Tag: 2002

Categories Class Notes, Class Notes | 2000sPosted on

CLASS OF 2002 | 2023 | FALL ISSUE

Here’s this edition’s notes from our classmates!

Paul Smaldino, who lives in Sacramento, wrote: “In my academic career, I published a book—a graduate-level textbook on modeling social behavior, out this fall. I also have a band, The Small Dinosaurs, and we just put out an album called Dad Songs [released in August]—a garage/art rock album about the milieu of fatherhood. I have two kids and a wife.”

Jenny He sent along this news: “The exhibition John Waters: Pope of Trash, curated by Jenny He and Dara Jaffe ’09, MA ’12, is on view at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles from September 17, 2023, through August 4, 2024. It is accompanied by a 256-page catalog edited with text by Jenny and Dara. The book includes an essay by Jeanine Basinger and the exhibition features loans from the John Waters Archive housed in the Ogden and Mary Louise Reid Cinema Archives at the Jeanine Basinger Center for Film Studies.”

No Accident, a film Michelle Rabinowitz Carney produced for HBO Documentary Films, premiered on MAX October 10. It follows the civil suit against the organizers of 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and features fellow Wes alum Michael Bloch ’00, who represented the plaintiffs.

Jed Rosenbaum and his wife, Jillian, welcomed baby Zachary to the family in March. They live in Lexington, Massachusetts. Four-year-old Wesley keeps asking when he will get to see the tennis team play again—he attended last fall’s Alumni Pro-Am and a match at Tufts and very much enjoys the “Go Wes” cheers.

Steve Scribner is still living in Denver, co-principal of Shape Architecture Studio. His partner in crime, Morgan Law, is married to Kathleen Jones ’03. Morgan and Kathleen live in Leadville, the highest elevation town in the country, and have two kids and a husky and several bikes, as you do in a mountain town.

Steve wrote, “We’re heading to the East Coast tomorrow, and on the way to see my folks in Maine, will visit Dina Levi in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she is a diversity and inclusion director at Amherst College. She has an awesome wife and two amazing kids, one of whom can play the violin better than you, dear reader. If we’re lucky we may also see Josh Blumenstock and Annie Youngerman ’03 AND Marcel Paret ’00 and Jessie Mandle, who all may just happen to also be visiting Massachusetts. Josh and Annie are living the dream in Berkeley—he’s a professor and she’s a landscape architect. Marcel and Jessie are living the dream in Salt Lake City—he’s also a professor and she’s program director for the Healthy School’s campaign. They have two kids and a sweet old house and a really organized woodshop.”

Steve continued with more updates: “Ryan Huggins is still living in Durango, Colorado, and being a badass—we recently saw her in Denver after she completed yet another half Ironman (yes, she’s also finished a couple of full Ironman’s). She has a house and a huge garden and chickens and a business doing green energy consulting and makes time to enjoy the mountains. And in an incredible alignment of the stars, both Bajir Cannon and John Gordon were sighted (not by me) at the same time and in the same place in North Carolina! Bajir lives outside Kyoto and John is still living in Shanghai. They both have their own companies: if you want to learn bridge talk to Bajir, if you want to learn Chinese, talk to John. Has anyone seen Erik Dawe? He’s still living in D.C., working way too much on really interesting engineering projects.”

As for me (your class secretary), I recently earned a News and Documentary Emmy nomination for a short film I produced called The Sentence of Michael Thompson, which was co-distributed by MSNBC Films and the AVOD/FAST that I co-founded, Documentary+. Another film I produced, The Territory (Nat Geo/ Disney+), was nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards and won the entire film team a Peabody Award this year, including me and our esteemed editor Carlos Rojas. Also, Gasoline Rainbow, a hybrid scripted/documentary film I produced, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, and will come out on MUBI later this year. Lastly, another film I produced, Periodical, about menstrual justice, the stigma surrounding periods, and two incredible young women fighting to repeal the tampon tax state by state, premieres theatrically in October in LA, NY, Canada, Miami, and the UK, and will premiere on MSNBC and Peacock in mid-November. It’s a great film, please support!

Keep sending notes my way!

Categories Class Notes, Class Notes | 2000sPosted on

CLASS OF 2002 | 2002 | SPRING ISSUE

It’s reunion time! Can’t believe it’s been 20 years since we graduated. Just like college was a blink of an eye, so was the last 20 years (well . . . maybe not the last two during COVID). Looking forward to seeing you all in May on campus! Onto the notes:

Felicity Kohn was elevated to counsel at the law firm of Pryor Cashman in New York. She is in the firm’s Intellectual Property and Media + Entertainment practice group, where she handles a wide range of intellectual property and complex commercial matters. Felicity was named “One to Watch” in Intellectual Property Law by Best Lawyers in America (2021–22) and “Women in the Law: One to Watch” by Best Lawyers in America (2021).

Sallomé Hralima is partner in a New York–based archiving and media company. With Umi NiiLampti ’99, she cowrote Through the Wire, a short film about a young West African college student on the verge of making it in the music industry. In 2017, Sallomé returned to WesU to teach a course at the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and received the Edgar Beckham Alumni Achievement Award. In 2018, she delivered a TEDxWesleyan talk, “Workplaces Suffocate Human Potential” in which she referenced Bozoma Saint John ’99. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two daughters, Dream and Legacy.

Angie Schiavoni recently started Montessori Public Works, an organization dedicated to bringing the first Montessori classrooms to public schools across New Jersey. This proud Wisconsinite (who drove her minivan to Wes full of Wisconsin beer, bratwurst, and cheese one year) still can’t believe she settled on the Jersey Shore, and thinks it must be because of the subconscious brainwashing of college roommates Alena Fiorentino (née Weller) and Cara Summit (née Smith).

Oscar-nominated filmmaker Debra Granik is set to direct a feature adaptation of Una LaMarche’s YA novel Like No Other. She and Anne Rosellini of Still Rolling Productions optioned the book, in partnership with Mad Dog Film’s Alix Madigan. Published in 2015 by Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, Like No Other is billed as a contemporary take on West Side Story. It watches as the unlikely paths of a Hasidic girl and a secular boy meet on Eastern Parkway and blossom into a forbidden romance.

Ryan Akers is a stay-at-home dad. His daughter, Isadora Eleanor Akers, was born last June.

Jenny He is the exhibitions curator for the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

Ben Allen has completed five years now as technical advisor for Microfinance Research and Learning at Catholic Relief Services in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2020, Ben has coordinated surveys in Africa and Latin America to learn how the informal savings and lending groups trained there have fared during the pandemic. Ben has also been moonlighting as an economics instructor at Loyola University–Maryland in 2020–21 and Catholic University of America (Washington, DC) this spring. His eldest daughter, Livia, is two and started preschool in December; and his youngest daughter, Norah, turned one in February.

After spending two years in Seoul, Korea, building the global security function for Coupang Inc., Eric Donelan moved back to the U.S. to be closer to family. He recently joined eBay as the senior director for Global Security and Resiliency based in the San Jose area.

Ernest Hartner is living in Miami with wife Raquel and three kids. He plans to stay in a dorm room with Nick Bazos at reunion.

Rachael Slivka and husband Joel had a baby boy, Dov, in August. Big brother Ori is excited to have a new friend.

As for myself (Justin Lacob), after spending a year during the pandemic in Vancouver with my wife Melanie and two daughters (Scarlett, now 7 and Juliette, now 4), we returned to Los Angeles in July 2021. Still working at documentary studio XTR, I recently produced the Oscar-nominated feature documentary Ascension; They Call Me Magic, a four-part documentary series on AppleTV+ about Magic Johnson; Butterfly in the Sky, a documentary about the impact of Reading Rainbow and LeVar Burton; The Territory, a Nat Geo film that premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival about an indigenous-led land defense against illegal loggers and nonnative farmers in the Amazon rainforest (edited by Carlos Rojas); art-heist documentary The Thief Collector (which premiered at SXSW); The Hobby, a documentary about the recent trading card boom; and about 15 other documentary features and series. I also am the cofounder and head of Documentary+, an ad-supported streaming platform (www.docplus.com) for passionate nonfiction fans.

See everyone on campus soon!

Categories Class Notes | 2000sPosted on

CLASS OF 2002 | 2021 | ISSUE 1

One year later most of us are still cooped up in our homes, our kids not in school, and still riding out the pandemic. But as the world opens up and vaccines become available, it’s still great to see that Wesleyan alumni are flourishing. And what’s even crazier—next year marks our 20th Reunion! A few updates from our classmates this time around:

      Michelle Carney (Rabinowitz) developed and produced a new docuseries on video games for Vice called Reset: The Unauthorized Guide to Video Games.

      Eric Donelan left the U.S. State Department in late 2019 and moved to Seoul, Korea with his family to take a position with the Coupang Corporation as the head of global security and workforce protection.

      Monica Coquoz sends out “a friendly hello from Seville, Spain,” where she is based. Melissa is a therapist, mindfulness and yoga teacher. She’s “dancing to stay happy and energized. Big hugs to all!”

      Suzy Gerstein lives in New York City with her husband, David, her eight-going-on-14-year-old son Harvey, and her almost three-year-old daughter Judith Rose. Since the pandemic hit Suzy has had to pivot her business. Suzy writes, “For the past decade-and-a-half I had made my living as a freelance makeup artist (doing mostly shoots and red carpet). With that no longer viable, I have begun to teach one-on-one virtual makeup lessons. Fellow ’02-er, Nicole Cohen, has given me invaluable PR coaching. I have also been staying sane doing my homegirl Jen Guarnieri’s Yoga Collective workouts and filming Instagram makeup tutorials (with voice by daughter, Judy).” Suzy’s IG handle is @suzygerstein; you can follow along with her! One of Suzy’s first clients was another fellow ’02er Lily Walton (McDowell), who has a new interior design business. Lily lives in Ojai and her design website is lilywalton.com.

      As for me, I’ve been riding out the pandemic with my wife and kids in the greater Vancouver area since September, having spent the fall on Salt Spring Island (seven weeks), Quadra Island (two weeks), and skiing in Whistler (one month), while settling in West Vancouver for the winter and spring (and going back to Los Angeles in the summer). I’ve been working remotely, continuing in my role at XTR. At XTR, we’ve been busy building one of the best documentary studios in the world—we produced eight films that premiered at Sundance 2021 and two films at SXSW 2021. And we are in the middle of production on three documentary series, as well as six feature documentaries, and we also launched our ad-supported streaming platform Documentary+, which is available anywhere you stream content, including docplus.com. We are building a home for passionate nonfiction fans and so far the platform has been doing quite well!

     Keep the notes coming!

Categories Class Notes | 2000sPosted on

CLASS OF 2002 | 2020 | ISSUE 2

Hey, everybody! I hope everyone is staying healthy and safe during these challenging times. If there’s a silver lining to the pandemic, it’s that we’re able to share more time with our loved ones and spend more time introspectively looking within. Our collective resolute spirit is inspiring to see.

I recently came across an article that my old hallmate Larrison Campbell wrote in Vanity Fair, where she talks about breaking out her mother’s old Junior League cookbooks during quarantine, discovering a time capsule to the past and a guidepost for the pandemic. And I recently caught up with Jenny He, pre-pandemic, as we attended the Frieze Art Fair in Los Angeles together. This year Jenny moved to Los Angeles and took a position as the exhibitions curator at the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures after being the touring filmmaker and artist for Tim Burton’s international exhibitions for the past 10 years.

Congratulations are in store for a few of our classmates. Rachael Slivka gave birth to her first child on Sept. 14, 2019; she and her husband, Joel Schectman, named their son Ori. They live in Washington, D.C., where Rachael works as an emergency physician at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. And Blake Walsh married Shannon McCabe on Sept. 1, 2019, in Buffalo, N.Y. Joining them for a raucous weekend celebration were Kevin MacDermott, Shawn Lemerise and his wife, Reka Salgunan ’01, Taylor Green and Rachel Peters, John Geehreng and Jen Guarnieri, Adam Cayton-Holland, John Lawler, Padraig Hughes ’03, and Chuck Ptak MALS ’05.

Jocelyn Greene has been creating content around theater games and social-emotional learning for parents and schools through Child’s Play in Action. Jocelyn lives in Brooklyn with her actor husband, Glenn Fleshler, and their 8-year-old son.

Alex Horwitz is tucked in the woods of Upstate New York, where he’s building a big stick house with his two boys. A few months ago, just before lockdown set in, Alex directed a Bon Jovi music video at Abbey Road Studios, featuring no-longer-Prince Harry. It was supposed to be step one of a larger documentary project with the band, but the pandemic put that on the back burner for now. Until then, his family is just hunkered down, staying safe, and getting ready for whatever is next.

And for others, it was time to move on from their jobs:

After a brief—but fun—stint working at an Amazon warehouse, Ryan Akers-Engstrand is a homemaker in David, Calif., with his wife, who is two years away from completing a neurology residency, and their two boys, one of whom is completing his kindergarten residency in June, and the other who is turning 4 in September. Ryan got the chance to have a virtual reunion in April with all of his senior year housemates—Nate Andrade, Chris Lynch, and Pete Rosenblatt. Ryan said, “It was sweet.”

Eric Donelan left the U.S. Department of State and moved to Seoul, Korea, in January with his family. Eric is currently the director of physical security for Coupang, the largest e-commerce company in Korea. They are settling well and “wish the whole Wesleyan community, students and alumni, good health during these trying times.”

I haven’t posted a note about myself in a while—I left the Viacom corporate world working for Paramount Network at the beginning of 2019 and joined forces with former Ryot Film co-founder Bryn Mooser to build XTR, a new documentary studio in LA. In our first year, we produced and co-financed over 20 documentary features, including four films in competition at Sundance 2020 (one of which—Blood Nose, Empty Pockets—was also produced by another Wesleyan alumni producer, Michael Gottwald ’06, one film at SXSW and two films at Tribeca (both festivals were sadly sidelined due to the pandemic). Our SXSW film—You Cannot Kill David Arquette—was picked up by Neon and will be released on VOD (and hopefully theatrically as well, depending upon COVID) in August. We are also about to announce a major sports doc with a huge Michael Jordan-level athlete. In addition, we’re working on several documentary series and podcasts. It’s been really fun building a new business and hopefully, a new brand within the nonfiction space.

Class of 2002, please keep the notes coming!

Justin Lacob | justinlacob@gmail.com

Categories Class Notes | 2000sPosted on

CLASS OF 2003 | 2019 | ISSUE 2

After 12 years in Vancouver, Canada, Steve Chasey relocated with his wife, Sarah, and two little ones Dorian, 6, and Naomi, 2, to Berkeley, Calif., to be closer to family and friends. Steve is practicing construction law with Varela, Lee, Metz, and Guarino, LLP in San Francisco, while not digging in the garden, playing with LEGOs, and generally having fun in the California sunshine.

Ben Rhatigan is switching to a creative agency called Brand Culture, after several years working in strategy consulting post-MBA. He’ll stay in Barcelona but will spend a few months at the company’s headquarters in Los Angeles, where he plans to reconnect with old Wes friends and where, coincidentally, he’ll be working with Columbine Goldsmith’s delightful younger sister Alice ’10.

Becky Ticotsky Roihl and her husband Dan Roihl are overjoyed to welcome their first child Gabriella May Roihl, born April 27. The Roihls live in a suburb of Boston, and Becky works as a college counselor at a private school.

Sarah Erlinder is an assistant federal public defender in Flagstaff, Ariz. She lives there with husband Charlie and sons Caleb, 4, and Zeke, 1.

Matt Kushner and Lauren Edgar Kushner (Brown ’04) are busy juggling careers and two children. Matt is freelancing around NYC as a 3D generalist, TD, and pipeline developer. You can catch his work on TV In Fear of the Walking Dead, Blindspot, and Power. Lauren helped create the VR experience in AMNH’s new T. rex: The Ultimate Predator exhibit. Daughters Mimi and Tessa are now 4 and 1.5, respectively, and are doing a great job of keeping their parents on their toes.

Laura Stein is living in New Orleans with her husband Chris Kaminstein ’04. She cofounded and directs a nonprofit arts organization, Dancing Grounds, and he cofounded and directs a nonprofit theater organization, Goat in the Road Productions, with artistic director, Shannon Flaherty ’06. Laura’s sister, Rachel Stein, and her husband, Matt Schwarzfeld ’03, moved to New Orleans with their daughter, Joni. Rachel is a research librarian at the Latin American Studies Library and Matt is a high school social studies teacher. It’s a Wesleyan family affair in New Orleans!

Amy Tannenbaum Gottlieb | atannenbaum@wesleyan.edu