therapy! His website is tor in the Baltimore area. He earned a doctorate in com andbestweddingdancelessons.com. fogelscorporatecomedy.com. percussion at the University of Maryland, and is Laura Rónai (music) is head of the Flute currently the director of bands at Bates Magnet Terry McCarthy (acting) has released his third CD of Department at the University of Rio de Janeiro, Middle School in Annapolis. He thanks his original music, The Charm. The “Purchase faculty and peeps for life-changing les15-song collection is available sons, rehearsals, and performances at Purchase.” on iTunes and CDbaby as well as from most digital music services. McCarthy’s previous Mary-Kelly Weir (literature) has been working in albums, First CD and Wait a daytime television production for the last 25 Second, are there as well. years. She started out as a production assistant and Upcoming gigs will be then became an associate director. Weir has announced on his Facebook worked on many network soap operas as well as page, and his music videos Laura Rónai Terry McCarthy The Dr. Phil Show. Currently she is a producer on the appear on YouTube.

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ABC soap opera General Hospital. Weir has been nominated for four Emmy Awards and belongs to the Directors Guild of America.

Anne Wennerstrand (dance) was appointed to the governing board of directors of the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute (WTCI) in New York City.

Wennerstrand is a psychotherapist in Katonah, NY, specializing in women’s mental health. She is the clinical supervisor and on the faculty of the WTCI, teaching in the postgraduate program “Eating and the Body: A Cultural, Relational, Psychoanalytic Approach.”

John G. Young (film) premiered Recruiting, a new play he wrote and directed based on an original screenplay, at the Fresh Fruit Play Festival in July 2013 in New York City. The story is based on real events surrounding John G. Young the multiple suicides of Army recruiting officers in Texas during the “surge” in Iraq. It starred Pamela Stuart ’85 (acting). Recruiting is being developed into Young’s fourth feature film.

1986

Elisa Flynn (visual arts) is the registrar for exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum. She has called Brooklyn home for the past 11 years. For six years she was a managing member of the Thirteen Gallery in Danbury, CT, and has been in various indie rock bands for the past 27 years. Since 2006, she has been a solo indie folk musician, and also produces regular themed music shows under the name Tripeg Lobo Productions.

1987

J. Robin Ward (literature) finished her MAT at SUNY New Paltz in 1999, and has been teaching English and journalism at Poughkeepsie High School since 1999. She started her PhD studies at SUNY Albany in August 2013.

1988

Regina Curro Gelfer (visual arts) had one of her illustrations selected by the National AntiVivisection Society to be used on notecards for the group’s direct-mail fundraising efforts. She says, “I am honored that such a compassionate and wonderful organization would select my work to help further its mission of protecting animals.

Thank you, NAVS!” Sarajean Rossitto (sociology) has been serving as the Japan program adviser for Give 2 Asia, assisting in support and fund disbursement for recovery and rebuilding projects in the disasteraffected areas in northSarajean Rossitto eastern Japan. This year Rossitto has been working with the Asian Rural Institute in Tochigi Prefecture on an evaluation of its training program. She was excited to join Peace Boat for a week of workshops on board.

1989

James Noel Hoban (acting) just completed another season of summer rep at the Theater at Monmouth in Maine, appearing in productions of The Taming of the Shrew, Our Town, and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. He will be directing the theatre’s fall touring production of Twelfth Night.

1990

Gale Martineau (design tech) just got engaged and is relocating her business, GFL, Inc., to the Chicago area, and is starting a master’s degree in digital photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She is doing most of it online, but will be back in NYC for the summer of 2015 for her thesis show and will finish the program on campus.

Martineau has also been teaching robotics and 3D design with a STEMS program in Greenbelt, MD, and hopes to build a sister program in her new hometown in Illinois.

1991

Joshua Abeles (history) is currently a vice president in the Legal Department at JPMorgan Chase.

Stephen Burt (visual arts) was invited to contribute work to an invitational exhibition, The Gift of the Glacier: The Maine Landscape, held at the L. C. Bates Museum from May 15 to Oct. 25, 2013.

Burt has been granted tenure at the University of New England as an associate professor and chair of the Department of Arts and Communications.

Sheilagh Casey (art history) was awarded first prize in painting at the Ninth Annual Jersey Shore Juried Art Show for her acrylic Memory Vessel.

Professor Kay Stables, former art department chair at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, juried the show, hosted by the Belmar Arts Council in March 2013. Along with the winners in four other categories, Casey was awarded an opportunity to exhibit at the Boatworks in Belmar, NJ, in February 2014.

Todd Scot (music) is the innovation design leader at the global office of Digital Innovation. He plans to compete in ten Olympic-distance triathlons this year. An accomTodd Scot plished songwriter, Scot performs at the Blue Bird Café in Nashville and is a freelance percussionist.

He earned a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music; after serving in the U.S. army, he became a historian of American revolutionary history.

1992

Mariah Maloney (dance) performed, lectured, and taught around the world as a featured soloist and

ensemble dancer with the Trisha Brown Dance Company from 1995 to 2002. Mariah Maloney Dance, formed in 2003, has been invited to perform, teach, and create new work throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America. She has presented work at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Inside/ Out festival. Maloney serves as an assistant professor and the graduate program director at the College at Brockport, SUNY, and earned an MFA from Hollins/ADF. Visit mariahmaloneydance.com.

Maya Hirose Schnapp

Jonathan Schnapp (visual arts) and his wife, Kumi Hirose-Schnapp, welcomed a baby girl, Maya Hirose Schnapp, on May 23, 2013.

Jeffrey Schwarz (film) produced and directed Vito, a documentary about the life of gay activist and film scholar Vito Russo.

Produced for HBO Documentary Films, it received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Historical Program, Long Form, as well as one in the Research category. It is now available on DVD and iTunes from First Run Features.

Matthew Sheridan (music) is a writer and composer whose play Audition was published by Playscripts in Great Short Comedies. Small Talk won the Audience Favorite Award in the New York City 15-Minute Play Festival, produced in Times Square. His other works include the musical The Ambition Bird, which has been showcased in competitive festivals on both sides of the Atlantic and regionally in the U.S. Sheridan also scored the short film Listen, shown on the Independent Film Channel.

1993

Denise Meagher (chemistry) left the lab at the Rockefeller University and earned her 500 gross ton oceans captain’s license. She is a sailing instructor on the Hudson River and is also the primary captain for the schooner Unicorn, the only all-female sailtraining tall ship in the world.

Ivan Rubenstein-Gillis (anthropology) has been busy musically, recording his most-recent album, TYPOE, and producing an album for legendary jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd. Trombone for Lovers, scheduled to release in October 2013 on Sunnyside Records, reinterprets a number of great jazz, R&B, and folk standards, and features contributions from John Medeski, Bob Dorough, and others. More information and lots of music can be found at ivanrubensteingillis.com.

Deborah Thurlow (MFA, music) has been writing lyrics and music and recording a fusion of jazz, pop, and adult contemporary music for the past two years. Her most recent single—“Where Were You?”—is a 9/11 tribute song. A CD release party P U R C HA S E | 2 7

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was scheduled for October 2013 at the Drama Book Shop in New York City for Collage, Thurlow’s 11th CD. She is also a band director and instrumental middle-school educator in East Orange, NJ, teaching privately, composing, and performing on the French horn. Visit deborahthurlow.com.

1994

Peter C. Frank (music) was in a serious car accident in 2002, but has slowly returned to his political and community activist activities. After the closure of the Bronx Community Pride Center, he began creating a brand-new community center from the ground up. The new Bronx LGBTQ Center will soon begin providing a limited number of programs and services to the community, including a legal clinic, workshops, and recovery and support groups. Write to Frank at secretary@bronxlgbtqcenter.org for more information.

Arielle Greenberg (drama studies) accepted a new position as a core faculty member in the new lowresidency MFA program at Oregon State University– Cascades, where she will be teaching poetry and interdisciplinary writing. Papers related to the zine she produced while at Purchase, William Wants a Doll, are now housed in the Girl Studies/Zine Collection at Duke University. She lives in Belfast, ME, with her family. Visit ariellegreenberg.net.

Eric Lima (environmental science) has, since graduation, taught English, hosted a radio show and “a cheesy television show,” and been a travel guide.

He traveled, mostly around South Korea, and honed his math skills to become a math and science teacher at an international high school. Lima returned to the U.S. in 1998, and nine years later completed his PhD at Columbia University in tissue engineering.

He was awarded a faculty position at the Cooper Union, teaching courses on hands-on prototyping and idea exploration.

1996

Stephanie Silber Zimet (literature) is looking forward to the projected autumn release of the latest documentary from her company, Home Team Productions. Everything Is Forever is a cinematic journey following composer Nenad Bach through war and peace and rock ’n’ roll. Her new blog explores the vicissitudes and joys of the creative process; visit stephaniesilberwordsworks.com. She is a member of Irish American Writers & Artists and of Artists without Walls.

1997

Allen Bain (film) and Jesse Scolaro (film) are the producers of a feature film, Revenge of the Green Dragons, which just completed principal photography in New York City. The film is directed by Andrew Lau and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, and stars Ray Liotta, Harry Shum, and Justin Chon. It is based on New York Times best-selling author Fredric Dannen’s New Yorker article of the same name.

1998

Jaime Flores (literature) is currently the chair of the English & Communications Department at

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Jaime Flores

Miami Dade College. Previously, he was an assistant professor of English at Broward College. While at Purchase, Flores was on the dean’s list, received the Pepsi Scholarship, and was a writing tutor in the Academic Support Center. After graduating from Purchase, he completed master’s degrees in international relations and English. Flores writes that he is passionate about helping students achieve their academic and career goals.

1999

Kelley L. Murray (liberal arts) obtained a master’s degree in art therapy through Norwich University and put the degree to work with an after-school art program in a small town in southern Vermont.

Almost a decade later, she moved to the booming city of Brattleboro. Murray now “seeks the opportunity to work with the homeless population in the artistic enclave that makes Brattleboro what it is.”

Her work, she says, draws on the past and present in order to inspire a future for individuals without housing.

2000

Marisa McCormick (visual arts) is lawyer living in Washington, DC; she practices in both New York and DC. Specializing in copyright and trademark law, McCormick provides legal services for small businesses and creative professionals, and is happy to work with her fellow former Purchase students in their artistic and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Follow her on Twitter for updates on legal issues for artists: @mmj_esq.

2002

John Capo (dramatic writing) is the producer of two musicals currently running OffBroadway in NewYork: Bayside!

Musical!, based on TV’s #1 teen drama John Capo Saved by the Bell, and Showgirls! The Musical!—a parody of the cult classic film Showgirls.

Capo is also the executive producer of The Pop Show, an ongoing pop music series at Birdland Jazz Club. As president of John Capo Public Relations, now in its sixth year, he reports that clients of the firm have won or been nominated for Tony, Emmy, Obie, and Drama Desk Awards.

Kevin Doyle (drama studies) is a writer-director based in Brooklyn. In March 2013, he directed these images are written on my body at MDT in Stockholm; this was an interdisciplinary work with Swedish choreographer Kajsa Sandström. In April 2013, Doyle directed the European Union premiere of his play not from canada at the Monty Arts Center in Antwerp, Belgium. He is the recipient of a 2013 Fellowship in Performance & Media at Yaddo in Saratoga Kevin Doyle Springs, NY.

Shane Kirsch (music) has been working at the Brunswick School for the past eight years, codirecting its upper-school instrumental music program. Since 2002 he has recorded as a saxophonist on many albums, including two of his own. He lives in Greenwich, CT, with his wife and three boys.

More information can be found at shanekirsch.com.

Hugh P. Klitzke (MM, music) is a composer for film, new media, and theatre. He is currently writing music and collaborating on lyrics for the musical The Precautionary Principle with Ingrid Breyer. Klitzke is also a voice casting director for Don Buchwald and Associates and Hugh P. Klitzke teaches voiceover through voiceoverfortheactor.com. He has been head of sound for Penn and Teller, an Equity stage manager, and a two-time marathon finisher. Klitzke lives in Sunnyside, Queens. Visit hughpklitzke.com.

Brooke Lehrer (anthropology) is now a full-time teacher in Park Slope, Brooklyn. After graduating from Purchase she went on to Naropa University and New York University, where she received a master’s degree in writing and English education.

Ryan Penagos (journalism) is the executive editorial director for Marvel’s Digital Media Group, has 1.3 million Twitter followers, and will be in the upcoming LEGO Marvel Super Heroes video game. “Pretty nifty,” he notes.

2003

Traci Bentzen (visual arts) is the lead designer for a national industrial company, where she is in charge of designing concepts and producing all national brandmarketing collateral such as catalogs, brochures, and Traci Bentzen direct mailers, and handling trade-show design and website implementation. Bentzen has also launched her own freelance design business, 24/Seven Designs, LLC. Some of her clients include the craft store Michaels and Carlson Craft. She resides in Minneapolis with her puppy, Fenway.

Jason Marin (design tech) recently programmed moving lights for the new Broadway musical First Date, starring Zachary Levi and Krysta Rodriguez.

He is now in his third season as a moving light programmer/operator on the Rachael Ray Show, and his sixth year as lighting designer at Cipriani 42nd Street, a major event venue in midtown. Marin is engaged to be married to his partner, Hillary Cohen, in June 2014.

2004

Andrew Albosta (visual arts) and his wife, Jessica, welcomed Eleanor Albosta Eleanor Jillian Albosta to their family on Feb. 22, 2013. She is pictured with big sister Charlotte a few days after getting home from the hospital.

They continue to reside in northern Virginia.

u Chris Petzold (biology) recently published a scientific paper, “Dependence of Paranodal Junctional Gap Width on Transverse Bands,” in the Journal of Comparative Neurology.

Karen Zraick (language and culture) recently joined the New York Times as a staff editor. Her articles and multimedia work have been published by the Times, the New York Daily News, the Associated Press, Clarín (Argentina), and the Daily Star (Lebanon), among other outlets. She holds a master’s degree in new media from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and lives in Brooklyn.

2005

Gus Cantavero (visual arts) released his first feature-length documentary film, A Drop of Water, in September 2013. It is about a Christian orphanage in Cambodia and its many efforts to help the country recover from the lasting damage of the Khmer Rouge, led

by Pol Pot, in the 1970s. Visit adropofwaterfilm.com to see the trailer, read about the film, and watch other clips.

Jared Karns (journalism) and his Chicago-based alternative/progressive rock group Hidden Hospitals released a vinyl LP in June 2013: EP 001 + EP 002, composed of the group’s two previously released extended-play singles. Hidden Hospitals embarked on a tour of the eastern U.S. and the Midwest to promote it.

NJ’s Steppin’ Out magaJared Karns zine called it “a band to watch in the next couple years.” A full-length album of new material is in the works for a 2014 release.

Adam Knight (literature) and his wife, Kristin, welcomed their first child, Wesley Atticus Knight, in April 2013.

John Mattiuzzi (visual arts) returned to school in 2009 after co-directing the award-winning Wesley Knight documentary La Americana. In 2012, he received his MFA in computer art from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. One year after graduation, he won the Student Academy Award for his thesis film, The Compositor, a biopic sci-fi fantasy film that follows Paul, a slave artist hopelessly trapped inside the visual-effects film industry. Visit TheCompositor-Film. com | Twitter: @ John Mattiuzzi JohnMa2z.

Send your news, updates, and photos to: alumni@purchase.edu Remember to include your class year and major.

Braille Music Workshop at Lighthouse International in New York City in July 2013.

2007

Jared Albert (journalism) has worked at Playboy magazine and Animal Planet as a publicist. At Animal Planet, he managed national press campaigns for series such as Puppy Bowl, Call of the Wildman, and Hillbilly Handfishin’. He travels around the country staffing photo shoots, handling unit publicity, and participating in the occasional snapping-turtle rescue in Kentucky with the star of the hit series Call of the Wildman. During press campaigns, Albert frequently collaborates with other Purchase graduates from national media outlets, including Maxim, The Colbert Report, and People magazine.

Giselle Mejia (dance) co-founded Curio Dance, based in Minneapolis, and is currently dancing as an original member in Artist of Light, a New York Off-Broadway production with iLuminate, which gained international recognition after reaching the final rounds of NBC’s America’s Got Talent. The show is running at New World Stages near Times Square.

Mejia has used the interdisciplinary skills she acquired at Purchase “to help combine technology and dance in a craft everyone can enjoy.”

Shawn Ryder (history) became curator of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame and the Northwest Louisiana History Museum in January 2013. The museum features 27,500 square feet of exhibit space and over 400 artifacts and art pieces from Louisiana; it opened to the public on July 2, 2013.

2008

Matthew Bauer (music) is one of the original members, an advisory board member, and the percussion arranger for the new communitybased drum and bugle corps in Port Chester, NY. The group is nationally recogMatthew Bauer nized for its performance exposure and sponsorship.

Bauer has performed with rising country rock star Jessica Lynn; he has been her percussionist for the past year. They are currently developing a full production and devising a potential tour schedule. A television special was recorded for PBS in early 2013 and should air this year.

Jessie Biele (journalism, women’s studies) earned her MA in public communication from American University in Washington, DC, in May 2013. She lives in Alexandria, VA, and works as a community editor for Patch.com, focusing on community outreach and social media.

Jennifer Castellano (MM, music) and Lisa Johnson ’81 (music) attended the National

Jennifer Castellano and Lisa Johnson

Johnson Chong (acting) is teaching mind-body awareness through yoga and Pilates and performing healing bodywork. He taught in an Indian ashram for six months, and is building a healing school with his guru in Rishikesh, India. In September 2013, he relocated to a popular Singaporean studio, where he will be developing an aerial yoga teacher training program. Information about Chong’s Project Heal, through which he is documenting masters of different holistic lineages during his travels, can be found at jasananda.com.

Teddy Nicholas (drama studies) recently presented the world premiere of the experimental gay-identity politics play he wrote and directed, This Is a Play about Being Gay, T. Ramon Campbell in This Is a at the 2013 Fresh Play about Being Gay (photo by Fruit Festival at Teddy Nicholas). the Wild Project in New York City. NYTheatre.com called the play “Provocative. A meditation on exclusion, on otherness, or awareness of being different and left out, on loneliness and lovelessness.”

Peter O’Brien (creative writing) has recently completed work on his second feature film, Misery Loves Company. He wrote, produced, and directed the film, and acted in it alongside Priscilla Wilson ’10 (biology). O’Brien has also successfully published his first novel, United States of Arson, which he developed from an idea he had while studying in the creative writing program at Purchase.

Visit mlcfilm.com.

Peter O’Brien Erwin Roemer (liberal studies: media/communications) completed a degree in 2012 in graphic design at the Pratt Institute. His collages have been exhibited across New England and were published recently in The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Art, ed. Dennis Busch, R. Klanten, and H. Hellige (Berlin: Gestalten, 2013). Roemer is currently based in Yellow Springs, OH. P U R C HA S E | 2 9

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in Action and was promoted to the position of senior editor in May 2013. In print and online, she covered media industry best practices, advertising, social networking, content marketing, media-based economics, event production, and technology. Raphael is now the digital content editor for The Takeaway, a national morning news program that delivers news and analysis on the topics of the day.

2009

Caitlin Christian-Lamb (history) graduated from Simmons College’s dual program with an MS in library and information science and an MA in history in May 2013. She received the graduate history department’s Award for Excellence in Thesis Research and Writing for “Going Down in History: The Collective Memory of the Titanic.” She has been working as a project producer and research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University’s metaLAB since October 2012. Christian-Lamb focuses on the relationships between bibliographic metadata and society, and on crowdsourcing annotation platforms for use in library, archival, and museum collections.

Michele Liebler (visual arts) has exhibited at the Parrish Art Museum, the National Academy Museum, and the Butler Institute of American Art, and her work is in private collections around the world. Her awards include an Elizabeth Greenshields grant, a Ralph Weiler Prize, an Edward Mooney Traveling Scholarship, and an Arnot Art Museum Award for painting. Liebler has had numerous solo exhibitions at the First Street Gallery in New York City. She teaches workshops and classes at the National Academy Museum and School and the Art Students League, and in 2011 she was appointed the chair and director of the First Street Gallery.

Sam Newsome (MM, music) is a saxophonist and professor of jazz studies at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He was recently selected as one of five nominees for Soprano Saxophonist of Year by the 2013 Jazz Journalist Association. His 2012 CD, The Art of the Soprano, Vol. 1, received a rave review in the New York Times, and was chosen as an Album of the Year by the New York City Jazz Record.

2012 a developer group that aims to create a stronger tech and startup-minded community in New Haven.

Joshua Teter (liberal studies: arts) graduated from Manhattanville College in May 2013 with a master of arts degree. He is currently working for the music and tutoring services Musika LLC, WyzAnt Inc., and takelessons.com. He resides in Millwood, NY, with his wife and two children.

2010

Alysia Chang (dance) has danced with the Sacramento Ballet since graduating from Purchase.

Highlights include works by Lila York, Yannis Adoniou, and Melissa Barack; Ron Cunningham’s The Nutcracker; Cinderella; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; George Balanchine’s Four Temperaments, Who Cares, and Western Symphony; and choreography for the company’s annual Beer and Ballet. Chang has appeared Alysia Chang in The Radio City Christmas Spectacular in New York City, and worked with John Adams and Mark Morris on the Metropolitan Opera’s Nixon in China.

2011

Marissa Joseph (dance) works as a certified personal trainer in New York City. She specializes in corrective and functional training and is currently developing a program in strength training as a method of injury prevention and rehabilitation for professional dancers. Joseph has helped her clients recover from major surgeries and injuries. This fall, she resumes studies at Columbia University to become a physical therapist. Visit workinglines.org.

Sam Newsome Harrison Powers (liberal studies) is “paving the way toward a healthier future,” and has been busy at work coding apps to optimize the fitness world.

Powers is the quality control officer of a leading fitness management company; he notes that you might just see his app on a kiosk at your gym.

Adam Soffer (arts management) pursued a master’s degree in computer science and started work as a software developer for the award-winning digital agency Digital Surgeons (digitalsurgeons.com). His professional highlights this year include seeing his company win a Webby for the work it did for Lady Gaga and co-founding newhaven.io (newhaven.io), P U R C HA S E | 3 0

Jared Kaplan (new media) is currently working as the associate producer for the online revival of the popular soap opera One Life to Live. The show can now be seen on Hulu, Hulu Plus, and iTunes, as well as Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network. Kaplan’s association with One Life to Live began when he interned with the show during his senior year at Purchase.

He credits his managerial role at Purchase’s television studio, PTV, for sparking his interest in pursuing a career in television production.

Ashley Merchant (psychology) recently took a position as a complex coordinator at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She has completed her first year of graduate school and is currently transferring to a different graduate program.

Tessa Jill (T. J.) Raphael (journalism) started with Folio magazine in March 2011 as an associate editor

Lisa Eadicicco (journalism) got her start as a technology journalist at the International Business Times during the second semester of her senior year. She now works as a reporter Lisa Eadicicco for LaptopMag.com, where she is responsible for leading the website’s morning news coverage and writing gadget reviews. Since joining LaptopMag, Eadicicco has traveled to Asia to cover the industry and has had her work featured on major outlets such as NBC News, Fox News, Mashable, and Gizmodo.

Brett Alan Garfinkel (MFA) accepted a position as an assistant professor of dance at Northwestern State University (NSU) in Louisiana. He has continued to perform with BODYART Dance Company.

Garfinkel taught master classes at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, as well as at Belhaven University in Mississippi, during the Amerian College Dance Festival Association conference, where he presented a well-received work. He taught a summer session at NSU and was asked to teach for the 2013–14 academic year.

Emily Gilson (drama studies, history) is an actor and audience services professional in her native Washington, DC, where she returned after graduation to continue her training at the acclaimed Studio Theatre. Gilson was Emily Gilson recently featured in a new Investigation Discovery pilot, and made her professional stage debut at the Capital Fringe Festival in July 2013.

She works in the Studio Theatre’s administrative offices and alongside the National Park Service at DC’s historic Ford’s Theatre.

Bryan Korn (dramatic writing) is working as a production and creative development assistant at Silvergate Media, the company behind the hit animated TV shows Octonauts (Disney Jr.) and Peter Rabbit (Nickelodeon). Korn supports the production of Octonauts and contributes creatively to the development of new series.

Eric Rivera (dance ’96, MFA ’12) says that his biggest professional accomplishment is becoming an assistant professor in dance at Western Kentucky University, where he started only two months after leaving Purchase in 2012. His best personal accomplishment, he adds, is that after graduation he got married to his dance partner, Angelica Burgos, and they are expecting their first child in November 2013.

WANT TO SHARE YOUR UPDATES AND NEWS? Send an email to:

alumni@purchase.edu Animation by Bryan Korn

Weddings Lee Lawlor ’91 (literature) recently married Fei Wu and they reside in Los Angeles. Lee has worked as a nonprofit arts manager for 15 years at Grand Performances, Cornerstone Theater Company, and L.A. Stage Alliance. Visit her at facebook.com/leeloulaw.

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Lauren McGrail ‘08 (dramatic writing) and Garret Harkawik ‘08 (film) were married July 27, 2013, at the Pruyn House in Latham, NY. The couple met through mutual friends while studying at Purchase. They currently live in southern Vermont, where they continue to write and make films. Alumni Evan Curtis ‘08 (film) and Helayna Herschkorn ‘08 (psychology) were in the wedding party, and many of the couple’s friends from Purchase were in attendance.

Lauren McGrail & Garret Harkawik

Lee Lawlor & Fei Wu Veronica Kimmel ‘08 (design tech) and Robert Spink ’08 (design tech) started dating as juniors at Purchase in 2007. They moved to Yonkers together after graduation, where they have lived ever since. The two were married at GoggleWorks Center for the Arts in Reading, PA, on June 22, 2013. The mission of GoggleWorks is “to nurture the arts, foster creativity, promote education, and enrich the community.”

Veronica Kimmel & Robert Spink

Rachel Talley ’08 (dance) and Steven Bruns ’08 (music) were married on July 5, 2013, at the Loeb Central Park Boathouse. Rachel is currently pursuing her MD at New York Medical College after graduating from Columbia University’s postbaccalaureate premedical program. Steven earned his MBA from Rutgers Business School and is working as a certified public accountant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. The couple currently resides in Westchester County, NY.

Rachel Talley & Steven Bruns

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Purchase Receives $2.5 Million Donation for Scholarships In June, Emily and Eugene Grant, avid supporters of higher education and dedicated arts patrons, provided a $2.5 million gift to Purchase College to be used primarily for unrestricted student scholarships, as well as scholarships to students in the Conservatory of Music who show exceptional talent.

The donation was announced at a meeting of the Purchase College Foundation. (Emily Grant joined the board of the Purchase College Foundation in 1969, serving for 18 years as chair.)

The Grants have funded hundreds of deserving students at Purchase through the Eugene and Emily Grant Merit Scholarship and the Eugene and Emily Grant Music Scholarship programs. This latest gift to fund additional student scholarships—as well as to fund faculty awards, and to support music productions within the college’s School of the Arts—is the Grants’ largest gift ever to the college.

“My husband and I are keenly interested in maintaining the quality of public higher education in our community and this gift does just that,” Ms. Grant says. “It is our belief that the dream of having a school of the arts at the university level, which was the late Governor Rockefeller’s vision, has been brought to fruition at Purchase College and we are confident that this gift will help maintain the high standard of the college and its students.”

“The Grants’ sense of pride in our institution–in our students and faculty–is striking. Emily and Eugene have forged a never-ending connection with Purchase College,” says President Schwarz. “Their legacy is reflected in hundreds of gifted students who might not otherwise

have made it to or all the way through college to become the success stories they are today. I can’t thank them enough for their dedication and generosity, as this gift will enhance Purchase College’s ability to attract and retain the highest caliber students.”

The $2.5 million gift is allocated as follows:

• $1 million endowment to go toward unrestricted student scholarships in all disciplines.

• $1 million endowment for need-based and merit scholarships for music students.

• $100,000 endowment for the president’s highest needs.

• $50,000 endowment for faculty awards that may include support for scholarly and research activities, recitals, exhibitions, improving or designing new curriculum, and incorporating new technologies or pedagogies.

• $50,000 endowment to create a Music and Performance Music Production Fund.

• Cash gift of $300,000 to kick-start the effort while the endowments generate funds.

“This is the kind of gift a public college really needs,” says Jeannine Starr, vice president of institutional advancement. “I have worked closely with Emily and Eugene to understand their goals for this contribution, and we’ve planned together with great care to make sure the gift would be one of immediate impact for students and to Purchase College.”

“The Grants’ ongoing commitment to our mission is truly inspirational and an example to us all,” adds Schwarz.

Your Donations at Work—Stories of Impact With tough economic times comes the inevitable rise in demand for need-based scholarships. We are proud that through the support of alumni and friends just like you, last year the Purchase College Foundation provided more than $1.7M in student scholarships and awards to deserving students who might not graduate otherwise.

In Memoriam

Students such as Alana Hughes ‘12 have benefited from a crucial gift from the Make an Impact Fund which allowed her to complete her final semester and graduate from the dramatic writing program. Hughes reflects, “When you face so many financial issues in college you start to realize how much endurance it takes to graduate….I’ll never forget that my journey in higher education could

Purchase College and members of the Purchase College Foundation Board of Trustees and the Performing Arts Center (PAC) extended heartfelt condolences to Purchase College Foundation trustee Ann Scheuer (chair emerita of the PAC board) and her family, upon the passing of Ann’s husband, Thomas Scheuer, in July. “Tom will be remembered for his

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have ended without the kindness and financial help of others. I hope to help others in the same way someday and I am excited about the possibilities of my future.”

More than 2,400 people contribute these critical funds every year.

JOIN THEM. Scan the QR code below with your smartphone right now and donate via our secure online server. Then, feel satisfied that your gift played a transformative role in the life of a student facing difficult decisions. Alana Hughes ‘12, and many other deserving students just like her, thank you from the bottom of their hearts.

Call (914) 251-6040, visit purchase.edu, or scan the code.

devotion to Ann, his intellect and never-ending curiosity, and his support of the college. We will miss his presence at our events,” notes President Thomas J. Schwarz. Ann’s devotion and work as a trustee of the Purchase College Foundation continues in earnest, as she was recently elected treasurer and chair of the Scholarship Committee.

T HE P E R FO R MIN G ARTS C EN T E R

Neuberger Museum of Art The Neuberger Museum of Art is the premier museum of modern, African, and contemporary art in the Westchester/Fairfield County region. An outstanding arts and education institution, the museum was conceived with the dual purpose of serving as an important cultural resource to its regional, national, and international audiences, and as an integral part of Purchase College.

Throughout each year the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College presents a stellar program of performing arts events in the fields of music, dance, and theatre. Audiences from Purchase College and the wider Westchester County and surrounding communities see world-renowned artists on our stages, often prior to or immediately after their performances in New York City’s major concert halls. The 2013–2014 season brings many internationally acclaimed performers to the PAC’s stages, including violinist Joshua Bell, piano virtuoso Garrick Ohlsson, the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Vienna Boys Choir, tap dancer Savion Glover, the Joffrey Ballet, and jazz great Cassandra Wilson.

The museum’s mission is to educate our diverse audience in, about, and through the visual arts. Our goal is to engage and inspire by actively fostering the story, appreciation, and understanding of our collection and changing exhibitions.

Beginning in 2013 and extending through 2014, we will celebrate the Neuberger Museum of Art’s 40th Anniversary. Special exhibitions, events, and programming are planned. Visit neuberger.org to subscribe to our e-news, or connect on Facebook for updates and information.

3 Neuberger Opening Reception Photo: Lynda Curtis Shenkman

3 Neuberger WFUV Party

Entertainers who are less well known but whose artistry is equally unsurpassed include the newly minted chamber group Decoda, introduced last season as The Declassified, an ensemble of young musicians selected in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

For information about these and other programs, including a series of prerelease screenings of new independent films, contact the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY, call (914) 251-6200, or visit www.ArtsCenter.org.

Savion Glover presents his latest work, STePz, at the Performing Arts Center.

Photo: Lois Greenfield

Photo: Evelyn Hofer

Photo: Lynda Curtis Shenkman

5 Threnody Cleve Gray, Threnody (detail), 1972–73 Acrylic on canvas, 28 panels, 6 panels: 240 x 110" each, 22 panels: 240 x 103" each, Collection, Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. Gift of the artist with support from the Friends of the Neuberger Museum of Art.

Also on the roster for the PAC’s 36th season are the uniquely insane, all-male Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a special classical summit with pianist Christopher O’Reilly and cellist Matt Haimovitz, and programs for families with young children such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar & Other Eric Carle Favorites.

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Purchase College

State University of New York 735 Anderson Hill Road Purchase, NY 10577-1400 Address Service Requested

Purchase College Alumni Association

Board of Directors 2013 Matt Alfano ’10 Fadi Areifij ’99 Paula Cancro ’79 Jaime Claus ’12 Kevin Collymore ’10 Vice President Audrey Cozzarin ’79 President Emerita Michael Fonseca ’08 Alison Kaplan ’86 Treasurer Emily O’Leary ’06 Mark Patnode ’78 Secretary Jeffrey S. Putman ’96 President Lydia Rivera ’05 Gorman John Ruggiero ’76 Thomas J. Schwarz President, Purchase College Jeannine Starr, CFRE Vice President of Institutional Advancement EX OFFICIO: Bella Guthrie Ashton ’11 Coordinator of Advancement and Alumni Relations

Address Updates If this address is not current, kindly forward correct address information to us at alumni@purchase.edu or (914) 251-6054.

Thank you.

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