This is a partial list of our many talented alumni. To add yourself to this page or update your bio, send a note here.

Dance

Pamela Levy-Arauz (BFA) has performed with the   Metropolitan Opera Ballet, the Claudia Gitelman Dance Theater, the Don Redlich Dance Company, and the Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance Company, in addition to various solo performances at international venues. She is a faculty member at Marymount Manhattan College in New York.

Gillian Beauchamp (BA) toured internationally as a company dancer and teacher for the Dance Theatre of Ireland. In her seven years as a member of Dance Alloy, Pittsburgh’s professional modern dance company, she toured nationally and internationally and was a guest lecturer/artist in residence at several universities. She is currently pursuing premedical studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Megan Byrne (BFA) is the lighting director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in New York. Other design credits include lighting for choreographer Paul Matteson at the American Dance Festival and various fashion show projects. Through the lighting design company jkld inc., she has worked on productions for Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, and Giorgio Armani.

Trista (Redavid) Defilippis (BFA) traveled internationally with the Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance Company for seven years and served as rehearsal director in the artistic director’s absence. She has performed original works by Claudia Gitelman, Don Redlich, Ronald K. Brown, Amy Pivar, Bill T. Jones, and Beverly Blossom. She recently began a company, R-2 Dance, with colleague Sarah Geroulo Rutledge.

Bethany Formica (BFA) has performed with over 30 dance and theater companies. Currently she dances for Philadelphia’s Melanie Stewart Dance Theatre and co-directs the REACTIONARIES. She is an adjunct faculty member at Rowan University and teaches for the Philadelphia Dance Projects. Her work, New Slang—Everything Looks Perfect From Far Away, was just presented by the 2005 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival.

Kimberly Gibilisco (BFA) spent more than five years performing throughout the United States and Western Europe as a soloist in the work of Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance. While a member of the company, she performed reconstructed, seminal works of Nikolais and originated leading roles in Louis’ new choreography. She is an assistant professor of dance at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.

Elizabeth Higgins (BFA) has toured and performed extensively. Several companies have commissioned her choreography, and she has performed with Murray Louis and Nikolais Dance Company, Don Redlich Dance Company, Dance Compass, Pick of the Crop Dance, Mark Jarecke Dance, Ramos Dance, and Soundance Repertory Company. She has her own company, Elizabeth Higgins Dance Theater, and is assistant professor of dance at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City.

Raquel Horsford (BA) has performed in the internationally touring Off-Broadway show STOMP and HBO's Stomp Out Loud. She has also performed The Beat by Fractured Atlas with Alpha Omega Theatrical Dance Co. She has danced in many television, film, and stage productions and continues to perform, teach, and choreograph in Los Angeles.

Cleo Mack (BFA) was selected by Dance Magazine as one of “25 to watch in 2002”. As artistic director of Cleo Mack Dance Project, she has been granted by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts in 2003 and 2004 in continuing support and recognition of the high artistic merit of her work. She is currently a faculty member at the Purnell School in Pottersville, New Jersey.

Tamieca McCloud (BA) has performed with several companies, including Pilobolus Dance Theater, Acrodanse Theatre, Terry Hollis, and Charles O. Anderson. She has also been choreographing and performing her own work, primarily in New York City, for more than a decade. Her company, Restless.Native.Dance, has had two seasons at the Joyce SoHo in New York City, with a third upcoming in spring 2006.

Lisa Race (BA) has directed her own touring company (Race Dance) in New York and has collaborated on duets with Ginger Gillespie, Tom Thayer, and Sondra Loring. While a member of New York’s David Dorfman Dance, she received a Bessie Award. She has been involved in teaching and choreographing residencies at universities and professional companies all over the world.

Julia Ritter (BFA) is an associate professor of dance at Mason Gross. She has received a choreographic fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as two prestigious Fulbright Awards. She is the founder and artistic director of Julia Ritter Performance Group, a nonprofit organization that performs nationally and internationally.

Dale Thompson (BA) has worked in modern dance for the past 30 years. She has been a featured member of the Nikolais Dance Theatre, touring extensively in North and South America, Europe, and the Far East. Since moving to the UK, she has taught at a variety of universities: Laban, Roehampton Institute, and University College Chichester. She was also on the faculty of the American Dance Festival, through which she was sponsored to teach in Quito, Ecuador.

Music

Brian Chin (BM, MM) is the principal trumpet for the Tacoma Symphony Orchestra. He also performs frequently with other Washington-area orchestras, including the Seattle Symphony and the Pacific Northwest Ballet.

Derrick Gardner (MM) is an assistant professor of jazz trumpet at Michigan State University. He has performed worldwide at premier venues and with many jazz legends such as Dizzy Gillespie and Tony Bennett. He has toured with Harry Connick’s Big Band and is a former member of the world-famous Count Basie Orchestra. His band, Derrick Gardner & The Jazz Prophets, recently released their debut CD, Slim Goodie, on Impact Jazz.

Chris Hasselbring (BM) is a top freelance trumpeter in Chicago. He has performed with ensembles all over the world, including: the Bogota Philharmonic Orchestra, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and the Yomiuri Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo, Japan. In Chicago, he performs with ensembles such as Ars Viva, Chicago Sinfonietta, Concertante di Chicago, the Metropolis Symphony, and the Lake Forest Symphony.

Yi-Wen Jiang (MM) plays violin for the prestigious Shanghai Quartet. He has also appeared as a soloist with the Victoria Symphony and the Montreal Symphony. He has performed for NBC and PBS television specials, National Public Radio, CPB in Beijing, WQXR in New York, and KRUO in St. Louis.

Darryl Kubian (BM, MM) is a violinist for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and a former member of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra. He has also played many Broadway Musicals, including The King and I, Show Boat, and Crazy for You. Active as a composer and recording engineer, he has produced scores for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, CBS, and the Disney Channel, among others.

Paul Mergen (MM), tuba player for “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, performed at the 55th Inauguration of the President of the United States in January 2005.

Qiang Tu (MM) is a cellist with the New York Philharmonic. Prior to that, he was the principal cellist for the Princeton Chamber Symphony. Tu made his professional debut at age 13 as a soloist with one of China’s major symphony orchestras. Since then, he has performed in premier venues all over the world.

Sean Jones (MM) is the lead trumpet in the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and assistant professor of jazz studies at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He has collaborated with the Chico O’Farrill Orchestra, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, the Illinois Jacquet Big Band, the Louis Armstrong Legacy Band, and others.

Amanda Pabyan (BM) is a lyric-coloratura soprano with an impressive operatic repertoire that includes the Washington National Opera and New York City Opera, among many other prestigious venues. She has also performed with several major orchestras, including the American Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Terell Stafford (MM) is the director of jazz studies at Temple University in Philadelphia. Previously, he was a faculty member at the Juilliard Institute for Jazz Studies in New York. He has recorded four albums as a leader and more than 40 as a sideman. His broadcast appearances include The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, You Bet Your Life with Bill Cosby, and National Public Radio.

Theater Arts

Andrea Anders’ (MFA) career catapulted to a lead role on Broadway (Elaine Robinson in The Graduate), then a co-starring role on NBC’s Friends spin-off, Joey. Other prominent film and TV credits include The Stepford Wives and a recurring guest role in HBO’s Oz.

Roger Bart (BFA) is most widely known as George Williams, the sinister pharmacist on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, but two Broadway roles really put him on the map. In 1999, he won the Tony and Drama Desk awards as Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. In 2001, he created the role of Carmen Ghia in The Producers—a performance that won him Tony and Drama Desk nods and the opportunity to revisit the role in the 2005 film.

Avery Brooks (MFA) is probably best known for his work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, on which he played the leading role of Benjamin Sisko and directed several episodes. Other major television and film credits include Spenser: For Hire, American History X, 15 Minutes, and The Big Hit. His many stage performances include two Broadway revivals of Philip Hayes Dean’s one-man play, Paul Robeson.

Kristin Davis (BFA) became a household name as Charlotte York on HBO’s mega-hit Sex and the City. She has also guest starred on many television series, including Will & Grace; Friends; Seinfeld; ER; Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and Melrose Place.

Tim DeKay (MFA) played the leading role of Clayton Jones in HBO’s Carnivàle. He is also instantly recognizable as Kevin, or “The Bizarro Jerry” from Seinfeld. Other notable TV credits include recurring roles as Dr. Paul Thomas on Party of Five and as Rev. Keyes on Everwood, as well as guest appearances on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace, Friends, Ally McBeal, Sports Night, Caroline in the City, and Grace Under Fire.

Calista Flockhart’s (BFA) claim to fame is the title role on FOX’s Ally McBeal. Her feature film credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Birdcage, and Quiz Show. On Broadway, she played Natalya Ivanovna in Three Sisters and Laura in The Glass Menagerie, for which she won a 1995 Theatre World Award. Her multiple Off-Broadway credits include a turn in the acclaimed The Vagina Monologues and Mad Forest, which won a 1992 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Ensemble Performance.

Tim Goodmanson (MFA) has won multiple Emmy awards as art director for the epic soap As the World Turns. Most recently, he was recognized with a 2005 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction/Set Decoration/Scenic Design for a Drama Series.

Kevin Goetz (BFA) is “the Dr. Phil of Hollywood focus groups,” according to Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times. As managing director and executive vice president of entertainment research and consulting for OTX in Los Angeles, Goetz has established himself as a leader in motion picture market research.

Kelly Hance (BFA) is the stage manager for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, a scrappy new musical that catapulted to Broadway after an award-winning Off-Broadway run. The Broadway production was nominated for six 2005 Tony and Drama Desk awards, including Best New Musical.

William Mastrosimone (MFA), an esteemed contemporary playwright, was nominated for a 1983 Drama Desk Award for Extremities, which was later produced as a major motion picture. Two of his other plays, Sunshine and The Woolgatherer, have been produced Off-Broadway, and many of his plays have been produced on regional stages. Among his television and film writing credits are Into the West, Benedict Arnold: A Question of Honor, Sinatra, and With Honors.

Pat McCorkle (BA) is a top casting director and part-time lecturer at Mason Gross. In television and film, her credits include Secret Window, The Thomas Crown Affair, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, School Ties, and Chappelle’s Show. She has cast more than 50 Broadway productions, including The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Amadeus, Cabaret, and I’m Not Rappaport.

Roger Paradiso (BA, MFA) has worked as a producer on major feature films such as City by the Sea (executive producer), The Thomas Crown Affair (co-producer), At First Sight (co-producer), and The Manhattan Project (delegate producer). As a unit production manager, his credits include Soapdish, Beaches, Scrooged, Moonstruck, and Nine ½ Weeks.

Molly Price (BFA) garnered widespread attention as Faith Yokas in NBC’s Third Watch. Her film credits include Sweet and Lowdown and Pushing Tin, and her notable TV guest appearances include 7th Heaven, ER, Law and Order, and a recurring role on Sex and the City.

Robert Jess Roth’s (BA) Broadway directing debut, Beauty and the Beast, earned him a 1994 Tony nod. He has since directed productions of the show all over the world; in London, the show won an Olivier Award for Best Musical. He directed the world premiere of Elton John and Tim Rice’s Elaborate Lives, the first incarnation of the hit Broadway musical Aida. His second project with Sir Elton, Lestat, is scheduled to begin previews on Broadway in March 2006.

David Sirulnick (BFA) is executive vice president of news and production at MTV and produces half of the station’s programming. Among the shows he has created and/or produced are The Week in Rock, Choose or Lose, Fight for Your Rights, and Total Request Live. Over the last two decades, he has changed the way millions of young Americans view the news.

Rick Sordelet (MFA) is a fight director with close to 30 Broadway productions to his credit, including: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Frozen, Taboo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Boys from Syracuse, I’m Not Rappaport, Into the Woods, Urinetown, Aida, Once Upon a Mattress, and Beauty and the Beast.

Dina Waters Spybey (MFA) is one of the most recognizable faces on TV, from her turn as the hippy ex-wife on Frasier, to a recurring guest role on HBO’s Six Feet Under, to co-starring roles on the comedy series Greg the Bunny and Men Behaving Badly. Her numerous film credits include Just Like Heaven, The Haunted Mansion, Freaky Friday, SubUrbia, and The First Wives Club.

Click here for more Theater Arts alumni credits.

Visual Arts

Alice Aycock (BA) is a sculptor whose work appears in major public collections all over the world. She has had a solo exhibition and two major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is famous for creating large-scale architectural sculptures, such as “Starsifter” for JFK International Airport, “Spiral Stair” for the San Francisco Main Library, and “East River Roundabout” in New York City.

Cheryl Dunye (MFA) is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has been screened at international film festivals and movie theaters nationwide. In 2002, she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Director for her second feature-length film, Stranger Inside (HBO Films). She wrote, directed, and starred in her first film, The Watermelon Woman, which won the Teddy at the Berlin International Film Festival and Best Feature in L.A.’s OutFest, Italy’s Torino, and France’s Creteil Film Festivals. Dunye is a faculty member in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Matt Rainey (BFA) won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography and the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Domestic Photojournalism for “After the Fire,” a seven-part series published in The Star-Ledger. The project told the story of the recovery of the victims of the January 19, 2000 dormitory fire at Seton Hall University. A staff photographer at The Star-Ledger since 1995, Rainey was a member of the team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the resignation of Gov. James McGreevey. He also received the 2005 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers for “Last Chance High,” an 18-month study of students at an alternative school in Orange, New Jersey.

Charles Ray (MFA) is a sculptor and leader in Conceptual Realism; often, his artwork explores the discrepancies between the literal and the symbolic. His work has been on view at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and many others. In 1998-1999, a survey of his work opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Currently, he is a professor of sculpture at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Lucas Samaras (BA) was known for his sculptures, paintings, and performance art before he began experimenting with photography in the early 1970s. In his famous “Photo-Transformations,” Samaras recreates images by manipulating the wet dyes in Polaroid prints. His work can be seen in major collecting institutions all over the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the National Gallery of Australia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Tate Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and others.

Juan Sanchez (MFA) creates mixed-medium works through painting, photography, printmaking, digital processes, text, and collage. His constant themes are Puerto Rico, where his parents are from, and the graffiti- and poster-surfaced walls of New York City, where he grew up. Sanchez calls these eclectic, symbolically rich pieces “Ricanstructions.” His paintings and prints are in several permanent collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sanchez is a professor of art at Hunter College, the City University of New York.

George Segal (MFA, DFA) experimented with a range of media during his lifetime, but the revolutionary sculptural technique he invented while earned his MFA at Rutgers in the early 1960s was what won him his reputation. By applying plaster bandages to his body, he created body-part casts that could be assembled into complete figures. He then surrounded those figures with furniture and other environmental elements to create real-life scenes. Segal has received numerous prestigious worldwide awards, including the 1992 International Lifetime Achievement Award for Sculpture (Washington, D.C.), the 1997 Praemium Imperiale Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (Tokyo, Japan), and a 1999 National Medal of Honor (Washington, D.C.).

Joan Snyder (MFA) is a painter and printmaker who was an integral part of the American women’s movement in art during the early 1970s. Her continuing achievement since that time has led to her recognition as one of the outstanding American artists of the late 20th century. Her work can be found in many public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. In 2005, a retrospective of her work since 1969 opened to rave reviews at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Keith Sonnier (MFA) is a sculptor and conceptual artist who gained prominence in the late 1960s through his neon light sculptures. He became known not only for producing color through the use of light but also for incorporating functional elements like power cords and electrical transformers into the art itself. Later, he became one of the pioneers of video art. His works can be found in several public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.