People
Grace Lightner ’13 was cleaning out her grandmother’s house in Ohio with her mother, Lorraine Stewart ’80, ’81 MS, when she stumbled upon a box of preserved wedding dresses belonging to Stewart and her sister. Stewart immediately teared up, and in that moment, inspiration struck.
As executive producer of ‘Ted Lasso,’ Liza Katzer ’08 is involved in nearly every aspect of making the hit AppleTV+ series. And while the success of 'Ted Lasso' has led to a lot of other opportunities, the senior vice president of Doozer Productions remains keenly aware of the challenges she faced in her early-career years and the lessons she’s learned along the way.
Pawel Janas and Kyle Rutledge took the Chicago Union ultimate team to the brink of frisbee greatness. In late August the duo played in the American Ultimate Disc League (AUDL) championship, where the Union fell to the heavily favored New York Empire 22-14.
On May 3, 1968, just one month after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., James Turner ’68 MA led 120 students in a peaceful, 38-hour sit-in at Northwestern’s bursar’s office to protest the racism and injustices Black students faced on campus, now commonly referred to as the Bursar’s Office Takeover. Northwestern Magazine remembers his legacy.
When Natalie Y. Moore ’99 MS started writing The Billboard, her new play about reproductive rights, in 2018, she never imagined that the script might hit the stage in a post-Roe world.
As an associate producer at The Washington Post, Chris Vazquez ’21, ’21 MS is part of a three-person team tasked with creating content for the publication’s TikTok channel. Every day, Vazquez scripts, records and edits short videos offering a comedic take on current events, ranging from mask mandates to inflation to President Joe Biden’s approval rating.
Jenny Hagel ’09 MFA has been nominated for multiple Emmy Awards for her work as a comedy writer for Late Night With Seth Meyers. She has also written for the Golden Globe Awards and shows like truTV’s long-running hit Impractical Jokers.
A year out of Northwestern, Keith Miller ’10 was working at a youth mentoring organization and moonlighting as a model in New York City when he wrote a manuscript focused on Jay, a queer African American young man coming of age in the Deep South in the early 2000s. Now that manuscript is the basis for an animated short film and a two-book deal with Harper Collins.
After honing his acting and vocal skills at Northwestern, Lukas Arnold ’17 went viral on TikTok for his spot-on celebrity impressions. Now he’s pursuing a career in stand-up comedy — and leaving his 2.4 million TikTok followers in stitches.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Sumbul Siddiqui and her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was a child and found affordable housing in Cambridge, Mass.
