Alumni Digest

Annika Wilewicz did everything a first year at a New England liberal arts college is supposed to do, and on the first night knew it was wrong. Weekend after weekend she took Metro-North into New York for the parks, strangers in cafés and jazz at three in the afternoon. Within two months she had applied to transfer to NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. The day she got in, she cried.

Her comparison is a good one. At Wesleyan, the 0.6-mile walk to the grocery store felt like an odyssey. In Manhattan, a similar distance is a coffee walk through Washington Square Park. She joined the student newspaper’s newsroom, in the Third North basement, and found a part-time job’s worth of purpose there.

Her advice to new students is practical rather than grand: sit in a café across town alone for a couple of hours, wander the Met until you are lost, and study somewhere other than Bobst Library. Friends down the hall may last for life, she writes, but so might the person next to you at the theatre.

The headline on her column is the one we borrowed for this issue: the city is the campus.

Washington Square News opens Welcome Home, its annual Under the Arch magazine for incoming first-years, with a letter from the editor-in-chief. Its pitch is that New York’s greatest gift to a student is a culture of shamelessness. Jaywalkers keep jaywalking, drivers keep honking, and even a mayor on a bicycle is old news within the hour.

The editor, a senior, says she used that freedom twice over: to run for the top job at the paper, and to recover after the awkward moments. The letter acknowledges a harder backdrop for the new class, from federal changes to higher-education policy to the spread of artificial intelligence on campuses, and answers with advice to try things: join a club, take the fascinating class that fills no requirement, do bizarre things responsibly.

The package that follows covers a film made inside the NYU community, a global enrolment explainer, guides to the city’s art and sports scenes, and the two personal essays that open this chapter. One photograph from the package shows friends watching the Manhattan skyline from a Brooklyn lawn, which is this issue’s thesis in one picture.

Professor Judy Pryor-Ramirez spent two years building Leveraging Leadership for Organizational Success, a Wagner travel course that ends with a week in Puerto Rico. This summer seventeen students from Wagner and elsewhere in the university took it, after preparing in class with the island’s history, politics and the ethics of working with communities.

The framing was the “3Ps”: promises, problems and paradoxes. Because Puerto Rico’s status is territorial, students looked at how legal and political limits shape leaders in the social sector, and how those leaders keep innovating through repeated crises. Guest speakers came from community groups and the University of Puerto Rico, among them the heads of Ruta Borinquen, El Puente, Taller Salud and the María Fund.

Students spoke about what the trip changed. Kimberely Jackson-Brown, a nonprofit professional with three decades in the field, called it exactly the learning she needed this late in her career. Manuel Blasco travelled partly to understand how forces on the island shaped his grandmother’s life, which began in Santurce before she moved to New York in the late 1940s.

The Wagner Gallery Space was a fixture of the school’s old home in the Puck Building, and students missed it. The 2025–26 Wagner Student Association board asked for walls with something on them, secured funding through the Wagner Student Association and the NYU Initiative Fund, and ran an open call. More than 100 images came in. A committee of students, faculty and staff chose 29 pictures by 20 photographers.

The show, Place & Purpose: Urban Life, is on view at 105 E 17th Street and curated by NYU Wagner communications and design manager Frankie Crescioni-Santoni. He deliberately varied the layout, with some walls in studio-style groupings and others in a plain line, so the hang itself would feel as diverse and dynamic as a city. The committee found its own subthemes along the way: children and youth, diversity, celebration, and architectural infrastructure. The opening reception was held on September 3.

Danny Fein arrived at NYU Law at 30, already the founder of an e-commerce company, Lithographs, which turns literary text into art, and with a clear goal: to start another business. A Jacobson scholarship helped him do it, and the law school’s venture programme funded summer projects on what he called digital heirlooms. One summer he interviewed his grandmother, cataloguing the objects and stories that mattered to her. The next, he thought about legacy and estate planning. That was the seed.

Infinite Will, which he began building in 2023, is a virtual estate-planning firm. He meets clients by video and sends mobile notaries to them, and he focuses on foundational plans for ordinary people, especially younger families that tend to be overlooked. He says he did not expect to love client counselling as much as he does.

The other half of the job is software. Since AI coding tools became powerful, he says, building the tools that serve clients has been a complete joy. His biggest challenge is reaching a younger audience for a service most people associate with older age. Among his teachers he credits Richard Brooks for contracts, Jeremy Waldron for property theory and visiting professor Ray Madoff for estate planning.

Alya AlZeyoudi began at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2020, when classes went online and first-year meetings happened on Zoom. She says the professors were ready for the shift and the sessions stayed interactive. A materials course taught by Professor Khaled Shahin moved her into civil engineering, and he became her mentor.

The degree took her well beyond the classroom. In an engineering ethics course she travelled to Jordan to help build a house for a family, and in an elective on engineering for social impact she went to Mumbai to work on infrastructure for people in Dharavi. After graduating in 2024 she spent a year as a trainee analyst at Erth Zayed Philanthropies, helping develop programmes for basic needs at home and abroad.

In 2026 she returned to the Abu Dhabi campus for an MBA at Stern. She wants to own a business one day, and says knowing NYU Abu Dhabi well made the choice easy. She finds being among the youngest in a class that spans the US, China and India a little odd, but useful.

In the middle of the pandemic, Sherina AlSowaidi noticed how few safe places there were to think about mental health, and how much stigma surrounded saying so. She opened Ritual Cafe and Studio in Abu Dhabi’s Reem Central Park in 2021, mixing coffee and food with workshops and meditative art such as watercolour therapy.

The business expanded into catering and a second venture, Bento Bowls, but she felt the original mission had slipped. It returned with a drawing. One afternoon she sat with one of her three sons and made a wheel of emotions with simple things to try when a feeling got big: read, drink water, wash your face, take a walk. People who saw it online asked for more, and it became My Feelings, a book that helps parents and children talk about emotions.

She published it with support from the UAE’s Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood and wants an international publisher to widen its reach. A double major in social research and public policy and in visual arts in the Class of 2017, she credits NYU Abu Dhabi with teaching her to look at familiar streets with fresh eyes. She now mentors students and is building a consultancy for early-stage entrepreneurs.

Samuel Wu, trained as a classical violinist, did not want a conservatory where education classes were an add-on. He picked Steinhardt because its music education programme put teaching first. At NYU he followed his curiosity: he was a founding member of Mariachi Violetas de NYU and took a course in which student composers wrote for live players. His own music now blends violin with looping and improvisation.

Field placements in a Bronx middle school and an elementary school near Steinhardt gave him classroom time before graduation, and he says his professors kept learning alongside the students. After his Bachelor of Music in 2024 he took a Master of Music in musicology at King’s College London. Next comes a fully funded PhD in music education at the University of Toronto, studying the emotional labour of music teachers and the pressure on arts advocates as resources shrink.

He still hopes to teach, ideally at the elementary level, where he thinks children are most open to creativity. The band he helped found is the subject of a story later in this issue.

Sophia Romee calls herself an NYU lifer. An undergraduate social-entrepreneurship class introduced her to the idea of repairing the world, and she spent her early career at NYU Stern as chief of staff to the dean, then at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, before co-founding the rest-and-reflection company Radical Reset. She returned to Wagner as an adjunct professor teaching data visualisation and storytelling.

At the College Board, she started a strategy project in 2023, when ChatGPT was entering public consciousness, with one rule: lead with people and their needs, not the technology. It grew into the GenAI Studio, a start-up inside a 125-year-old organisation, scaling from nothing to 25 staff in under two years. One strand brought AI to the organisation’s 2,000 employees. Another built AI-enabled ways for students to show skills such as collaboration and oral communication that traditional tests struggle to capture.

I never made a roadmap longer than six months

Sophia Romee, NYU Wagner alumni spotlight

Her view of assessment is that students are often better at using AI than the adults around them, so the real question is whether they know when not to. In AP courses, educators broke the writing process into steps: AI could help explore a topic, but drafting should stay human, because learning to write in your own voice is the point.

Her new company, DiscernIt, measures exactly that judgement. She moved from India to Miami at nine and grew up in Little Havana, where she saw how much a zip code can decide, and she says that childhood is the throughline from classrooms to public interest technology.

Immanuel Wilkins, a Grammy-nominated saxophonist and composer, has been named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow. The fellowship comes with $800,000 over five years, and NYU’s announcement describes him as the youngest of this year’s fellows. He has taught as an adjunct at the School of Professional Studies since 2020.

Born in Philadelphia, he moved to New York in 2015 to attend Juilliard and built his career around the Immanuel Wilkins Quartet. His debut album, Omega, was named the best jazz album of 2020 by The New York Times; this year he was nominated for two Grammys, and a three-volume Live at the Village Vanguard came out on Blue Note. He also works in visual art and sculpture, including an immersive installation, Recess, that opened in North Philadelphia this year.

He said the fellowship will give him “a certain boundlessness of creativity”. The 2026 class also includes Maaza Mengiste (GSAS ’07), a novelist who studied in NYU’s creative writing programme.

Justin John Moniz, an associate professor of music and associate director of vocal performance at Steinhardt, has been named the 2026 national winner of The American Prize in Conducting for musical theatre. The recognition is for his work on the school’s production of Maury Yeston and Peter Stone’s Titanic, judged from recordings against entries from Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music and Oklahoma City University.

He has won The American Prize in Vocal Performance three times before, which makes him the only person in the competition’s history to win both divisions. In his statement he credited the cast, orchestra and production staff, calling the score one that demanded extraordinary musicianship, collaboration and trust.

Moniz also teaches across musical theatre, classical and contemporary commercial styles, received Steinhardt’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2025 and was named the Ellen Faull Master Teacher by the National Association of Teachers of Singing.

THE WIZZIE: A Journey of Grief, Growth + Glitter was a devised therapeutic theatre piece made by graduate students from two Steinhardt departments, music and performing arts professions and art, working with New York City high schoolers. It ran June 4 to 7 at the school’s Black Box Theatre and sold out, according to Steinhardt.

The CollideOscope Repertory Theatre Company, led by artistic director Adam D–F Stevens, an adjunct faculty member and doctoral student in educational theatre with a focus on drama therapy, used The Wiz as scaffolding. Devised theatre means the performers write the work themselves, drawing on their own experiences. The young people explored grief, identity, belonging and resilience through storytelling, movement, visual art, music and performance.

Stevens said the aim was never to teach anyone to follow the yellow brick road but to make room to question who built it. Together with their young artists and graduate interns, they built a world “where grief could have rhythm”.

Chronovisor is a literary noir shot on 16mm film about a device that supposedly broadcasts the past, based on a conspiracy theory about a 1950s Benedictine monk. Co-directors Jack Auen and Kevin Walker made it in 2025 with a crew that was largely NYU. Auen graduated this spring with a joint MBA and MFA from Stern and Tisch, and he says it is the most NYU born-and-bred production there could be, even though the school was not officially involved.

The team leaned on university resources at every step. Auen pitched the film to investors three times in an NYU class on film packaging before taking it outside, and used his student ID for discounts on rental gear and Kodak stock. Leo Zhang, from the graduate film programme, shot it on a 16mm Aaton camera he owned. Jason Zuriff, a cinema studies alumnus, produced, and Alex Peña, a Tisch design graduate, built the production design. They found their lead, the obsessive scholar Beatrice Courte, by watching a TED Talk: Anne-Laure Sellier teaches at HEC Paris and is an adjunct associate professor at Stern. She nearly deleted the director’s email as a scam.

The film premiered in January in the Netherlands, had a sold-out North American premiere in April, and, as of the student paper’s August report, was due at Film at Lincoln Center on September 4. Is the Chronovisor real? The cast and crew disagreed. Sellier said flatly no; Auen said it depends on the time of day.

The Grey Art Museum’s retrospective, “by Alison Knowles: A Retrospective (1960–2022)”, was curated by Karen Moss. It brings together around 200 works across six decades of performance, printmaking, sound and artist’s books by one of the founding members of Fluxus, the experimental international network that treated everyday life as art.

It is a hands-on show. The reviewer for Washington Square News writes of being surprised to take off their shoes and walk through a pile of beans, a gesture that suits an artist whose work depended on audience participation. Knowles turned actions such as dipping toes in sand and making a salad into performances anyone could try.

The most famous piece is The Identical Lunch: for two years she ordered the same tuna fish sandwich, buttermilk and soup at a Chelsea diner each day, and documented it with photographs, notes and receipts. The review sees the same warmth in the orange screen prints of friends and family. Knowles’s photographs, recordings and drawings, it says, make the museum feel like an adult playground.

The Best of All Possible Worlds, curated by Gallatin professor Keith Miller, runs through October 17 in the Gallatin Galleries. Twelve artists answer the same question through film, sculpture and painting: what would your perfect world look like? The walls are pink, the seats are plush, and the Washington Square News review notes that every utopia in the room arrives with its own catch.

The first piece, Rocío Delaloye’s three-minute video game Indoor_Horizon, imagines a world that sells oxygen and sunlight by the bottle and the pod, and keeps the population in pill-shaped capsules. Emma Kathleen Hepburn Ferrer’s work includes an oil painting on wooden shutters and a brass sculpture in an eighteenth-century walnut box.

The show opens NYU’s Arts & Impact initiative for its second year, a programme that links the arts to health and well-being through 2026–27. September also brought a conference with musician Jon Batiste during UN General Assembly Healing Arts Week and a storytelling workshop marking the 25th anniversary of September 11. Vice provost Elise Cappella says the programme shows NYU’s ability to collaborate across boundaries.

Brody Glover was a first-year at Tandon when a casting agent stopped him in Washington Square Park. A month later he was walking in Gucci’s “GucciCore” show in Times Square, between 46th and 48th Streets. This summer he juggled that with a paid National Science Foundation research internship in West Virginia on AI and the roofing industry, flying to Milan for a four-day Gucci shoot and working remotely on the plane.

Francesca Nicoletti, a Gallatin junior studying fashion business, helped plan designer Bibhu Mohapatra’s show: drafting hundreds of emails, naming garments and styling final looks. On the night she sat in a pit at the end of the runway managing crowds and the livestream, and credits teamwork for the show. She still turns in her assignments on time.

Sena Iwata transferred from Parsons to NYU to study economics, after a gap year interning for a jewelry brand she met through a chance conversation at a dentist’s office. This season she ran two public-relations internships alongside a full course load, and during the SLOAN x Moda Operandi event she raced around the city delivering last-minute pieces to guests who had been asked to wear the collection.

Designer Frederick Anderson welcomed his audience as “descendants of immigrants” in his show note for The Garden Party, a 50-piece collection timed to the United States’ 250th birthday. He dedicated it to his father, who died of injuries from military service. The show opened with Grammy-winning artist Allison Russell performing “Eve Was Black”, a song confronting the racism Black Americans had to overcome to be free.

The collection told the Garden of Eden story in fabric. Pastel and floral silhouettes gave way to a bright red jumpsuit whose satin bodice stood for restraint, which Anderson called the most intense piece, a nod to the strapping of slavery. Raffia fringe coats and boubou sleeves referenced West African dress, and a pink-red wash of eye makeup reworked Indigenous American war paint. The show closed in white and reintroduced the jumpsuit to say the garden is also about renewal.

Andrew Stuart has moved between countries, between mathematics and engineering, and between abstract theory and the physical world, with posts at Caltech, Stanford, MIT, Warwick and Bath. At NYU he holds appointments at the Courant Institute and Tandon. “I like the abstraction,” he says, “and the way that it links different things together.”

His best-known territory is data assimilation, the mathematics that merges equations of physical processes with streams of observations from satellites, aircraft and balloons, the way modern weather forecasts do. He asked where else the same ideas might work, and found climate modelling and even models of the human glucose-insulin system. His second theme is inverse problems, which run the logic backward: start from what you observe and work out what caused it.

For much of Onur Mutlu’s career one question has driven his research: what if computers were designed differently from the ground up? An internationally recognised computer architect, he joins NYU Tandon with appointments in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science and engineering, and plans a new centre on emerging computing technologies and systems design.

He has been at ETH Zurich since 2016, where he built a group of more than 40 people, and will bring more than 10 students and researchers to New York while keeping a link to ETH during the transition. Earlier he taught at Carnegie Mellon, founded the computer-architecture group at Microsoft Research and spent time at Intel, AMD, VMware and Google. His undergraduate degree combined computer engineering and psychology, and he sees promise where computing meets the social sciences and humanities. His stated goal for the centre is “great research, education, and entrepreneurship”.

Michelle Choi Ausman’s road to engineering education was winding: biomedical engineering, English and psychology minors, a technical-writing internship at the guitar maker Ernie Ball Music Man, where she digitised the know-how of factory-floor workers, and a PhD on how students experience engineering. She joins Tandon as an industry assistant professor in general engineering and focuses on the first-year experience, hoping to build skills, confidence and a sense of belonging in equal measure.

Aarati Akkapeddi, an artist, technologist and educator, joins the Integrated Design & Media programme. They treat the boundaries between art, design and technology as doorways. One project, about intergenerational memory and a family member’s memory loss, trained a machine-learning model on family photographs; the generated images resemble the originals while diverging from them, memory as approximation.

Delaware is the legal home of more than 2 million corporations, including more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500, thanks to well-developed case law and experienced courts. In “The New Political Economy of Delaware Corporate Lawmaking”, published in the Journal of Corporation Law in June, NYU Law professors Marcel Kahan and Edward Rock argue that the state’s lead may be at risk.

In an interview published by NYU Law, they point to a breakdown in how Delaware makes corporate law. Two reasons they give are growing competition in the legal market and more power concentrated in the hands of controlling shareholders. Kahan is the George T. Lowy Professor of Law and Rock the Martin Lipton Professor of Law; the pair have collaborated on shareholder rights and governance for about twenty years.

Hannah Bonestroo, a PhD student in urban systems, and assistant professor Augustin Guibaud studied FDNY data from 2013 to 2023, tract by tract. The paper appears in the Fire Safety Journal. Citywide the story looks simple: structural fires fell 11.3 percent over the decade. Underneath, eastern Queens and Staten Island were among places where fires rose.

Response time moved differently. The citywide average rose from 4 minutes 6 seconds to 4 minutes 36 seconds, past the National Fire Protection Association’s four-minute standard, and almost the whole city followed that pattern, with northwestern Queens seeing the sharpest deterioration. Reviews by the FDNY and the State Senate point to traffic congestion and rising call volume, and the researchers’ analysis agrees: fixed neighbourhood factors explained only about a quarter of the differences between tracts.

The second finding is that fire frequency and response time capture largely different dimensions of risk. Areas with the most fires tended to have faster response, not slower. If resources are allocated at neighbourhood scale, Bonestroo says, citywide numbers can hide places with different patterns.

NYU IRL, the university’s initiative on in-person connection, launched a four-week “Phone Breakup Challenge” this week with journalist and author Catherine Price, whose bestselling 2018 book is How to Break Up with Your Phone. Administrators have been pushing the idea since February, when they introduced NYU IRL and the NEST, a phone-free space in the Kimmel Center for University Life.

Price says the goal is not to be offline. It is to set better boundaries so the phone becomes a tool rather than a time sink. Week one is an audit of habits and of the real-world relationships you want to prioritise. Weeks two and three involve muting notifications and a 24-hour day without a phone, and the last week reviews what stuck. The NEST hosts events along the way.

Ishani Upadhyaya, a Tandon sophomore, says that within two days she had replaced scrolling before bed with reading. Tracy Ye, who works at the NEST, says some students who came into the lounge had been spending more than 12 hours a day on their phones and became noticeably more social. The programme has an academic parent: Price co-wrote a graphic novel with Stern professor Jonathan Haidt, whose research inspired NYU IRL and who spoke at the May commencement.

A garden tucked beside Washington Square Village looks, to a passer-by, like a heap of grey-green shrubs. CAS senior Lily Primeaux, a co-founder and president of the Community Agricultural Project, says that is the point: unlike the pruned gardens elsewhere in the city, this one exists only to support native pollinators. When people ask why she leaves dead flowers standing, she explains they shelter native bees, wasps, spiders and ants.

The idea came from a field trip with NYU’s Sustainability Leaders Fellowship to Lentol Garden in Greenpoint, where an unruly corner turned out to be full of native plants. In 2024 Primeaux and fellow students Priya Massie and Neo Ng, who founded the SEEDS club in 2023, applied for a microgrant from the Office of Sustainability, which offers awards of up to $3,000 alongside Green Grants of up to $20,000. They already had space, which made the application easier. They bought plants from the Gowanus Canal Conservancy to support golden digger wasps, skipper butterflies and black swallowtails.

Washington Square News previewed the fall with a story for each of nine teams. Men’s soccer, which won only 4 of 15 games last year, started 2026 undefeated. Women’s soccer was 2-1-1 after the first few weeks. Women’s golf, third at the NCAA championships last year, is aiming for the national title, while women’s volleyball is working on defence after a first-round exit from the Division III tournament.

New head coach Dillon Pottish, a former national champion player and four-time BIG EAST coach of the year, arrives to lead both tennis teams and build a unified team identity.

In the paper’s “In the Huddle” podcast, sophomore golfer Yoyo Fu says she picked NYU because Division III means less pressure on the golf side and more room for academics. She was ranked third nationally and first in the region in her first year. Her team trains Tuesday to Thursday, with an optional Friday, which leaves weekends for everything else. She was speaking weeks after the UAA Championships on September 14 and 15.

The NYU Alumni Association’s in-person events calendar for New York lists dozens of October events. These ten, in order, have fixed dates and places. Times are Eastern. Check the calendar for registration, because some events are closed or limited.

• 6Tue · Oct
  The Supreme Court’s Backward March on Voting Rights (live podcast)6–8 p.m. · The Greene Space
• 8Thu · Oct
  Alumni College: The Good Boss Project, with Dolly Chugh7–8:30 p.m. · Kimmel Center, Room 905/907
• 8Thu · Oct
  Tom at the Farm (to Oct 10)See calendar · NYU Skirball
• 9Fri · Oct
  15th annual NYU Entrepreneurs Festival1–6 p.m. · Rosenthal Pavilion
• 13Tue · Oct
  Meet Your People: Director x Actor Meetup6:30–8 p.m. · NYU Production Lab
• 15Thu · Oct
  Terry Golway’s “Terror from America: A Sherlock Holmes Adventure”6–7:30 p.m. · Glucksman Ireland House
• 16Fri · Oct
  Open House at the NYU Production Lab for alumni6–7:30 p.m. · NYU Production Lab
• 17Sat · Oct
  NYU Alumni Club in Westchester: tour of Bartow-Pell Mansion11 a.m.–noon · Bartow-Pell Mansion
• 20Tue · Oct
  Pitch Power Hour and Founder Matchup5–7 p.m. · NYU Stern
• 22Thu · Oct
  Welcome Home, CAS: the College of Arts & Science’s new home5:30–7:30 p.m. · 25 West 4th Street