“I hope that we can continue to make memories and find ways to come together,” she says of the affinity chapter, “because I think Ailey and Fordham have such a special history. It’s an incredible program.”

Where did you grow up and how did you end up in the Ailey/Fordham program?
I grew up in Mesa, Arizona. The summer after my junior year of high school, I actually attended the Ailey Summer Intensive and got to stay in the dorms [at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus] for six weeks. That was a little sneak peek of what college could look like for me. My four years at Fordham were absolutely amazing. I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today without the Ailey/Fordham BFA program. I actually saw the Christmas Spectacular for the first time my freshman year of college through tickets that I got from Fordham.

And did you get to do any workshops with the Rockettes at Ailey?
Yes, they would come in and do workshops at Ailey about two or three times a semester. The spring of my sophomore year, I auditioned for the ensemble in the Christmas Spectacular, and I did that the fall of my junior year. So I was working and going to school and was a part of the show. Then, after I graduated, I auditioned for both the ensemble and the Rockettes. I would’ve been ecstatic either way, but I was offered the role of Rockettes for the Christmas season in 2021, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

So when do rehearsals start for the Christmas Spectacular?
They usually start at the end of September or early October. And we rehearse for about six weeks leading up to opening night, six days a week for about six hours each day. And we slowly layer on choreography, tech, with lighting, costumes, the orchestra, and then it’s opening night and we’re doing it every day up to four times a day. Typically, we do up to 15 or 16 shows in a week.

What are you doing for the rest of the year?
All of us are doing different things, but for me personally, I teach dance and I’m a fitness instructor. I also still do a lot of things with the Rockettes in the offseason. I’ve actually been able to go back to Ailey and teach classes, both at Ailey and at Radio City, where we actually bring the dancers to the music hall and give them that experience of rehearsing there. That has been really special because that’s how I got my introduction to the Rockettes, those workshop classes.

Outside of that, we always keep up with social media and doing different routines and additional performances that pop up last-minute. But then all of a sudden, it’s Christmastime and we’re back at the hall rehearsing and performing for 6,000 people every night. So it goes by quickly. Really, we’re always working and doing things in that time to prepare for the next season.

How do you manage seeing family and friends around the holidays?
I’m so fortunate that my family and friends make their way out here for the holidays. My parents were actually just here for a few performances, and they may come back up for Christmas. But they know that this show is where I’m at during the holiday season, and they’re just so proud of me. And I think that’s what’s special—I can make new memories during the holiday season, and I’m glad that I’m able to make the time to FaceTime and call and send gifts or do whatever it may be to stay connected.

What would your childhood self think about your job?
I think little Maya would be in awe of where I’m at now and would probably not even believe that that’s how I’m spending my Christmas morning. It’s definitely a huge dream come true that I didn’t even know was a dream at the time.

What’s your favorite part of the show?
I really do love our “New York at Christmas” number. We’re on a double-decker tour bus, which takes us through New York City and Central Park and Fifth Avenue, and then you end up at Radio City Music Hall. I love how it incorporates everyone in the show—the singers, the ensemble, the principals. And there’s moments where I’m on the bus and you can really look out into the audience and see individual faces of some of those kids, and their eyes really do light up when they see us come on stage. I feel like it’s one of those numbers that you take it in, like, “Wow, I’m performing at Radio City Music Hall.”

What’s your favorite Christmas song?
“Jingle Bells.”

What’s the best gift you’ve received?
I’m a sentimental person, so just a classic Christmas card from friends or family. I usually keep all of those.

What’s your favorite place in New York City at Christmastime (that’s not Radio City)?
This might be a boring answer, but my apartment. I feel like after the shows and the busyness of the holiday season, I think being at my apartment—which is very much decorated with the holiday spirit and it’s just super cozy—is my favorite place at the end of the long day.

—Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

Check out more photos from the Radio City Christmas Spectacular below (all photos courtesy of MSG Entertainment).

RELATED STORY: How to Become a Radio City Rockette
RELATED STORY: Inside a Dream Internship with the Radio City Rockettes

But just as important was a gut feeling.

“There was this moment when I visited Fordham after I had gotten accepted, and I was going down the escalator” in the Lowenstein Center, Liu says. “There was the ‘New York is my campus, Fordham is my school’ sign, and I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, okay, I think I can spend four years here.’ It was very clear to me that this was the place I belonged.”

Liu not only got the dance training that prepared her for her current role in the national touring production of Funny Girl, but she became an orientation leader on campus—in part to help students find their own “escalator moment.”  

“I loved the fact that everything was in its own little radius,” she says. “I was like, ‘Okay, I feel like there’s a little community for me here. Even if I am in this huge city where there’s a million things to do, I know I have this little pocket.’ I wanted other people to have that experience.”

Finding Structure—and a Spiritual Connection—Through Art

Growing up in San Francisco, Liu knew she wanted to attend college in New York City.

“For me, it felt like a mecca,” Liu says. “This is where art is. This is where art flourishes. This is where art is appreciated. This is where we feel like we can be fully who we are and not have to hide anything, and just be allowed to be in community with the people who are the best at this in the world. There’s just really no other place like it.”

As she settled into the BFA program, she decided to pursue a minor in business administration “to have skills to bring to the table if I own a small business or help someone else with their business,” she says. And the first-year course Faith and Critical Reasoning was a formative one for her.

“Seeing how people create structure in their lives around religion almost reminded me of how I create structure in my life around art,” she says. “Regardless of what religion it is, it all comes down to the same thing: wanting to feel alive, wanting to feel appreciated, wanting to feel love, wanting to give love. I think that is my philosophy around art as well. It’s just sharing human experience.”

Since graduating from Fordham in 2019, she’s been sharing that experience with audiences as a dancer, actress, and model at places like the J Chen Project dance company, on Apple TV’s Dickinson, and as a cast member of Cabaret at Connecticut’s Goodspeed Opera House. Now, she’s bringing her talents across the United States on the Funny Girl national tour, a yearlong job that began last August and will take her through this summer—and that has brought her to some new favorite cities, like Des Moines and Memphis, and to San Francisco for a hometown run. She says the Funny Girl tour feels like a culmination of what she’s been building toward. “I remember just crying, being like, ‘Okay, everything that I’ve been working toward and wanting and manifesting is finally coming to fruition,’” she says of finding out she landed a role in the tap-heavy musical. “It feels like a step in the right direction toward the rest of my goals.”

Creating Community on Campus

While dance and academic studies keep BFA students plenty busy, Liu also wanted to get more involved on the Fordham campus outside the classroom. She gave campus tours for prospective students, was an orientation leader, and served on the Senior Week Committee, which planned events and celebrations for her class’s upcoming final year—from a boat cruise and Dave & Buster’s night to information sessions on housing and personal finance workshops.

“It was community building and preparing yourself to be an adult and spending time with friends,” Liu says of her experience on the Senior Week Committee. “I just wanted to take advantage of all the opportunities that I had to connect with people and create relationships that were not solely focused on dance.”

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
Sharing my art and being accessible to people who feel like I can be of help to them.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Two: It’s not all about you, and everything happens for a reason.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Oh, that’s such a hard question! I have to say Sheep Meadow in Central Park. It’s a little cheesy and basic, but it’s real. New York is my favorite place in the world. Once you leave New York, you’re like, ‘Oh, thank God I left,’ but then you’re like two, three days out and you’re like, ‘Wait, now I miss it!’”

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman. I did my senior choreography thesis based on it. It’s this somewhat fictional, somewhat based-on-fact short story collection. He theorizes how Einstein was imagining how time moves. It is so much about questioning reality and questioning your perspective on things. That’s been a basis for how I take things in and how I see the world, for sure.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I loved Dean Milton Javier Bravo, who taught Faith and Critical Reasoning. I appreciated that he didn’t just see me as a student, he saw me as a human. He was like, “Okay, you’re on your own journey and this is my class, but what you bring to the class is more important than you just showing up and sitting here.” He was always trying to get everyone else involved in the class. On the Ailey side, the one who’s closest to my heart is one of my ballet teachers, Caridad Martinez. She’s a former Cuban ballerina, incredible technician. I loved her class so much. It was always the hardest class. I would make sure in my schedule that I could get into her classes, because she knew the way I worked. She was able to push me and be like, “Kathy, is that really your best? I don’t think you’re giving me your best today. I know you can do better than this.” I hope she knows that she’s been a big influence.

Following a brief video highlighting the history and mission of the BFA program, Naia Neal kicked off the evening’s performances with The Serpent, a solo piece choreographed by Jonathan Lee. Neal, a junior in the program, is one of two current recipients of the Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship, an artistic merit scholarship established in 2012 for Ailey/Fordham students and funded by donor support and proceeds from the annual benefit concert.

Each class performed a group piece: First-year students showed off their West African dance training with Den-Kouly (Celebration), choreographed by Imani Faye; sophomores performed an excerpt from the more ballet-centric For They Are Rivers, choreographed by Becky Brown; juniors danced an excerpt from Darshan Singh Bhuller’s athletic, abstract Mapping; and the senior class came together for Fredrick Earl Mosley’s Running Spirits (Revival and Restaging), a playful piece that featured impressive jumps, lifts, and—as the title suggests—dancers filling up the stage with speed.

Three Ailey/Fordham alumni—Mikaela Brandon, FCLC ’19; Naya Hutchinson, FCLC ’21; and Shaina McGregor, FCLC ’18—came back to dance alongside Neal in Four Women, choreographed by senior student Baili Goer.

The Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program welcomed its first class in fall 1998. The brainchild of then–Ailey School director Denise Jefferson and Edward Bristow, Ph.D., then dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the program combines rigorous dance training with a rigorous liberal arts education. Its graduates perform with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Rockettes, and on Broadway stages and beyond. Today, the program is led by Ailey School co-director Melanie Person and Fordham professor Andrew Clark, Ph.D.

The concert was preceded by a reception for ticket holders in a sixth-floor studio at the Joan Weill Center for Dance on West 55th Street, five blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. The Fordham Lincoln Center Jazz Ensemble provided musical entertainment during the reception.

“These are more than scholarships,” said Fordham senior Sonola Burrja, giving an address at the University’s annual Scholarship Donors and Recipients Reception. “They are often life-changing events that have aided us in becoming who we are today.”

Burrja, who emigrated from Albania, got a scholarship at a time when she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish her degree at Fordham. Now she’s sitting on three medical school acceptances. “This scholarship truly changed the path that my life is about to take,” said Burrja, a biological sciences major at Fordham College at Rose Hill and recipient of the Eugenie F. Doyle, M.D., and Joseph A. Doyle, Esq., Endowed Scholarship.

The event at the University Club in Manhattan drew approximately 340 donors and students—some of whom were meeting the benefactors behind their scholarships in person for the first time.

Others already had relationships with their benefactors. One recipient in attendance, Gabriella Lopez, was considering transferring to a college back home in Florida a few years ago because of how the coronavirus pandemic shook up her family’s dynamics. She thought it would be impossible for her to come back to Fordham, “which really did sadden me tremendously,” she said. “I had already spent a year and a half here, and I wanted to stay committed and finish out my degree.”

Then Fordham connected Lopez to a scholarship created by Patricia Dugan-Perlmuth, FCLC ’79. “That basically just saved me and gave me the opportunity to finish out my career here at Fordham,” said Lopez, now a senior in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. In addition to the scholarship gift, Dugan-Perlmuth’s “consistent communication with me has really helped keep me steady and grounded and graduate on time.”

To Dugan-Perlmuth, that’s just part of giving to Fordham. “It’s very cura personalis,” she said, using the Jesuit term for caring for the whole person.

The Cycle of Giving

In her own remarks, Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham, spoke of the cycle of scholarship giving and lauded the commitment of donors. “I’ve met so many of you, both in New York and around the country, and you tell me these stories—sometimes with tears in your eyes—about what it meant to have someone invest in you,” she said, “and how eager you are to keep investing in others.”

The night was full of stories of trials and triumph as students and donors sat together around tables, breaking bread. “It’s exhilarating to put a face to the name,” said Theresa Krembs, a sophomore at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and another recipient of Dugan-Perlmuth’s endowed scholarship.

Two donors also addressed the gathering—Mary Jane F. McCartney, TMC ’69, PAR, and her husband, George F. McCartney, Esq., FCRH ’68, LAW ’74, PAR, both of whom are longtime members of the Fordham University President’s Council. “To achieve our hopes for you, it’s important that you do more than graduate and get a good-paying job,” Mary Jane McCartney said. “We hope that you are spending your time here absorbing the full range of cultures, ideas, and viewpoints that an intense Jesuit education provides.”

One student in attendance, Kweku Andoh Jr., a sophomore in the Gabelli School of Business, came to Fordham to learn the business side of fashion and get experience in the industry, and is now doing shoots and working at Moschino, a fashion house. But he might not be at Fordham without the Richard R. Hayes, GABELLI ’51, Endowed Scholarship, designated for veterans and students from military families.

Andoh is the son of a federal employee and member of the U.S. Army; the family was relocating from a duty station in Germany around the time he entered Fordham, and needed help with his tuition. The scholarship “is really great, tailored to students like me, who have parents in the military,” Andoh said. “I think the scholarship has really helped with our transition.”

Richard Hayes, founder of the scholarship, passed away in 2018, but his wife, Margaret Hayes, came to the reception and met Andoh there. She said hearing recipients’ stories and connecting with students who have lived all over the world keep her coming back.

“They’re just so lovely and energetic and hopeful and creative,” she said. “I come every year.”

— Jeff Coltin

Scholarship gifts advance the University’s current $350 million fundraising campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student. Learn more about our campaign.

The evening showcase, The Movement, Melodrama, and Melodies of NYC, featured dance solos from the Ailey/Fordham students and performances of the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile, as well as popular rhythm and blues song Route 66 by the Fordham Jazz Ensemble. Members of Fordham Theatre also performed an excerpt from the play Indecent, which celebrates the love, magic, and hope of the theater. Following the showcase held in Costantino Room, guests wined and dined at a reception held in the adjacent Soden Lounge and Bateman Room. 

In her closing remarks at the end of the showcase, Tetlow thanked the students for their “stunning” performance and their ability to evoke emotion. 

“There’s a world where we would have our business school students discuss a business plan, and watch the law student try to brief, and have a calculus problem on a whiteboard, just to demonstrate their talent and discipline and hard work, but none of them would have made us feel what you made us feel tonight,” Tetlow said. 

She also praised the students for their courage to perform on stage and admired the dancers’ agility. (Watching the Ailey dancers almost made her pull a muscle, she joked.) In addition, she highlighted the students’ nod to American history. 

“I think that you, tonight, really earned our spot on San Juan Hill. I feel the spirits of the people who lived here who were so important in American history and in American cultural history, from Zora Neale Hurston to Thelonious Monk. And you have made it such that we deserve this spot of their making and deserve our spot as part of Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts because we are part of this grand experiment to bring together such amazing culture of this country and in the world,” said Tetlow. “So thank you for demonstrating what Fordham is and your own talent and for making the kickoff to this inauguration so special.” 

“I support the Denise Jefferson Memorial Fund, it enables dancers who otherwise would not be able to come to Fordham,” she said at a May 2 reception benefitting the program at the Lincoln Center campus. “I’m very joyful about that.” 

Dugan Perlmuth said she has a mailing list of friends she invited to the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance Benefit Concert, which returned with live performances after a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic. More than 200 rush tickets were sold for the concert and the evening raised about $32,000.

That night, for nearly 90 minutes, students in the dual program honored the modern dance tradition through numbers drawing from ballet to modern jazz to hip-hop.

More than 120 student dancers are enrolled in the program, which allows students to earn a liberal arts undergraduate degree while also earning a BFA degree through study with the Ailey School, the official school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

The evening drew supporters such as Fordham alumna Delia Peters, who attended Fordham in the 1980s while a full-time dancer at the New York City Ballet company.

Was it hard to balance studies and dance? Not really, said the 1985 graduate.

“The skills we learn as professional dancers serve us very well here. Our papers were never late, we were never late for our tests, because, when that curtain goes up, you gotta be ready with your pointe shoes on, your hair up, your make up on–no excuses.”

Peters majored in the then-new Middle East Studies Program and retired from dancing three years after starting classes at Fordham. However, she continued working for the New York City Ballet in a different capacity before moving on to a career in law.

“I love Fordham. It made me a better-rounded person,” she said, adding that she also supports the Ailey/Fordham BFA program by serving on its benefit committee. “Contemporary dancers, I learned, have a longer lifespan to get into a [dance]company. They can do this. And, if they’re going to do this, then I want to be a part of making it the best it can be. And, it has turned out to be one of the best in the country.”

“There’s so many issues that impact the ability for people to be healthy in low-income communities like the Bronx,” Pierre said, such as high unemployment, low graduation rates, and limited access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables.

Pierre said Bronx County, where he’s lived for more than 15 years, ranks last out of 62 counties in New York when it comes to health outcomes. He’s on a mission to improve that statistic, not just through his work at Healthfirst, but also by mentoring Fordham students as a member of the President’s Council and by teaching health economics as an adjunct professor at Columbia University and other schools across the city. He said a holistic approach is what’s needed.

“There’s so many downstream impacts of not having [good] health [outcomes], but the solutions are outside of just giving people a health insurance card; it has to do with the total environment,” he said.

The Value of a Fordham Education

Born in New York City to Haitian immigrants, Pierre said the value of education was drilled into him and his older brother “the entire time growing up.” He watched as each of his parents worked multiple jobs to provide for their family and make higher education that much more accessible for him and his brother.

“My dad actually started a business cleaning offices, and the sole purpose was for his children to go to school, get an education, work hard,” Pierre said.

Pierre said that in high school, Fordham was on his radar as one of the city’s top schools. He liked that he could live on campus but still visit his family often. He also liked the University’s proximity to countless internship opportunities and the reputation of its business school. Add in the fact that he could continue running track, which he did throughout high school, and Pierre said he was sold.

“I knew I wanted to be a business major somewhere that would afford me the opportunity to have an internship. I remember, once I got the acceptance from Fordham and the ability to join the track team, that was my decision; that was it.”

Beginning a Lifelong Commitment

Pierre’s start as a Fordham student is imprinted in his mind for more than the opportunities and change it provided, though: 9/11 happened at the beginning of his first semester.

“I remember going to the rooftop of Dealy Hall with other classmates and looking at the city skyline,” he said. “I remember every single piece of that moment. There was so much bonding for that cohort.”

Pierre said that those moments, along with his time on the track team and in the classroom, were defining for him. “[You] figure out what you want to be when you grow up, figure out the type of man you’re going to be for the rest of your life,” he said. And that’s why he’s so committed to the University still.

“After I graduated, there was always a goal to stay connected to Fordham—you just want to give back because of how much was given to you as a student,” he said.

Offering Current—and Future—Students a ‘Hand Up’

One of the ways he tries to meet that goal is by serving on the President’s Council, a group of successful professionals and philanthropists committed to mentoring Fordham’s future leaders.

Last September, he joined two other council members on a panel titled “Born, Bred, and Making It in NYC.” He told Fordham students that a series of internships really helped drive him to his career and passion: equitable access to health care for everyone.

After graduating from the Gabelli School of Business in 2005, he earned a master’s degree in health policy and financial management from NYU, and now he’s pursuing a doctorate in health economics at Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business—all to be better equipped to both find solutions to public health crises and to educate students to be able to do the same.

As a member of the President’s Council, Pierre has also contributed to the Fordham Founder’s Undergraduate Scholarship Fund. He recalled one incident when he was able to help clear the barriers of entry for one student of color with her heart set on enrolling in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program. Now, she’s in her second year of the program, he said.

In the past, he’s also had a chance to reach students before they enroll, offering advice and sharing his experiences with Black male student-athletes through his involvement in Fordham Gents, a mentoring group consisting of Black male alumni.

“I would sit at a table with 10 to 12 kids, and we literally would just talk about college life, school, how to write a resume, how to look for scholarships, things to think about when thinking about a school, my experience at Fordham as a Black student,” he said. “Giving back that way was very impactful for me, and I just felt it was a must-do because I wish I had that sort of exposure, training, and guidance. I wished I was able to meet alumni that were of color that said, ‘Hey, I’ve been through it.’”

Since December, Pierre, who recently finished a term on the President’s Athletic Advisory Board, has also been serving as a member of the Athletics Steering Committee and is hoping to facilitate a partnership between Healthfirst and the University. He said that recruiting from the communities it serves is a priority for Healthfirst, so the organization is looking to Fordham and other New York City schools for interns and recent graduates.

“Once COVID-19 is dying down, and we can go back into the community and be safe, where there’s opportunities for Healthfirst to do community engagement events in partnership with Fordham, we’ll definitely connect.” More than recruiting students, Pierre said the partnership would also focus on what can be done to help the community overall.

“My passion has been trying to work with anybody … because we shouldn’t be in a society where we have so much money, yet there’s so many people that need a hand up to help them have a better life and thrive.”

Fordham Five (Plus One)

What are you most passionate about?
I’m most passionate about mentoring and helping people along their path to being the best version of themselves.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
The sweet isn’t as sweet without the bitter.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
I have forever fallen in love with Harlem, New York. After that, Johannesburg, South Africa, is my second favorite place.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith. Actually, any book by Zadie Smith!

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
I admire Anthony Carter, FCRH ’76 [a Fordham trustee and former member of the President’s Council]. He has been a thought leader and high-level executive in his industry. He sets a high bar and an amazing example of how to give back to the Fordham community. Lastly, he has created unique opportunities for other alumni, like me, to give back, too. He’s a Fordham titan!

What are you optimistic about?
I am optimistic about the COVID-19 recovery in New York City. As we return to normal, vaccinations are quickly becoming the gateway to our new, post-pandemic economy. This means the unvaccinated working class of New York could potentially be shut out due to their lower vaccination rates. This comes at a time when the need could not be greater. But I am hopeful that New York and the new administration in City Hall will find the light at the end of this tunnel.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

“Jonathon was a caring and compassionate educator who had the kind of multilayered career that one can only marvel at,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, in an email to the University community. “He was thoughtful and creative, with a talent for drawing connections among disciplines.” 

Appels taught in Fordham’s English, African and African American studies, anthropology, dance, history, communication and media studies, Middle East studies, theology, and visual arts departments, as well as the religious studies, comparative literature, and urban studies programs, from 1996 to 2002 and 2009 to 2021. He offered a colorful mix of courses, including “Madness and Literature” and “LGBT Arts and Spirituality: Mystics and Creators,” mostly at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“His mind was eclectic and his education and curiosity was unmatched,” said Anne Fernald, Ph.D., professor of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies. “Endlessly curious, he always had a new story of the latest lecture or performance he had attended. He was a wonderful storyteller, with a rich laugh. He took me out to a vegan restaurant once, hoping to encourage me in more healthy habits. He was always cold and wandered the halls draped in wonderful scarves.”

Appels was a scholar, poet, musician, sculptor, and art critic who conducted research in 20 countries, largely in Europe; he was also a member of nine humanities associations. 

“He had a very probing mind, and he was very good at connecting the dots between various disciplines and departments,” said his husband, David LaMarche. “He was a very animated and inquisitive person with strong opinions, but not rigid … a free spirit and sort of counterculture, since the time that we were born in, the early sixties, and a sensitive man who loved every branch of the arts.”

His First Love

But what most academics weren’t aware of, said his husband, was his love for dance.  

“He loved teaching, but his first love was probably choreography,” LaMarche said. 

Appels was a dancer and choreographer who founded his own dance company, Company Appels, in 1979. He performed across the country and the world, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City to international stages in France, Germany, and Portugal. He choreographed modern dances for scores of performers, principally graduates of the Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, and North Carolina School of the Arts. One of his favorite courses he taught at Fordham was part of the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, run jointly with the Ailey School, said his husband. Even off stage at more casual venues, you could find him dancing.

“He loved disco dancing and he loved to dance, even into his sixties. If we ever went to a gala party or something like that, he’d always be on the dance floor, wild,” said LaMarche, a pianist who first met Appels at a dance class in San Francisco. 

Appels’ passion for the arts was recognized worldwide. In 1998, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach modern dance at the National Dance Academy in Hungary. (He received another Fulbright to study the archives of a famous philosopher in Belgium in 1991.) In addition, he received an artist fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts and a William Como Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts. 

In a 2014 reflection, a Fordham alumnus praised Appels for showing him the beauty of dancing through his course called Lincoln Center Arts. 

“I never considered dance to be very interesting, running the other way when friends would suggest going to the ballet … I now found myself discussing Balanchine, Paul Taylor, and Dance Theater of Harlem with anyone who would listen,” wrote Jason McDonald, who took the course as a Ph.D. student.

‘Now Keep That Big Smile’ 

Appels was a thoughtful instructor who wanted his students to take away something meaningful from his classes, said Thomas O’Donnell, Ph.D., co-chair of Fordham’s comparative literature program and associate professor of English and medieval studies. 

“Jon really wanted his students to become exposed to very different ideas. He was a very curious and open-minded person, and it seemed that his lessons as a result were full of that same spirit,” O’Donnell said. “He cared about his students very deeply. For every student that I would talk to him about, he had some story or insight about their biography and who they were. He really wanted to get to know the students so he could help them better.”

He loved speaking with students about their work over the phone, said LaMarche. Before their calls ended, he left them with a unique message. 

“He ended almost every phone call with a student by saying, ‘Now keep that big smile,’ which I thought was so cute,” LaMarche said, chuckling. “You can’t see someone smile over the phone, but he would always say that to them.” 

An ‘Off-the-Grid Educational Experience’ 

Appels was born on May 17, 1954, in Falfurrias, Texas. His father, Robert C. Robinson, was a sales executive for oil companies and a financial planner; his mother, Patricia Robinson, neé Hosley, was an elementary school teacher. When he was a child, his family frequently moved because of the nature of his father’s job, said LaMarche. He lived in Nigeria and Libya and later settled in California. 

“He was exposed to a lot of different cultures as a youngster … He got his B.A. at Western Washington University at a college called Fairhaven College, which was a very experimental educational institution at that time,” said LaMarche. “That started his off-the grid educational experience.”

Appels earned a bachelor’s degree in art and society from Western Washington University, a master’s degree in music from Mills College, a master’s degree in poetry from Antioch University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the City University of New York. 

Outside of Fordham, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, Rutgers University, and his alma mater Western Washington University. He enjoyed yoga, pilates, gyrotonics, acupuncture, and other forms of Eastern medicine and healing. Instead of ironing his shirts and wearing a suit jacket like many professors, he preferred a loose and casual style, LaMarche said. He was a spiritual man who loved nature, especially walks through the woods and summers spent with LaMarche in Ithaca, where they swam in waterfalls, gorges, and lakes. He disliked technology, especially computers—in fact, he never owned one, said LaMarche, who managed his husband’s online accounts.  

In addition to LaMarche, Appels is survived by his father, Robert; brother, Robert H. Robinson and his partner, Ilona Robinson; and his sister, Carol House, her husband Roger House, and their son Josiah. A memorial service will be held for Appels sometime early next year, said LaMarche.

We connected with some of the countless Rams bringing people together to repair and lift up their communities.

A Pro Runner Blows the Whistle on Abusive Training Culture

In 2013, at age 17, Mary Cain was one of the top runners in the world, the youngest U.S. athlete ever to compete on a World Championships team. But soon after joining Nike’s elite Oregon Project to train with head coach Alberto Salazar, her health and her promising pro career deteriorated.

Her coaches forced her to lose weight, which led to the loss of her period for three years and stress-related injuries, including five broken bones, Cain said.

“You don’t go from losing weight to breaking bones in two days, right? There’s usually this long period of time where there’s this physical deterioration,” Cain said at Fordham’s ninth annual Sports Business Symposium, held virtually on March 25. “Throughout the day, I just was more prone to having silly things, like headaches, to just being more hungry, to being a little bit more irritated as a result, and to just being visibly fatigued.”

She began to dread the sport she had loved since fifth grade. Her physical, emotional, and mental health began to spiral downward. She developed an eating disorder and began to cut herself and have suicidal thoughts.

“What once had been something that came naturally to me, this beautiful experience … suddenly became a slog,” Cain said. “The longer that I was in this really circular system, the more my body broke down.”

Cain completed one year at the University of Portland while training with the Oregon Project before transferring to Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2019. After moving to New York, she kept training with the Nike project until 2016.

In a November 2019 video piece for The New York Times, Cain said the all-male coaching staff, led by Salazar, did not include a certified sports psychologist or certified nutritionist, and that Salazar had tried to put her on birth control pills to lose weight and harmed her mental health by berating her and humiliating her in front of her fellow athletes.

“Women in sports are treated harsher when it comes to body image,” she said during the Fordham symposium in March. “And I believe the reason is mostly societal—the expectation to be a lighter weight is more attached to [women’s] looks and their meaning. And it’s this really toxic culture that I think permeates professional sports.”

After Cain’s story came out, many other women supported her claims, including Kara Goucher, an Olympic distance runner who had trained under the same Nike program. Salazar denied the allegations of abuse, but several weeks before Cain’s story was published, he received a four-year ban from the sport for doping violations, and Nike had already shut down the Oregon Project.

In January 2020, Nike completed an internal investigation of Cain’s allegations of abuse, and her story helped Nike identify initiatives to “do better in supporting female athletes,” including increasing the number of women coaches in sports and investing in scientific research into the impact of elite training on women and girls.

Today, Cain is the New York City community manager for Tracksmith, a running apparel company. She runs professionally as a member of USA Track & Field and continues to call for reforms, including having teams provide mental health counselors and sports psychologists who are separate from the coaching staff.

She said her goal in sharing her story is to make sure that no other athletes, particularly female athletes, have to go through the suffering she did.

“I hadn’t known that the situation was bad until somebody [told me], ‘That is bad. That shouldn’t happen to you.’ It’s normalized,” she said.

“I realized I didn’t want any other person out there to … be self-loathing, beat themselves up, and have this incredibly negative experience because they were under an emotionally abusive coach and almost didn’t know it.”

—Kelly Kultys, FCRH ’15

A Gun Violence Survivor Works to Heal Social Divisions

Lamont Young knows something about forgiveness and bridging interpersonal divides.

In 1993, he almost died after being shot seven times in the chest—point blank—by an acquaintance who was high on PCP. But he later found the strength to forgive his assailant, and in doing so, he was inspired to pursue a lifelong path of helping others.

That path eventually led him to the Graduate School of Education, where he earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling in 2018.

Then he made a career move that led to a personal transformation. He went to work with UNITE, a national initiative co-founded by Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver that seeks to help Americans overcome divisions, and he gained a new perspective.

“I went in with this psychological approach to addressing the human condition and suffering caused by racism and discrimination. I had a burning desire to promote human dignity and shed light on segregation and dehumanization, but I was so caught up in my head trying to find ways to address this,” he said.

“Once I met with the UNITE team, I had a spiritual awakening. I started to address them not from my mind or from my heart, but from my spiritual background. It was transformative to understand that in spite of it all, we have to love, we still have to forgive.”

Young and his mother, Glenda, are featured in The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening (Penguin Life/The Open Field), published in March. The book contains an interview with them conducted by Shriver, who knew Young from a young men’s group he once led in New Haven, Connecticut.

“A mother who raises a son who can take on the hardscrabble and often fatal streets of New Haven and not only come through it but come through it with forgiveness and an open heart—that’s a mother I want to learn from,” said Shriver, who spoke about the power of personal transformation at Fordham’s 2019 commencement ceremony, where he received an honorary doctorate.

Shriver said the book’s common thread is that when we treat ourselves and others with dignity, we unlock potential, even during disagreements.

“This is hard emotional, spiritual, political work,” he said. “If you want a quick solution, this is the wrong place. But if you want the best solution, there’s only one way, and that’s to unite.”

In addition to conducting research on dignity and respect for UNITE, Young works with people experiencing homelessness in New Haven at Columbus House and provides psychotherapy at Reliant Behavioral Health Community Service.

And he has learned about some new dimensions of forgiveness. “You can transgress against yourself by not forgiving yourself for some of the things that you haven’t done or some of the time you haven’t spent with your loved ones before they left this Earth,” he said. “I found that very powerful, to understand how to love and forgive yourself in the midst of turmoil and grief in order to free yourself.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

A Nonprofit Leader Rescues Food Waste to Relieve Hunger, Promote Community

As the president and CEO of Community Solidarity, Jon Stepanian runs the largest vegetarian hunger relief program in the country. It’s a nonprofit he hopes doesn’t exist in a generation or two.

“When we started, we wanted to build a structure where we could theoretically put ourselves out of business in the communities where we operate,” Stepanian said. “We want to make sure that there’s going to be no need for us in 30 to 40 years if the community itself can take care of these needs.”

Based on Long Island, Community Solidarity rescues food from being wasted at supermarkets and farms and distributes it to people at food shares across four locations on Long Island and one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each area, he says, is at risk of being a “food desert,” where fresh, nutritious, affordable food is hard to find.

“We rescue food waste because it’s common sense—it’s cheap to do it. But on a more philosophical level, on a more economic level, this is why people in our communities are struggling. We see it as a fundamental problem in our system that’s making people in our community poor and hurting people overseas and also destroying our environment by producing large quantities of stuff that we don’t need,” he said.

“We’re trying to rescue a small portion of that waste and repurpose it for something good, like feeding our neighbors, but we’re also trying to expose the problem.”

Stepanian knew he wanted to focus on helping local communities after graduating from Fordham. As an undergraduate, he studied history and political science—and an internship at the United Nations and a stint working at the American Civil Liberties Union gave him perspective on working within the intergovernmental and nonprofit sectors. Shortly after college, he and his friends started a Food Not Bombs chapter on Long Island, occasionally setting up a food distribution table on weekends.

Before long, he realized he needed to create a more sustainable structure to keep the food distribution going. Community Solidarity, with its 501(c)3 nonprofit status, was born out of this realization, although Stepanian said that a nonhierarchical structure was important from the outset.

“When we decided to become a nonprofit, we said we wanted no lines of demarcation between who can volunteer and who can get food,” he said. “We wanted to make it so you wouldn’t be able to tell if someone’s volunteering or in need or both.”

In a 2018 TEDxNYU talk, Stepanian talked about what he called “the myth of scarcity,” and how a communal response can not only address hunger but also help to create a deeper sense of belonging among neighbors.

“We’re also trying to raise awareness by saying that we will, in 10 years, be the largest hunger relief organization in the country, and we’re doing it for a thousandth of the price that the food banks are doing it, all because of this waste,” Stepanian said.

“This is how abundant that system of waste is. We want to make it eye-opening for people.”

—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

A Familiar Face Offers Financial Literacy Training to Fellow Women of Color

As a young woman growing up in Brooklyn, Felicia Gomes-Gregory knew she wanted two things: to attend Fordham University and to work as a computer scientist. She achieved both.

But now, more than 30 years later, Gomes-Gregory is focused on something new, which she calls her passion project: Heels and Higher Achievement, a nonprofit that empowers women and people of color by helping them learn about finance.

Her path to forming the nonprofit started in 2016, when she received what she calls a blessing in disguise. After a decades-long career at various financial firms in New York City, she was laid off from Neuberger Berman, an employee-owned investment management firm.

She asked herself what she would do next. “In my heart, I’ve always wanted to … get more women involved in technology or finance, and especially women of color, because I never saw anybody that looked like me—or not enough of it,” Gomes-Gregory said.

She kicked off Heels and Higher Achievement (HHA) in 2018, determined to make financial literacy fun while giving a voice to those in her community who are empowering young women in tech, finance, STEM, media, or “whatever it is that they want to do,” she said. “I wanted to create a forum so that people can speak, but mainly speak about financial education.”

That first year, she conducted in-person workshops at schools, churches, and “anywhere anyone would hear me,” Gomes-Gregory said. She’d speak about basic financial literacy concepts and invite people to schedule a complimentary financial review—a kind of “GPS of your money,” she said, “to make sure you can stop working for money at some point and [let]money work for you.”

She also launched an ambassador program to give young girls opportunities to network with professionals and serve their communities through volunteer work. But COVID-19 meant pivoting to online events and workshops in 2020.

In April, HHA sponsored its second annual series of online workshops for Financial Literacy Month, including, for the first time, programming for men. “[Because] of all of the things that were happening in the Black community— between George Floyd, the social issues, COVID—men need to talk, too,” she said.

The digital programming has gone well, she said. She’s hoping to launch a YouTube channel and resume in-person events soon.

“I’m learning that self-care and self-preservation—from a financial, physical, mental, and spiritual [standpoint]—are so very important,” she said. “And I didn’t learn this until I was 50. So, now I’m teaching all of the young ’uns. ‘Take care of yourself first. You’re important.’”

—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Students Share Their Expertise with Bronx Businesses

When the pandemic upended everything in March 2020, Rich Shrestha was working on a research project about consumer behavior in the Bronx. As the economy went into a tailspin, his mind went back to his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father ran a Subway franchise for a decade.

“I saw him always grinding away every day, putting in 12-hour days. So, I can sympathize with the small business owners who are trying to survive in the age of COVID,” he said.

Shrestha, a rising senior majoring in economics at Fordham College at Rose Hill and a member of the University’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, reached out to friends he thought might be interested in helping small businesses.

Diontay Santiago, then a senior majoring in marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, was one of those who answered the call. In June 2020, they launched the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. The student-run group, comprising more than 70 members, is split into teams that assist clients with finance, marketing, compliance, technology, and communications. Students offer their advice free of charge, relying on lessons they’ve learned in classes. They also conduct research, develop industry reports, and create case studies and videos for Bronx businesses.

For Santiago, who graduated from Fordham in May and had served as president of ASILI, the Black Student Alliance, the group has been a way to lift up the borough he has called home his whole life. “Doing this sort of thing weds the school to its actual geographic location and allows it to give back to the community it’s inhabited for the last two centuries or so. So when Rich presented me with the opportunity to work with him, I jumped at it.”

The group’s clients have included restaurants, nonprofits, a software company, and an insurance firm. In addition to word-of mouth and its website (fordhambdc.org), the group has connected with clients through the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

Sadibou Sylla, the interim director of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory and an adjunct professor at the Gabelli School, said that all who contribute to the group personify what it means to be a “changemaker.”

“They understand that it is only in serving all that we serve ourselves,” he said, “and that business is nothing but an instrument for helping society.”

Shrestha is optimistic that the group will live on long after he and his classmates graduate.

“This is an opportunity to gain an understanding of the community you’re in, and how we can be a better part of it and better neighbors,” he said. “I think a lot of students are starting to realize how important that is.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

Do you know a Fordham “Changemaker”?
Who are the unsung Rams working to foster collaboration and change in your community? Tell us about the people whose stories you’d like us to share. Write to us at [email protected].

At the time, few could imagine the increased diversity in dance that the program would go on to champion, let alone foresee the social media revolution. Today, as the program prepares for its annual benefit on May 3, a recipient of the scholarship named for Jefferson embodies both.

FCLC senior Naya Hutchinson is pursuing a double major: a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance and a bachelor’s in African and African American Studies; for the latter, she is writing her senior thesis on Black dancers in the media.

Hutchinson said that while the past year has been trying, an unforeseen upshot of the pandemic has been that she has begun to think about dance in a more media-centric manner.

“We all had to create our pieces virtually, we had to direct and film from afar, and edit,” she said.

The need to record dance during the pandemic spurred her to begin an accelerated master’s program in public media as she completes her bachelor’s. Even as she wraps up writing her senior thesis, she has already started the Master of Arts in Public Media, which will earn her both degrees in just five years. She said the coursework has helped her present dance on a variety of digital platforms.

Learning About African Americans and the Arts

Hutchinson added that classes at Fordham inform her dance studies at Ailey and vice versa.

Once in the Ailey/Fordham program, she began to learn about New York’s deep history in African American arts. At Ailey, she learned about the people behind the scenes in dance and jazz of the Harlem Renaissance. She reflects often on past dancers at the company who are no longer alive, but whose legacy lives on in her dance instructors. At Fordham, she said a “plethora of teachers” from her African and African American Studies major gave her insight into Black politics, cinema, and activism.

“They have helped me along the way with learning about these things I didn’t have a chance to learn about in high school, especially on the Black media, just the amount of Black movies that I’ve watched and old Black characters—all these things have been super helpful and informative as my journey begins, so I’m excited.”

Ailey/Fordham Benefit to Support Jefferson Scholarship

This year, like nearly every year since Jefferson and Bristow established the program, the two institutions will hold the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance Benefit to help more students like Hutchinson benefit from the cross-pollination of a liberal arts degree with the fine art of dance. Though this year’s event will be held virtually due to the pandemic, funds raised will continue to go toward the Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship Fund, an artistic merit scholarship that supports two students, a junior and a senior, in the Ailey/Fordham program every year. The event will be held on Mon., May 3, at 5:30 p.m.

Despite training with a noted ballet mistress in Chicago and having mastered her craft, Jefferson, who was Black, told Dance magazine that she initially didn’t plan on pursuing dance because she had never seen anyone on stage who wasn’t white. While times have certainly changed, Hutchinson said the dance world has yet to fully expunge its white-centric aesthetic.

“I think that overall the dance world could have evolved even more today than they already have,” said Hutchinson. “I think there should be more dancers that look like me on the big stages.”

A Spiritual Start

Hutchinson got her start in Prince George’s County, Maryland, performing liturgical dance at the church where both her parents were ministers, which has led her to think of dance in a spiritual manner.

“I think of dance’s value in terms of my relationship with God and what that means through my movement,” she said.

By the time she was 10 years old, she landed at the School of the Washington Ballet where said she encountered other Black students and dancers. But when she arrived at Ailey, the demographic was even more diverse and inclusive.

Using Social Media to Create Change

“I always think that we can push more diversity at all of our institutions and I think that’s super important, especially with the year that we’ve had where race has been such a highlight of the summer of 2020 and everything that went on,” she said. “I’ve known girls that have not wanted to dance anymore because they don’t see the representation of themselves.”

To that end, Hutchinson has already employed her media skills to reach young people who may not have the opportunity to see dance on stage.

“I do this because I love it, but I also love the aspect that I get to inspire young girls through media,” she said. “I’ve had some come up to me and ask me about dancing and they talk about how alien all of these things are to them, so I’ve created a YouTube channel in part for them.”

Those wishing to attend the virtual benefit or make a gift to support the program’s student dancers may do so here.

The injustices of offshore tax evasion. The relationship between Sigmund Freud and his mentor Jean-Martin Charcot. The connection between stress responses and glucose-sensing neurons in the brain. The power of dance to promote social-emotional learning.

These topics sparked the interest of three recent Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduates whose research papers were honored by the Global Undergraduate Awards, a Dublin-based program that recognizes top undergraduate work and seeks to connect students across cultures and disciplines.

Examining the Injustice of Tax Crimes

Public awareness of offshore financial crimes has risen since the publication of the Panama and Paradise Papers in 2015 and 2017, respectively, but Briana Boland, FCLC ’19 was left wondering whether the attention has resulted in increased regulation.

For her foreign service seminar, the international studies major looked at the tax governance policies of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the Group of 20, the international body composed of leaders from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies.

What she found is that while public scrutiny of offshore finance has increased, there has been little progress toward better international tax governance.

“Global governance mechanisms have failed to effectively regulate tax avoidance,” Boland writes in “Tax Injustice: The Failure of Public Scrutiny to Translate into Global Tax Governance.”

She does express optimism about the potential for increased public attention to lead to better regulation, stating in the paper’s conclusion that “[p]ublic engagement and activism to hold states and intergovernmental organizations accountable … is critically important to ensuring any future justice and equality in the international economy.”

Boland’s paper was recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards as a Highly Commended entry in the political science and international relations category—a designation given to the top 10% of papers submitted in each subject area. It later was named a Regional Winner, meaning it was deemed the best paper in that category in the United States and Canada.

Boland described the recognition as “a tangible result of hard work and scholarship,” and expressed gratitude to her faculty mentor, adjunct instructor Anna Levy, “for encouraging me to pursue my research interest in the topic and for continuing to work with me even after our class had ended.”

Since graduating from Fordham last May, Boland spent the summer in Dalian, China, studying Chinese as a recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department. Now she’s back in New York City interning for U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on immigration and foreign affairs issues.

Freud as a Mentee—and the Amygdala’s Role in Eating Behavior

Kaetlyn Conner, FCLC ’19, who majored in integrative neuroscience, produced two award-winning papers.

In “Charcot: The Catalyst of Freudian Psychoanalysis,”—which received the Global Undergraduate Awards’ Highly Commended designation in history—she focused on the relationship between Sigmund Freud and one of his mentors, Jean-Martin Charcot. Conner decided to write about Freud and Charcot as a final assignment for her interdisciplinary capstone course, Hysteria/Sexuality/Unconscious, taught by professors Doron Ben-Atar and Anne Hoffman, because they were both prominent figures in the study of hysteria and sexuality.

Freud worked under Charcot, a prominent neurologist, at Paris’s La Salpêtrière hospital in 1885 and 1886, an experience that gave Freud the tools to invent the practice of psychoanalysis, Conner wrote.

“Freud’s ideas about trauma, sexuality, and hypnosis, that were formed and shaped by his early exposure to male hysteric patients and Charcot’s therapeutic methodologies, went on to have significant impacts on Freud’s way of thinking,” she wrote.

“By studying the works of both men, I was able to draw parallels between the two and infer some of the effects that Charcot’s work may have had on Freud’s career.”

Conner’s second paper earned the Highly Commended honor in psychology.

In “Glucose-Sensing Neurons in the Medial Amygdala and their Role in Glucose Homeostasis,” she investigated the way the medial amygdala portion of the brain responds to glucose levels, and how that affects subjects’ eating behaviors.

While most studies on glucose-sensing in the brain have focused on similar neurons in the hypothalamus and brain stem, Conner finds that the medial amygdala, which is central to reproductive, sexual, emotional, and defensive responses, may also have a role in feeding behaviors or glucose regulation.

“As obesity rates in America continue to rise at alarming rates,” Conner writes, “research investigating the neuronal processes and mechanisms behind feeding behavior will continue to be of the utmost importance.”

The paper came out of an independent research project Conner conducted under the supervision of Sarah Stanley, Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital. Conner continued to working in the Stanley Laboratory after graduating from Fordham, thanks to a grant from the American Heart Association that allowed her to extend her work there through the summer. More recently, she moved back to her hometown of Pittsburgh for a job as a research specialist in the CARE Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which studies how parental care is related to how children learn to express and regulate their emotions using brain and behavioral methods.

Conner says that her research and professional success reaffirm that she chose the right school.

“Fordham’s unique mixture of supportive peers and engaging professors really challenged me and gave me the space to explore new areas of research that I had not previously considered,” she said.

Dance Education as an Agent for Change

Caroline Shriver, FCLC ’19, double majored in dance and Latin American and Latino studies, and she brought both of those subjects to bear in her award-winning research, which was recognized in the anthropology and cultural studies category.

In “Becoming an Agent for Positive Change: Youth Development of Self Efficacy and Agency through Social and Emotional Dance Education in Aguas Frías, Colombia,” Shriver sought to demonstrate how Colombia’s tumultuous history and identity of conflict pervade the country to this day, and how students would benefit from an emphasis on social-emotional learning.

After teaching dance-based social-emotional learning classes in the rural community of Aguas Frías and conducting interviews with a number of her students, she found that “a physicalized form of social-emotional learning gave students the opportunity to develop a degree of self-efficacy.”

In these classes, she had students take part in physical trust-building exercises, and she asked them to teach a dance move to their peers to build a collaborative choreography.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Caroline Potter Shriver (@caropottershriver)

Employing her research and that of others, she concluded that physicalized social-emotional education “offers an effective strategy to combat Colombia’s social order of conflict and provides a vehicle for young people to develop personal and cultural agency.”

Since graduating from Fordham, Shriver traveled to Spain, Berlin, and Panama, where she participated in dance workshops and taught dance. She also led a group of 13 undergraduate dancers from the U.S. on a dance outreach trip to Colombia. After returning from these travels, she has been freelancing as both a dancer and dance teacher. She said she plans on continuing to pursue a career as an artist and social activist.

“This award reminds me that arts education can have a positive impact on young people around the world, and it inspires me to further develop and share my passion for dance education,” Shriver said.

Boland, Conner, and Shriver are not the first Fordham students to be recognized by the Global Undergraduate Awards. In 2018, Joshua Anthony, FCLC ’19, was named a Global Winner for his paper on the morphing historical perceptions of La Malinche, the indigenous woman who was the chief translator to Hernán Cortés.

“The range of the majors and minors of these winners captures just some of the breadth of the many academic and research opportunities offered at Fordham University,” said Josie Grégoire, J.D., assistant dean for seniors at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. “We are delighted with their success.”