Musinguzi Blanshe, Elissa Slotkin, and other Alumni in the News

 Musinguzi Blanshe wins African Journalist of the Year award
Musinguzi Blanshe (Leon Sadiki / The Wits Centre for Journalism)

Ugandan journalist Musinguzi Blanshe ’20JRN won the African Investigative Journalist of the Year award for his series on Congolese rainforest-timber trafficking.

Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin ’03SIPA, a member of the House of Representatives since 2019, was elected to the Senate in November. California congresswoman Sara Jacobs ’12SIPA won reelection to the House.

Alicia Graf Mack ’03GS, the director of Juilliard’s dance division, was selected as the next artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. 

Lucia Aniello at 2024 Emmys
Lucia Aniello (Jerod Harris / Getty Images)

At the 2024 Emmys, Shōgun, the historical drama co-created by Justin Marks ’02CC, swept up eighteen awards including best drama series. Hacks, co-created by Lucia Aniello ’04CC, scored the Emmy for outstanding comedy series as well as a screenwriting award for Aniello. Joanna Rothkopf ’14JRN and Tim Carvell ’95CC won as writers of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, while Ramin Hedayati ’02CC, co–executive producer of The Daily Show, took home a prize for outstanding talk series. At the Creative Arts Emmys, Leah Katznelson ’02CC won in the costume-design category for Feud: Capote vs. The Swans. At the News and Documentary Emmys, Noah Amir Arjomand ’18GSAS won for outstanding social-issue documentary for Eat Your Catfish, and Dan Krockmalnic ’06LAW won for outstanding crime and justice documentary as an executive producer of Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, & Reckoning.

McNeal, a play written by Ayad Akhtar ’02SOA, opened on Broadway this past fall, with Robert Downey Jr. starring as a renowned novelist grappling with the age of artificial intelligence. 

Venture capitalist Tanvi Chaturvedi ’14BUS, human-trafficking consultant Shobana Powell ’14SW, and social-justice advocate Lindsay Schubiner ’07BC were included in the 2024–25 cohort of Obama Foundation USA Leaders. 

Creation Lake, a spy novel by Rachel Kushner ’01SOA, was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a prestigious annual award for fiction. 

A solo exhibition dedicated to the work of sculptor and performance artist Smita Sen ’16CC opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami on November 6 and runs until April 6. 

BlocPower founder Donnel Baird ’13BUS, NASA scientist Peter Kalmus ’08GSAS, and UC Santa Barbara energy researcher Leah Stokes ’09SIPA were included on Forbes’s inaugural list of “superstar” sustainability leaders.  

Say Nothing, the 2019 nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe ’99CC about an infamous murder in Troubles-era Northern Ireland, was adapted into a limited series of the same name. The show premiered on FX and Hulu on November 14. 

April Kim Tonin ’99GSAS, an artist and the head of education at the Frick Collection, illustrated How to Cook Everything Kids, the new children’s cookbook from food journalist and Columbia public-health lecturer Mark Bittman.