Alumni theater professionals were involved in two of the most-awarded productions at this year’s Tonys. Schmigadoon! (above), which featured Megan O’Keefe ’17BUS, ’17LAW, David Manella ’17LAW, ’18SOA, Alex Donnelly ’14CC, and Adam Miller ’04SOA on the producing team, won Best Musical. Ragtime, written by Terrence McNally ’60CC and produced by Lamar Richardson ’15CC, won for Best Revival of a Musical.
Several alumni journalists received Pulitzer Prizes this year: Reuters reporter Jeff Horwitz ’14JRN was awarded in the beat reporting category for exposing fraudulent advertising on Meta, and Mike Spector ’06JRN, also of Reuters, won for national reporting for his team’s coverage of the Trump administration’s abuse of executive powers to prosecute enemies. Bloomberg investigative journalist Natalie Obiko Pearson ’09JRN shared the award for illustrated reporting and commentary for a graphic-novel-style article on online scams in India.
Lin King ’22SOA won the 2026 International Booker Prize for her English translation of Taiwan Travelogue, a 2020 novel by Yáng Shuang-zi originally published in Mandarin.
Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller, a National Geographic series investigating criminal networks, hosted and executive produced by Mariana van Zeller ’02JRN, won seven News and Documentary Emmy awards for its fifth season, which focuses on issues such as illegal street racing and the shark-fin black market.
Sarah Asali ’23PH (left), a health-care administrator who oversees revenue-cycle management at Richmond University Medical Center, made the Arab America Foundation “30 Under 30” list for 2026.
Art historian Connie Choi ’19GSAS was named chief curator and inaugural vice president for art and education at the Barnes Foundation, a Philadelphia museum home to approximately four thousand artworks and artifacts.
Huma Nayab ’25CC received a $10,000 grant from Middlebury College’s Projects for Peace to launch SwipeSafe, a virtual training and support network for women navigating online dating in Pakistan.
Five alumni received 2026 Guggenheim fellowships to pursue independent creative projects: visual artists Allison Janae Hamilton ’10GSAS, ’17SOA, Michael Ross ’81SOA, and Tenzin Phuntsog ’06SOA, and writers James Marcus ’84SOA and William Deresiewicz ’85CC, ’87JRN, ’98GSAS.
A permanent mural (above) honoring suffragist Mabel Ping-Hua Lee 1917BC, 1918TC, 1921GSAS was unveiled in Washington, DC’s Chinatown in July.
Lisa Kersavage ’98GSAPP, executive director of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, was appointed chair of the agency by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in the spring.
Architects Pavitra Nayak ’24GSAPP, E. J. Shin ’24GSAPP, ’25SEAS, and Mikhail Kossir ’25GSAPP, recipients of Columbia’s 2024 Percival and Naomi Goodman Fellowship for research in natural building materials, presented their resulting project, a pavilion made of rice-husk waste, at India’s Sinhgad College of Architecture.
