Arts & Entertainment
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.
Jenny Shi’s award-winning, feature-length documentary follows the disappearance of Yingying Zhang and her family’s search for justice. Shi spent two years working on the film, Finding Yingying, which won the South by Southwest Film Festival 2020 Documentary Feature Special Jury Prize for Breakthrough Voice.
Artist Ryan Tova Katz painted a mural at 829 Foster St. in Evanston in honor of the 2020 Northwestern graduates.
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.
Northwestern professors and an alumna offer perspectives on beauty and who gets to decide what is beautiful.
To this day I’m still not sure how I managed, as an RTVF major, to weasel my way into Craig Kinzer’s sophomore acting class. I never even wanted to be an actor, but I knew filmmaking involved working with actors, so I talked my way into the class.
Greg Berlanti, a writer, producer and director and 1994 School of Communication alumnus, and his husband, former professional soccer player Robbie Rogers, recently made a $2 million gift to the school via the Berlanti Family Foundation. The gift will endow a professorship and help expand opportunities for students interested in writing for the screen and stage.
When Bud Welch lost his 23-year-old daughter, Julie, in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, he was consumed by grief at the loss of his only daughter and rage toward the perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh.
After performing at opera festivals around Europe, tenor Chase Henry Hopkins ’12 wanted to create the same musical atmosphere in his hometown, Edwardsville, Ill. So in 2018 he founded Opera Edwardsville to develop performances, arts education and community collaborations through live opera.
Danny M. Cohen ’06 MA, ’11 PhD, an associate professor in both the School of Education and Social Policy and the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies, teaches social change, human rights and Holocaust history.
