Arts & Entertainment
After putting on a children’s theater performance during his senior year, Jeff Semmerling ’81 became fascinated with mask-making. He spent years honing his skills in the mask, and today he’s one of the country’s best-known mask makers.
For nearly five decades, fog artist Fujiko Nakaya ’57 has presented her ethereal, shape-shifting installations of pure water vapor in an effort to connect humans to nature.
Jennifer Croft’s 2017 translation of Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s book Flights, originally published in 2007, received the 2018 Man Booker International Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Awards’ inaugural honor for translated literature last year. Croft ’13 PhD, who studied comparative literature at Northwestern, says that she felt a deep kinship to Tokarczuk and the novel’s themes and began the work of translating after meeting Tokarczuk in Krakow.
If you drove around Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2012, you couldn’t miss the billboards promoting Kabul Dreams, the country’s first rock band. “Seeing the images of three rockers all around Kabul wasn’t something many people expected,” says Alykhan Kaba ’18 MBA, who at the time was working in Kabul for a telecom company that sponsored the band.
Record producer-songwriter-mixer Thom Russo knows talent when he hears it. Last spring his manager sent him two songs recorded by a 20-year-old student who’s attending the Brit School, a free performing arts and technology academy in south London.
Longtime audio engineer and professor Benj Kanters now focuses on hearing conservation.
Miki Sawada '09 is a nomad, often spending a month or more on the road. But wherever she goes, she is never far from a piano. During three weeks in August and September 2017, Sawada crisscrossed the largest U.S.
The Fourth Plinth, London: Northwestern artist Michael Rakowitz unveiled a 14-foot statue of the Lamassu, a winged Assyrian deity with the body of a bull and the head of a human, at the Fourth Plinth in London last March. Created from 9,000 steel cans of Iraqi date syrup, the piece is part of Rakowitz’s larger project The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, which uses ephemera to represent and commemorate lost Iraqi artifacts.
The former viola performance major turned Broadway star won the 2018 Tony Award for best performance by an actress in a musical for “The Band’s Visit.” In this interview she shares how she transitioned from music performance to theater, how she focuses her creative energies and the life lessons she learned at Northwestern.
A few years back, classmates Hana Schank ’93 and Elizabeth Wallace ’93 met for dinner and realized that they were both orbiting around a crisis. Since their undergraduate days, they had been told to dream big.
