Faculty Focus

Alana Arenas and Todd Rosenthal Fall 2024 Actor Alana Arenas (DePaul University) and set designer Todd Rosenthal (MFA, Yale University) are heading to Broadway next spring to work on the play Purpose (directed by Phylicia Rashad and written by Branden Jacob-Jenkins), which premiered in Chicago earlier this year and won several Joseph Jefferson Awards, including best large production. Opening will be in mid-March 2025. Harry Lennix (C86) costars in the play.
Dotun Ayobade Fall 2024 Dotun Ayobade (PhD, University of Texas) published his latest book, Queens of Afrobeat: Women, Play, and Fela Kuti's Music Rebellion. He called it a “gorgeous culmination of 11 years of thinking, being out there, writing, doubting, revising, blocking out the noise, and trusting the process.”
Pablo Boczkowski Fall 2024 Pablo Boczkowski’s (PhD, Cornell University) book Abundance: On the Experience of Living in a World of Information Plenty (Oxford University Press, 2021) was named the recipient of the 2024 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture from the Media Ecology Association. The award is given to “books that focus on the ethnographic or intercultural analysis of communication, perception, cognition, consciousness, media, technology, material culture and the natural environment.” This is the book’s fourth distinction.
Melissa Blanco Borelli Fall 2024 Melissa Blanco Borelli (PhD, UC Riverside) was awarded a Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Global Collaboration Grant to develop and help fund a cross-institutional international summer school program for master's and PhD students working across theatre, dance, and performance studies.
Kent Brooks Fall 2024 Kent Brooks (BA, UNC Chapel Hill) presented an original gospel piece at the 56th annual Gospel Music Workshop of America (GMWA), held July 9-15 in Greensboro, N.C. The song Emmanuel was one of ninety songs selected from among six hundred submissions considered for performance across five divisions. Brooks’ song was performed in the New Music Division of the conference. The Gospel Music Workshop of America, the world’s largest aggregation of gospel music professionals, academics, amateurs, and enthusiasts, was founded in 1967 by late gospel music legend and Chicago native, Rev. James Cleveland. Cleveland was a musical disciple of Chicago luminary Professor Thomas A. Dorsey, the “Father of Black Gospel Music.” Brooks teaches Black gospel music history and performance in the Department of Performance Studies, and he is the director of special operations in the Department of Religious & Spiritual Life.
Stan Brown Fall 2024 Stan Brown (MFA, University of South Carolina) made his Broadway debut last spring in Water for Elephants at the Imperial Theatre. The show, which costarred Gregg Edelman (C80), was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best new musical.
Barbara Butts Fall 2024 Barbara Butts (BA, Mars Hill College) and Masi Asare (PhD, NYU) were honored with 2024 Northwestern University Teaching Awards—a recognition given to professors who demonstrate excellence and innovation in undergraduate teaching. Butts won the “Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Professor of Instruction” and Asare won the "Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence" award.
Noshir Contractor Fall 2024 Noshir Contractor (PhD, USC) was named executive director of Web Science Trust (WST), a charity that promotes the understanding of the web through web science based in the United Kingdom. The WST also coordinates the Web Science Network (WSTNet), a worldwide group of web science laboratories.
Shana Cooper Fall 2024 Shana Cooper (MFA, Yale School of Drama) directed last summer By The Queen at Hudson Valley Shakespeare. The play was written by Whitney White (WCAS08).
Thomas DeFrantz Fall 2024 Thomas DeFrantz (PhD, NYU) premiered his latest production called "re-OrientationS," a "mixed-media, live-processing performance that combines soundscaping, VR explorations, dance performance, projection mapping, and storytelling to craft an immersive experience of Black thought and Black wonderment." DeFrantz directs the SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology Lab.
Nick Diakopoulos Fall 2024 Northwestern has launched a new effort to develop best practices for news organizations using artificial intelligence. The project received a $1 million investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Nick Diakopoulos (PhD, Georgia Tech) will collaborate with Jeremy Gilbert of the Medill School of Journalism to lead the University’s Computational Journalism Lab.
Bill Healy and Sarah Geis Fall 2024 Bill Healy and Sarah Geis, instructors in the MA in Sound Arts and Industries program's podcasting track, won a Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting and a Peabody Award in the radio/podcast category for their work on the podcast, “You Didn’t See Nuthin" with Invisible Institute, a nonprofit Chicago newsroom, and USG Audio. "You Didn’t See Nothin” follows host Yohance Lacour as he revisits a 1997 hate crime on the South Side of Chicago that introduced him to the world of investigative journalism.
Megan Roberts, Elizabeth Gerber, and Ivy Wilson Fall 2024 Professors Megan Roberts (PhD, Vanderbilt University), Elizabeth Gerber (PhD, Stanford University) and Ivy Wilson (PhD, Yale University) were named among Northwestern’s Office of the Provost new Academic Leadership Program (ALP) Fellows for the 2024-25 academic year.
Elizabeth Gerber Fall 2024 Elizabeth Gerber (PhD, Stanford University) and the Center for HCI+Design launched the second season of the podcast “Technical Difficulties.” It tells the stories of women in design and tech. The first episode featured Sarah Alpern, the global VP of design at LinkedIn.
Cindy Gold Fall 2024 Cindy Gold (MFA, Alabama Shakespeare Company Professional Actor Training Program), newly an emeritus professor, was in Wipeout at Chicago’s Rivendell Theatre Ensemble and a workshop of the new play The First Lady of Television with Northlight Theatre at the Colorado New Play Festival in Steamboat Springs.
Roxane Heinze-Bradshaw Fall 2024 Roxane Heinze-Bradshaw (PhD, City University of New York) was awarded an Alumnae of Northwestern University grant to build a theatre database.
Felicia D. Henderson Fall 2024 Felicia D. Henderson's (MFA, UCLA) most recent film, The Rebel Girls, won the Best Short Film Award at the 2024 Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival earlier this summer.  The Rebel Girls is the true story of the fight for civil rights from the girls who reinvigorated the movement.
E. Patrick Johnson Fall 2024 School of Commination Dean E. Patrick Johnson (PhD, Louisiana State University) traveled in April to the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy for the "Deans' Symposium - Racial Justice and Public Policy: Complexities, Challenges, & Priorities for Reform" to discuss his work and the role of public policy in both contributing to and addressing racial justice. The session also included a discussion on current legislative threats to DEI programs and teaching/research regarding racial injustice at public educational institutions in the United States.
Olga Kamenchuk Fall 2024 Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research highlighted Olga Kamenchuk (PhD, Utah State University) for her research on the intersection of political psychology, public opinion, and policy analysis with a focus on Eastern Europe.
Nina Kraus Fall 2024 Nina Kraus (PhD, Northwestern University) was named to the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows. These professors are part of a diverse group of academic scholars and artists from across 52 disciplines.
Yingdan Lu Fall 2024 Yingdan Lu (PhD, Stanford University) gave a tutorial on image and video analysis at the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at the Chicago 2024 event put on by the Department of Management and Organization at the Kellogg School of Management and the Northwestern University Center for Science of Science & Innovation (CSSI).
Viorica Marian Fall 2024 Viorica Marian (PhD, Cornell University) was awarded the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences. Because of this distinction Marian gave the 2024 McGovern Award Lecture in Behavioral Sciences at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver, Colo.
Daniel O’Keefe Fall 2024 Daniel O’Keefe (PhD, University of Illinois), an emeritus professor, is the 2024 recipient of the Steven H. Chaffee Career Achievement Award from the International Communication Association. The award honors a scholar for a sustained contribution to theoretical development or empirical research related to communication studies over an extended period.
Ariel Rogers and Miriam J. Petty Fall 2024 Ariel Rogers (PhD, University of Chicago) and Miriam J. Petty (PhD, Emory University) were named Kaplan Humanities Faculty Fellows for 2024-2025.
Dassia Posner Fall 2024 Dassia Posner (PhD, Tufts University) was awarded a Global Collaboration Grant from the Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs to create a global team of co-editors and co-translators to support her upcoming books and research on the Kamerny Theatre in Russia’s capital of Moscow.
Ozge Samanci Fall 2024 Özge Samanci (PhD, Georgia Tech) debuted her newest graphic novel, Evil Eyes Sea, a feminist political mystery set in Istanbul during the 1995 elections, at the Buffett Book Talk. There she shared her process and inspiration for the story.  Samanci was invited to The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival and was a special guest at Toronto Comics Art Festival.  Özge had pre-release book events in Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Toronto, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Samanci and Elizabeth Son (PhD, Yale University) were accepted to the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs 2024–25 Cohort of Buffett Faculty Fellows.
James Schwoch Fall 2024 James Schwoch (PhD, Northwestern University) has joined a working group spearheaded by the International Astronomical Union to address problems posed by satellites on astronomy and the preservation of dark and quiet skies. At least 25,000 new satellites are projected to be launched by 2030, creating many challenges for optical and radio astronomy.
Shayna Silverstein Fall 2024 Shayna Silverstein (PhD, University of Chicago) wrote Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Music in Syria (Wesleyan University Press, 2024).
Jacob Smith Fall 2024 Jacob Smith (PhD, Indiana University) wrote Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind. Starting with Bateson’s early career as an anthropologist and through his evolution into ethnographic filmmaking and environmentalism, Smith explores how this 20th century thinker sounded early alarms about the risks associated with overconsumption and a warming planet. The hyperlinked digital book is downloadable for free.
J.P. Sniadecki Fall 2024 J.P. Sniadecki (PhD, Harvard University) was awarded a Northwestern Buffett Institute for Global Affairs’ Buffett Global Collaboration Grant in support of his work to promote the use of sustainable and non-toxic materials for filmmaking. The annual grant is intended to support a wide variety of globally focused faculty projects and faculty can receive up $10,000 per year.
Ines Sommer Fall 2024 The Hills, an environmental documentary by Ines Sommer (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), had its broadcast premiere on Chicago's PBS station WTTW. The film is set on Chicago's southeast side and highlights nature's return amidst the toxic legacy of the steel industry.
Eric Southern Fall 2024 Eric Southern (MFA, NYU) was nominated for a 2024 Drama Desk Award for outstanding lighting of a play for Swing State, which was originally produced at Chicago’s Goodman Theater before its transfer to New York’s Audible Theater at the Minetta Lane; and a 2024 Elliot Norton Award for outstanding lighting design for Macbeth, produced by the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company in Boston. Southern codesigned the production with MFA in Stage Design graduate Maximo Grano de Oro (GC23).
Neil Verma Fall 2024 Neil Verma (PhD, University of Chicago) wrote Narrative Podcasting in the Age of Obsession (University of Michigan Press, 2024). The book examines the rise of the storytelling form and the trends that have emerged from it.
Nathan Walter Fall 2024 Nathan Walter (PhD, USC) delivered a Translational Applications in Public Health lecture titled, “Misinformation, Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, and Pseudoscientific BS” in partnership with IPHAM and the NUCATS Institute.
Sulafa Zidani Fall 2024 Sulafa Zidani (PhD, USC) coauthored an article published in the journal Lateral. “A Pinch of Imagination.” The article discusses collective imagination and food politics in Palestinian and Mexican cultural crossings.
Masi Asare Winter 2023 Masi Asare (PhD, New York University) wrote lyrics for Monsoon Wedding, the musical adaptation of Mira Nair’s film of the same name, which was performed last fall at the Abdul Aziz Nasser Theatre in Doha, Qatar. “The musical rehearsed in Mumbai, India, for several weeks and then premiered in Doha during the World Cup at the invitation of Sheikha Mayassa, produced by Qatar Creates,” Asare says. “It is truly an honor to be working with director Mira Nair and composer Vishal Bhardwaj—legends of Indian arts and culture—on this wonderful team.” As writer of half of the lyrics (including several entire songs), Asare shares credit with the musical’s original lyricist, Susan Birkenhead. Monsoon Wedding will premiere off-Broadway in New York City this spring.
Marisha Speights Atkins Winter 2023 Marisha Speights Atkins (PhD, University of Cincinnati) has been awarded a Leadership Fellowship in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD), an initiative sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Atkins says the program “has established mutually beneficial, coordinated, and trusted partnerships to enhance the participation and representation of researchers and communities currently underrepresented in the development of AI/ML models and to improve the capabilities of this emerging technology, beginning with electronic health records and extending to other diverse data to address health disparities and inequities.”
Larissa Buccholz Winter 2023 The Global Rules of Art: The Emergence and Divisions of a Cultural World Economy by Larissa Buccholz (PhD, Columbia University) was published in November by Princeton University Press. The book explores how the global contemporary arts scene’s long-marginalized cultures and creators have become more visible and powerful in recent decades.
Shana Cooper Winter 2023 Shana Cooper (MFA, Yale School of Drama) directed several recent productions in collaboration with Andrew Boyce (MFA, Yale School of Drama) as set designer: All’s Well That Ends Well at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in spring 2022; Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at Court Theatre in late winter and spring of 2022, with costume design by theatre associate professor Linda Roethke; and The Taming of the Shrew at American Players Theatre last fall, with costume design by Raquel Adorno (GC21), currently a Mancosh Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Communication.
Cindy Gold Winter 2023 Cindy Gold (MFA, Alabama Shakespeare Company) was featured last fall in Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s production of The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, directed by Whitney White (GCXX). Gold additionally appeared in the Goodman Theatre’s 2022 production of A Christmas Carol, directed by theatre professor Jessica Thebus (GC91, GC97), choreographed by assistant theatre professor of instruction Tommy Rapley, and with set design by theatre professor Todd Rosenthal. Alumni in the cast included Andrew White (C87), William Dick (C79), Amira Danan (C19), Thom Cox (C88), Alexander Quinones (C18), and Lucky Stiff (GC19).
Nina Kraus Winter 2023 Nina Kraus (PhD, Northwestern University) received the Alumnae of Northwestern University’s 2022 Alumnae Award last fall in recognition of her outstanding contributions to auditory learning and neuroscience research.
Bruce Lambert Winter 2023 Bruce Lambert (PhD, University of Illinois) was awarded a $1,184,520 grant from the Food and Drug Administration for the project “Assessing the Effectiveness of Text Enhancements to Prevent Drug Name Confusion Errors” in collaboration with colleagues from Northwestern Medicine, the University of Illinois Chicago, Columbia University, Hofstra University, the University of Chicago, and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. The project aims to determine the best lettering system for drug name labels. “I have been working on the problem of drug name confusion since 1996,” he says. “Since the 2000s, the FDA has been asking drug companies to use mixed-case lettering to try to differentiate confusingly similar names on drug packages and in computerized order entry systems. But there is little evidence about whether this method of text enhancement reduces errors in the real world.” Lambert and his colleagues have been tasked with determining whether this enhancement is effective and identifying what enhancements are optimal for reducing errors.
Susan Manning Winter 2023 Susan Manning (PhD, Columbia University) received the American Society for Aesthetics’ 2022 Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for best publication in dance studies for her article “Cross-Viewing in Berlin and Chicago: Nelisiwe Xaba’s Fremde Tänze,” published in The Drama Review.
Bonnie Martin-Harris Winter 2023 Bonnie Martin-Harris (PhD, Northwestern University) won the esteemed Gold Medal Award from the Dysphagia Research Society. The Gold Medal recognizes distinguished service and/or contributions to the society over time. The award was bestowed at its annual meeting in March in San Francisco.
Megan Roberts Winter 2023 Megan Roberts (PhD, Vanderbilt University) received two grants last fall totaling over $1.3 million. The first, from the Institute of Education Sciences, will fund her project “Reducing Time to Autism Diagnosis for Toddlers Enrolled in Early Intervention.” The second, from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, will fund “Optimizing Outcomes through Sequencing Parent-Mediated Interventions for Young Children with Autism.” The latter seeks to heighten the effectiveness of future research and intervention practices by connecting autistic adults and caregivers of autistic people with early-childhood autism researchers and speech-language pathologists in an effort to address gaps in early intervention for autism patients.
Dassia Posner Winter 2023 Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev, cowritten by Dassia Posner (PhD, Tufts University), was the runner-up for the Theatre and Performance Research Association’s 2022 TaPRA Research Prize for Editing (Essay Collections and Special Issues) and received honorable mention for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s 2022 Excellence in Editing Award. Last fall, Posner appeared as a guest expert in puppetry history for “Back with You Again: Celebrating 75 Years of Kukla, Fran, Ollie, and Chicago Children’s TV,” an event sponsored by Chicago’s Newberry Library.
Michelle Shumate Winter 2023 Michelle Shumate (PhD, University of Southern California) was awarded a $362,637 grant from the Army Research Office to design better referral networks for veterans, military families, and transitioning service members. "The goal of the research is to introduce and validate a system-derived measure of the quality of client outcomes,” Shumate says. "Ultimately, this project’s north star is to recommend the right provider for veterans and their families based on a track record of improving similar clients’ well-being."
Shayna Silverstein Winter 2023 Shayna Silverstein (PhD, University of Chicago) won the Marcia Herndon Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Gender and Sexualities Taskforce section for her article “The ‘Barbaric’ Dabke: Masculinity, Dance, and Autocracy in Contemporary Syrian Cultural Production.” Published in 2021 in the Journal for Middle Eastern Women’s Studies, it was one of the periodical’s “five most-read articles” that year.
Jacob Smith Winter 2023 "Alan Bates ’78," the first published videographic essay by Jacob Smith (PhD, Indiana University), appeared in the online journal [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies.
David Tolchinsky Winter 2023 The film Cassandra by David Tolchinsky (MFA, University of Southern California), featuring the voice talents of radio/television/film professor and chair Thomas Bradshaw, was awarded best international short at the Austin International Art Festival. Tolchinsky’s feature script Apollo’s Curse—in active development with Institutional Quality Productions and the Line Film Company—was named the year’s best unproduced script by the Santa Barbara Film Awards. Additionally, Tolchinsky and producer Madison Jones were awarded grants by Northwestern’s Undergraduate Research Office to hire two undergraduate assistants for their upcoming production of Orpa, an adaptation of the Orpheus myth. Tolchinsky is the director of the Pritzker Pucker Studio Lab for the Promotion of Mental Health via the Cinematic Arts, and his mentorship of student Danielle Llevada (C22) won him the SURG Fletcher Prize; Llevada also won a prize for her project. In addition, Tolchinsky was invited by Psychology Today to start the blog Screenology: Pondering Mental Health and Media.
Cristal Chanelle Truscott Winter 2023 Cristal Chanelle Truscott (PhD, New York University) has been named a 2022–2025 Social Practice Artist-in-Residence at Washington’s Kennedy Center. Founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theatre and creator and director of SoulWork Studio, Truscott is a culture worker, scholar, educator, playwright, and director. “My social practice residency at the Kennedy Center manifests through two main efforts across the three years of the residency,” she says. “The first is to provide accessible arts education and training that is both inclusive and culturally specific through a series of SoulWork Summer Intensives that will be offered every year. The second is by creating artistic work built through intergenerational and intercultural collaboration and community engagement. This includes Precious, an annual youth-driven Juneteenth performance, and, in the third year, a sharing of my Plantation Remix project that I’ll be building with the local DC community throughout my residency.” Truscott is the creator of SoulWork, a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities, and framing analytical research that is rooted in generations-old African American cultural practices, theories, and performance traditions.
Nathan Walter Winter 2023 Nathan Walter (PhD, University of Southern California) received an award from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (via the University of Chicago) to perform initial research for his project “Chicago Center for Diabetes Translation Research: Just a Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Messages Go Down—Improving Prediabetes Awareness and Risk Communication among Hispanic/Latino Adults.” Founder and co-director of Northwestern’s Center of Media Psychology and Social Influence, Walter aims to determine the core values of his study’s population and then use those values to communicate with them about diabetes and prediabetes risks. "We want people to feel self-affirmed,” he says. “In-your-face campaigns don’t really work all the time, but our research shows that you can induce the feeling of self-affirmation if you show people characters and models they identify with."
Marco Williams Winter 2023 Murders that Matter, a documentary by Marco Williams (MFA, UCLA), was acquired by “POV” on PBS and will make its national broadcast premiere this summer. The film follows Movita Johnson-Harrell, a Black Muslim mother, over five years as she moves from being a victim of trauma to a vocal critic of gun violence.