Arts & Entertainment
Sheinelle Jones, co-host of the “3rd Hour of Today,” is one of a handful of Black women helming a national TV broadcast. And she thinks it’s important for people to see her full self: accomplished, Black, a woman, a mother, a daughter, a wife, a volunteer, a pray-er, a proud Midwesterner, and a human who embraces joy, who sometimes falters, sometimes loses her nerve — but persists nonetheless.
Snorkeling, tightrope walking, woodworking and competitive whistling — you won’t believe what Northwestern community members are up to outside of the classroom and office!
This winter, Nitasha Tamar Sharma offers a new Black studies course for students: New Black Music in Chicago: Artists’ Reflections on Music, Race and Entrepreneurship. Students will organize a free public jazz event for the community, which will take place March 4 as part of the Department of Black Studies’ annual Leon Forrest Lecture Series.
Lauren Dandridge Gaines ’04 is co-founder and principal of Chromatic, a Los Angeles–based lighting design firm working at the intersection of architecture and social justice.
Northwestern alum Aspen Buckingham ’23 and senior economics major Steven Jiang are the creators of Intervallic, a new video game changing the way aspiring musicians can practice their skills. Both musicians, Buckingham and Jiang are making practice into entertainment.
What do a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., an award-winning poetry collection and a bestselling mystery about the dark side of love have in common? They were all written by Northwestern alumni.
With his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and storied career as a writer, actor, director and producer, Garry Marshall ’56 made an indelible mark on American film and TV. His legacy lives on at Northwestern with the donation of the Garry Marshall Papers to University Archives.
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong ’96 has written seven books on pop culture history, including So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It), which comes out this January. Armstrong identifies five TV and movie moments that have influenced today’s popular media.
After learning to DJ during quarantine, Karen Valencia ’15 broke into Chicago’s nightlife scene, bringing reggaeton beats to some of the trendiest clubs. She shares how Northwestern shaped her worldview, what she loves most about DJing and more.
Maryam Keshavarz never dreamed of becoming a filmmaker when she was a Northwestern student in the mid-1990s. The daughter of Iranian immigrants didn’t know that world existed.
