Notable Alumni in the Arts
An astonishing number of Columbians made a mark in literature, film, drama, architecture, music and other art forms. The Arts Initiative thought it might be nice to assemble a list. In 2005, several students made it a part-time project; we're particularly grateful to Madeleine Elish, Julia Kelly and David Harrington, and hope to see them on the list they created one day.
You didn't have to graduate to be included, which kept Federico Garcia Lorca and many others on board. You didn't have to go to Columbia or Barnard Colleges, which yielded Paul Robeson (Law '23) and Georgia O'Keefe (TC '14-'15). Among the graduates, you'll find Tony Kushner (CC '78), Cynthia Nixon (BC '88) and Suzanne Vega (BC '81).
Any omissions were inadvertent, not a result of editorial decisions, and we apologize to those we missed. Please send additions, and of course corrections, to cuarts@columbia.edu.
Gregory Mosher Director, Arts Initiative |
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O'Keeffe, Georgia (1887 - 1986)
Visual Arts Painter 1914-15TC O'Keeffe benefited from the tutelage of artists William Merritt Chase, Alfred Stieglitz and Arthur Wesley Dow. Her abstract forms earned her identification with the Modernist and German Expressionist movements; however, it was during her time in rural locations such as Canyon, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico that O'Keeffe would develop her unique combination of abstraction and realism. She is best known for her large-scale yet intimate paintings of flowers and the brilliant colors of her Southwestern landscapes. In 1942, the Whitney Museum of American Art launched a project to celebrate and preserve her works. In 1946, the Museum of Modern Art honored O'Keefe with its first solo exhibition of a female artist. Learn more. Olds, Sharon Poet GSAS Born in San Francisco, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first poetry collection, Satan Says (1980), received the San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her next collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), was the Lamont Poetry Selection and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, The Unswept Room , Blood, Tin, Straw, The Gold Cell, The Wellspring, and The Father. Olds won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and in more than a hundred anthologies. Olds was New York State Poet (1998 – 2000). She currently teaches poetry in NYU’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.
Omura, June Dance Dancer '86BC Omura has danced around the world with the Mark Morris Dance Group since 1988, only taking a brief break to bear twins. In 2005, she was awarded a New York Dance and Performance Award (the "Bessie"). She credits Barnard and the Department of Dance for helping her through her first intensive summer training program with the Group-the beginning of an unusually long career. Learn more. |
