Skip to main content

Arts & Entertainment

When student performance groups returned to campus in the fall, social distancing and crowd safety guidelines forced them to adjust their art to a new, virtual reality.

Read about campus arts

Opera Hero
Acclaimed poet and Northwestern alumna Angela Jackson is Illinois' fifth poet laureate. Previous poet laureates include Carl Sandburg and Jackson's idol, Gwendolyn Brooks.

Read more about the Illinois poet laureate

Angela Jackson Hero
Conductor, composer and arranger Kevin Vondrak talks about his new arrangement of Northwestern's “Alma Mater,” his love of a cappella, and how his job as a conductor and artistic associate with The Crossing, a grammy winning choir based in Philadelphia, has changed during COVID-19.

Read more from Kevin

Kevin Vondrak Hero
In order to avoid being deported to Korea, in the midst of a pandemic, world-class pianist EunAe Lee must convince Immigration and Naturalization Service officials that her unique gifts at the piano are an asset to the music community here in the U.S.

Read about EunAe

EunAe Lee Hero
Ziwe Fumudoh ’14 has re-created appointment TV in the streaming era with her Thursday night Instagram Live show. In the sharply funny, confrontational and often wildly uncomfortable show, Fumudoh interviews celebrity guests to get at their implicit biases and start conversations about race and racism.

Learn more about Ziwe

Ziwe Story Image2
In the early days of the pandemic, Whitney Owens quickly pivoted the Cincinnati Museum Center’s three institutions — the Duke Energy Children's Museum, Cincinnati History Museum and Museum of Natural History & Science — to virtual programming.

Read more about Whitney Owens

Cincinnati Museum Hero
Northwestern gave Bill Healy the skills and the confidence to pursue a career as a journalist. It also gave him an opportunity to return to the classroom, where he teaches students to find genuine emotion that cuts to the core of our shared humanity.

Read Bill Healy's essay

mnd bill healy

Mural Maker

Fall 2020
Artist Ryan Tova Katz painted a mural at 829 Foster St. in Evanston in honor of the 2020 Northwestern graduates.

See the completed mural

Mural Hero
Broadway actor Adam Kantor ’08 co-founded StoryCourse, which mixes food and theater, creating “a multisensory, delicious, profound, moving experience,” says Kantor. He and his StoryCourse team are now developing at-home interactive theatrical culinary experiences.

Read more about Adam Kantor’s StoryCourse

kantor group
Following leads from England to Australia to Mexico, Jim Berkenstadt ’78 traveled the world looking for Jimmie Nicol, the drummer who subbed for the Beatles’ Ringo Starr for two weeks in 1964, at the height of Beatlemania — then disappeared.

Read more about Jim Berkenstadt

cu jim berkenstant