Arts & Entertainment
Barry Joseph ’91 has a long-running fascination with fizzy drinks, particularly seltzer, and he wants others to learn all about its effervescent history. In summer 2024 Joseph launched the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, a partnership with the oldest seltzer factory in New York City.
At just 28, Selina Fillinger became one of the youngest woman playwrights in Broadway history, and her 2022 show, POTUS, received three Tony Award nominations and has since been produced in theaters across the nation and internationally. Fillinger ’16 came to Northwestern to pursue acting, but a playwriting class with theater professor of instruction Laura Schellhardt ’97 changed her trajectory.
By day, Amanda Dunlap edits film trailers for Disney, but by night, she’s a true-crime junkie. Dunlap ’06 took inspiration for her debut novel from stories of real-life “resurrection men,” grave robbers who sold stolen corpses to medical schools in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the early 19th century.
Uncover more about Dunlap’s novel and the history of body-snatching.
Melissa Harris ’02 had just joined the Chicago Tribune as a columnist in 2009 when a colleague recommended she read the 1967 Division Street: America, a book which contains oral histories from 71 Chicagoans interviewed in the late ’60s. Years later, when Harris learned that the audio tapes of the original interviews were being digitized by the Library of Congress, she reached out to Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mary Schmich, and after some consideration they decided to make a podcast.
Common Fly is a 15-minute stop-motion film about a housefly who is deeply unsatisfied with his family life and, most crucially, his job at a company that makes him feel insignificant. Created by radio/television/film major Ian Castracane and nearly three dozen fellow students, the film premiered at Northwestern’s MultiStudio Premiere event last year and won Best Animated Short at the 2024 Boston Film Festival in September.
By combining elements from seemingly disparate music genres, composer and musician Adegoke Steve Colson ’71 bucked convention and laid the groundwork for contemporary jazz as we know it today. His papers are now collected and publicly available at Northwestern’s Music Library.
Northwestern’s Institute for New Music organizes workshops, symposia and residencies for visiting composers and ensembles and gives students opportunities to interact with and learn from prominent figures in the new music world.
André Crump ’91 MBA founded the World Dog Surfing Championships, which brings thousands of canine lovers to the shore of Linda Mar Beach outside San Francisco to watch the world’s best four-legged surfers catch some waves each summer.
Anamaria Sayre ’21 is co-host of NPR Music’s Alt.Latino, where she celebrates Latinx culture as NPR’s youngest-ever full-time host. She also produces El Tiny, the Latin music version of Tiny Desk Concerts.
Hillary Simms, doctor of musical arts student in Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music and the first woman trombonist on the faculty at the Juilliard School, explains her love-hate relationship with the trombone.
