Tag: 2003

Divya Gupta started a new job in Irvine, Calif., at the law firm Severson & Werson, where she practices financial services litigation. She and her husband welcomed their second daughter last fall. Baby Niyati joins big sister Jahnavi, who just turned 5.

Caroline Knox is moving to Asheville, N.C., with her husband, Mike, and new baby, Adeline Reid Lindow.

Bayard Templeton and his wife, Alex, were delighted to welcome their wonderful daughter, Elisabeth (“Issie”) Ruth Templeton, into the world on April 8th, weighing 6 lbs., 7oz. Bayard continues to teach middle school history, coach girls’ basketball and softball, and advise the karaoke club at Germantown Academy; he and his family now live in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia.

Ann Chen received the Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship. Starting in September, she will be traveling across Western Canada, mapping and documenting the communities along the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.You can follow her journey on Nat Geo’s website. Wes people living in Alberta or BC should give her a holler.

Tejas Desai is building his New Wei literary movement. In spring 2014 several of his articles on literature were published, including in the Huffington Post Books Section, Neworld Review, and Publishing Perspectives. He also gave many radio and print interviews, read at the renowned KGB Bar Reading Series, and exhibited at the AWP Conference in Seattle. He is currently writing the second book of The Brotherhood Trilogy, which he is calling a “noir epic,” as well as articles and book reviews.

Earlier this year Gabriel Popkin began a new career as an independent science writer, and recently had his first piece published in this magazine. He lives in Mount Rainier, Md., just outside Washington, DC.

Aaron Paige will be starting a three-year post-doc in ethnomusicology at the University of Denver Lamont School of Music in the fall.

Arturo Vidichand his wife, Julia, had a baby boy on February 1st named Ryder Metteya.

AMY TANNENBAUM | atannenbaum@wesleyan.edu

Julie Stankiewicz and Ben Teaford live together in their Manchester, Conn., home with their two cats, Vespurr and Lovebug. Julie has enjoyed working with Our Companions Animal Rescue as a cat adoption specialist and recently became a member of their magazine editorial staff. Ben has been working at ESPN for the past eight years in their digital media department. Julie and Ben are happy to announce that they are engaged and are planning to get married at the Wesleyan Chapel this coming fall.

Gabriela Herman is engaged to Tyson Evans, an editor at the New York Times, and will be getting married this June on Martha’s Vineyard. She continues to work as a freelance photographer in NYC shooting for publications such as Travel & Leisure, Martha Stewart Living, and Cosmopolitan.

Alison Plenge and Colin Aitken are the proud parents of Nora Brian Aitken, who unexpectedly made her arrival 10 weeks early on Feb. 23, 2014. After almost six weeks in the NICU, Nora is doing beautifully and came home in early April. They can’t wait to put her in her first Wes onesie!

M. Bob Kao is a visiting professor at Henan University Law School in Kaifeng, China, where he teaches American law. He is starting his PhD research on marine insurance law at Queen Mary, University of London in the fall.

Sandy Batista and Gabby Carson are married and live in NYC where Gabby works as a clinical psychologist at Bellevue Hospital and Sandy as deputy chief investigator at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. They are the proud parents of Ayla and Callen.

Tom Rabstenek and Sara Bremen Rabstenek ’05 welcomed their daughter, Dorothy, on Nov. 29. The whole family is doing great in sunny L.A.

Mayuran Tiruchelvam’s documentary film, To Be Takei, made its world premiere at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. A portrait of Star Trek actor and civil rights activist George Takei’s journey from WWII Japanese American internment camps to the daily Facebook feeds of over six million fans, To Be Takei will be released theatrically by Starz in August. Over the course of a busy year, Mayuran co-produced The Mend, co-starring twins Todd Stone ’05 and Adam Stone ’05, which premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March. The Village Voice recently called Girl is in Trouble, a film Mayuran co-wrote with director Julius Onah ’04 a “a standout” of BAM’s New Voices in Black Cinema series.

At the end of 2013, Matt Meyersohn left the Celtics after eight years of running the community relations department. Starting in the new year, Matt joined the U.S. Fund for UNICEF as senior director of sports partnerships. He’s in charge of working with American sports leagues, teams and athletes to raise awareness and funds for UNICEF’s international work. Matt is married to Nina, who is a radiology resident at Mass General Hospital. He’s addicted to golf and lives in Cambridge.

Matt Lerner and his wife, Chelsea, are thrilled to announce the birth of their son, Everett Finn-Lerner, on Dec. 22nd. Everett has already met (and charmed) many of his parents’ Wesleyan friends and is excited to meet many more!

Alison Criscitiello has finished her PhD at MIT, and moved to Canmore, Canada, for epic backyard skiing and climbing—and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary.

Johanna Russ and Rebecca Cohen moved with their daughter, Iris, from Detroit to Chicago. Jo is working for the Chicago Public Library’s Special Collections Division, and Rebecca is working for a consumer protection law firm.

George Obulutsa is still in Nairobi, working as a correspondent for Reuters News.

Divya Gupta has moved back to Southern California with her expanded family. She welcomed her second daughter, Niyati, in November, who joins big sister, Jahnavi, who will be starting kindergarten in the fall.

AMY TANNENBAUM |atannenbaum@wesleyan.edu

In January, Samantha Gillombardo Larson left the public defender’s office after 6.5 years and now works as a clerk magistrate for the Massachusetts Trial Courts. She frequently and happily returns to campus to visit her sister, Tabitha ’16. Among the guests at her son’s birthday party was Elias McCoy, son of Andrea Wilson McCoy, who lives close by.

Tejas Desai published his second book, Good Americans. This short story collection paints an uncompromising, panoramic portrait of contemporary America and is the first in a series of collections called The Human Tragedy. It is available on Amazon. Tejas is alternating The Human Tragedy with his novel series The Brotherhood Trilogy.

Neville Galloway-Williams is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as she applies for internships to complete her degree in clinical psychology. If this nerve-wracking process goes well, this will be her last year at Virginia Tech, and next year she could end up anywhere, from Maine to California. Wherever she goes, she hopes to find a few Wes grads who will hang out with her, husband Joshua, and 2-year-old Alice.

Tim Harrington, Jessica, and son Lius (2 years) moved to sunny Mountain View, Calif., in May and decided to stay after Tim received a permanent offer of employment from Google in its green-energy investments legal group. Daughter Josephine was born Oct. 8, in Mountain View. Mom and Josie are not sleeping much but otherwise doing great.

Along with his wife, Sally, and daughter Rose, Jeremy Cluchey moved from D.C. to the great state of Maine, where he’s working in communications at Bates College.

Kirsten Yamaguchi presented a talk about the formal and behavioral construction of gender in animation at the UC Berkeley Center for New Media during The Queerness and Games Conference. Kirsten’s talk was titled “The Medium’s Flexible Potential: Practical Tactics from Animation for Designing Queer Video Game Characters.”

A new English teacher has arrived in Salzburg. Vida Long is teaching ELL and Literature at a boarding school and loving being so close to the Austrian Alps for skiing.

Ben Rhatigan finished his MBA in and started working out of the Barcelona office of a management consultancy that specializes in companies in emerging economies, with some recent projects in Ghana, Kuwait, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.

Catherine Roden Faulk and Brian Faulk welcomed their first child, baby boy Jack Lincoln Faulk, on May 7, 2013. Jack has been welcomed to the Wes family by many Wes friends and recently met Zoey, daughter of Sarabeth Broder-Fingert ’02 and Heidi Alexander. The two were fast friends with birthdays just one month apart.

Arturo Vidich had an eventful year in NYC with two performance commissions, a Creative Capital grant, a NYFA grant, plus he got married; their son was born Jan. 31, 2014.

Andrew and Betsy Fippinger moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Andrew is a high school English teacher at Horace Mann. Betsy is a freelance casting assistant working in film and television. Their almost 2-year-old son James is an applesauce lover and Elmo aficionado.

Anna Seastrand finished her PhD in art history at Columbia and now works as a collegiate assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Nezia Azmi married Paul Rausch in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Dec. 29, 2012, after he took her on the longest first date ever—a train trip from London to Tehran over 25 days. She is currently in KL working on some arts management/education projects and spending time with family while waiting to join Paul in Honolulu, Hawai’i, hopefully sometime in mid-2014.

Julia Beizer and husband Tom Ratliff ’01 live in Takoma Park, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. Their second child, Miles James Ratliff, was born Dec. 21. Julia oversees mobile product development for The Washington Post.

In August, Joey Wender was joined by Tony Saudek in Jackson Hole to celebrate his marriage to Lauren Paige. Joey continues to work on Capitol Hill, having moved with his boss, Ed Markey, from the House to the Senate.

AMY TANNENBAUM

atannenbaum@wesleyan.edu