Profiles

Square

A Journalist’s Unmatched Access
In February 2013, after conducting a widely condemned nuclear weapons test and just days before leader Kim Jong Un infamously welcomed visiting NBA star Dennis Rodman, North Korea launched its first mobile internet network. Though it was only available to foreigners, it was a newsworthy move for a totalitarian regime with a decades-long policy of extreme isolation. As the Korea Bureau chief for the Associated Press, Jean H. Lee reported all of this news from Pyongyang.
(Columbia College Today, Fall 2021)

Moira Demos ’96 Returns to the Scene of the Crime
Once you’ve created a cultural phenomenon, what do you do for an encore? Moira Demos ’96, SOA’08 and Laura Ricciardi SOA’07, the filmmakers behind the true-crime Netflix docuseries Making a Murderer, took a somewhat meta approach: They returned to Manitowoc County, Wis., to grapple with a world changed by the impassioned response to their work.
(Columbia College Today, Winter 2019)

A Savory Tradition
It’s lunchtime on a humid summer Tuesday and a suit-and-tied Mauro Maccioni ’95 is seated in a harlequin-patterned chair in the dining room of Osteria del Circo, the Midtown West restaurant inspired by his mother Egidiana’s Tuscan home cooking.
(Columbia College Today, Summer 2014)

Oceanographer Juliette Finzi Hart ’96 Shows the (Virtual) Reality of Climate Change
Imagine seeing your favorite beach swallowed by the ocean. Your distress — the visceral kind of reaction that spurs people to action — is what oceanographer Juliette Finzi Hart ’96 is looking to elicit from residents of Southern California through the use of virtual reality.
(Columbia College Today, Winter 2017-18)

The Home Front
Ai-jen Poo ’96 spent her formative years as a Columbia Lion, but as an advocate for domestic workers she identifies more closely with the tiger, her Chinese zodiac sign. So much, in fact, that she had its likeness tattooed on her right arm when she was in her mid-20s.
(Columbia College Today, Fall 2012)

Sleepy Hollow Mayor Takes Town Beyond the Legend
It’s tough to introduce yourself as the mayor of Sleepy Hollow without raising some eyebrows. “As in the Headless Horseman?” Indeed, and each fall Ken Wray ’77, GSAPP ’91 presides over the first of the season’s annual hayrides that trace the flight of Ichabod Crane. But the mayor of this small New York village has bigger responsibilities than nurturing an early 19th-century legend.
(Columbia College Today, Fall 2017)

Steven Handel ’66 is Bringing Nature Back to the City
On a sunny July afternoon at Brooklyn Bridge Park, amid ice-cream toting children, tour groups and wedding parties posing for photos, Steven Handel ’66 stops along the promenade of Pier 1 to contemplate the salt spray roses facing the East River. Where the casual observer might perceive a delicate bloom, however, Handel sees a hearty species chosen for the site because it tolerates salty air and water.
(Columbia College Today, Winter 2014-15)