“Artists are entrepreneurs. We are our own business.” That’s what Fordham Theatre grad Marjuan Canady, FCLC ’08, says when she teaches creative entrepreneurship at places like Georgetown University and NYU. Her words ring true for many Fordham alumni who have cut a professional path with their arts and business acumen.

“There’s creativity in everything that is going on in the room, whether it’s the business side or the actual creative side,” said Canady, who founded Sepia Works, a multimedia production company, and Canady Foundation for the Arts, a nonprofit that creates educational and career opportunities for youth of color by connecting them with professional artists. “That’s what makes it fun.”

SaVonne Anderson, FCLC ’17

Founder and Creative Director, Aya Paper Co.

After graduating from Fordham in 2017 with a degree in new media and digital design, SaVonne Anderson worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she had interned as a student. Being around inspiring art got her gears turning, and she decided to start her own greeting card and stationery business, Aya Paper Co., in 2019. The following year, she decided to focus on Aya full time. Since then, her work has been featured in Time, Allure, and Forbes magazines, and carried in stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Whole Foods. And while it can be difficult to balance her design and illustration work with the demands of running a business and the challenges of parenting a toddler, Anderson feels it’s all worth it.

Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05

Artist and Designer

Like many textile artists, Martha Clippinger, FCRH ’05, was greatly influenced by the Gee’s Bend collective, a group of African American quilters whose work she first saw at the Whitney Museum as a Fordham student. “It ignited a desire to explore color and shape and rhythm,” she says. More than 20 years later, Clippinger has made a career out of that artistic exploration, displaying her work in museums, galleries, and corporate collections, and selling bags, rugs, and tablet covers on her website. Some of those items are woven by her professional partners in Oaxaca, Mexico, where she spent time on a Fulbright-Garcia Robles grant in 2013.

Katte Geneta, FCLC ’06

Founder, Narra Studio

Katte Geneta grew up thinking she was going to become a doctor. But when she arrived at Fordham and took a fine arts class, she discovered a talent for drawing. After graduating in 2006, she exhibited her paintings and later pursued a master’s degree in museum studies at Harvard. Soon, she took up weaving—the smell of oil paint made her nauseous while she was pregnant. Motivated by a conversation with a weaver in the Philippines who was hoping to find broader exposure, she started Narra Studio. The studio sometimes designs goods and sometimes just works on distribution. It partners with upward of 15 weaving communities in the Philippines and sells the pieces—from jewelry and blankets to jackets and traditional barong tops—through its website and at markets.

Bryan Master, FCRH ’99

Composer; Founder and Executive Producer, Sound + Fission and Partner in Crime Entertainment

Bryan Master has been writing and playing music for as long as he can remember—he apologizes to any Fordham neighbors who may have heard his frequent drumming at Rose Hill. But when he graduated in 1999 with a degree in communications, his passion took a backseat to his job in advertising—until 2022. That’s when his side hustle—a music, production, and creative services company called Sound + Fission—became a sustainable, full-time endeavor, thanks, he says, to a boom in audio storytelling listenership. Along with his other company, Partner in Crime, which focuses on creating and developing series, Sound + Fission was behind Can You Dig It?, an original Audible series about the birth of hip-hop that featured narration from Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16

Co-Founder and Director, ArtSea

Courtney Celeste Spears had achieved many of her dreams as a dancer: She began dancing with Ailey II—Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s second company—while she was still a student in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program, and she joined the main company in 2018, two years after graduating. Last summer, though, she made the leap to devote herself full time to ArtSea, a Bahamas-based arts organization she founded with her brother, Asa Carey, in 2017. Now living on the island, where she spent time visiting family as a child, Spears works to bring high-level dance education and entertainment to the Caribbean and expose young artists to the wider dance world.

The award, which was presented in a ceremony at the Lincoln Center campus, was given to Stephens for his book The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Invention of 20th-Century Journalism (St. Martin’s Press, 2017).

In accepting the prize, Stephens spoke fondly about his subject, particularly his zest for going literally anywhere in the world for a story.

“He had tremendous spirit, he was a nice man, he was kind to everyone he met, he was interested in everybody he met, and he had this amazing desire to travel, to go there, to put his feet on the ground. It was a real pleasure to follow in his footsteps,” he said.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J. president of Fordham, congratulated Stephens for writing what he called a “lovingly objective” biography of Thomas, who worked in radio from 1930 to 1976, hosted the first-ever television news broadcast in 1939, and traveled to the furthest corners of the globe to report news stories. He singled out Thomas’ granddaughter Anne Thomas Donaghy, who was in the audience, as an honor for Fordham.

“Thomas was an iconic figure whose life is now recorded in masterful prose, in a magisterial way, with affection for the subject,” Father McShane said.

Ron Simon, television curator for the Paley Center of Media, told the audience that although Thomas is not as well remembered today in journalism circles as figures such as Edward R. Murrow, he was the most famous journalist of his time.

While Thomas is perhaps known best for discovering and promoting T.E. Lawrence, AKA “Lawrence of Arabia,” Simon said Stephens made a convincing case that Thomas helped set the standard that contemporary journalists strive to uphold.

“Thomas began his career as a captivating lecturer, using slides and films, sometimes stretching the facts to fit the morals of his stories. But when he commenced his nightly news broadcast when he was 40 years old, he wanted to report the news right down the middle, and not to let anyone know his political persuasion,” he said.

“Mitch persuasively argues that this decision by Lowell to be impartial sets the standard for network news history about creativity and fairness.”

Rick Moulton, director and producer of the documentary The Voice of America: Lowell Thomas and the Rise of Broadcast Journalism, which Stephens appears in, noted at the ceremony that while he was reviewing thousands of visuals for the project, Stephens was tracking down endless written details about Lowell’s life.

“While the paper trail offered a verifiable record, Mitch understood the journalistic principle that if you want to understand the story, you have to walk the ground. So he did just that, literally following Lowell’s life around the world, from Greenville, Ohio, to the gold camps of Colorado, the west side of Chicago, up to Alaska, on to London, the Middle East, India, Nepal, Tibet, and finally Australia,” he said.

“Like the messenger Lowell Thomas, he was traveling on truth’s account, compiling the story of this man, who became, as we sensed, the ‘Voice of America.’”

Stephens, whose children and grandchildren were present for the ceremony, and whose previous work has delved into the history of journalism, said that Lowell had always floated at the edge of his consciousness. But he only considered writing a biography when Moulton, who was with Lowell the day he died in 1981, asked him to be part of his documentary. He said the Sperber award held special significance for him.

“I met Ann Sperber once at NYU when she was visiting to give a talk on Murrow. I’m a great fan of Murrow and her biography of him, so it’s a real honor to accept a prize with her name on it.”

The Sperber Prize was established by Liselette Sperber to honor the memory of her daughter Ann, who wrote the definitive biography of Edward R. Murrow, Murrow: His Life and Times (Freundlich, 1986). It is administered by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies.

As a theater major on both the playwriting and directing tracks at Fordham, Kim says he found valuable connections between his experiential major and the University’s Core Curriculum. “A huge part of what we did was ask questions like: How are we engaging with our audience? What are our goals as artists, or as citizens of the world? These questions carried over to other classes and beyond,” says Kim.

Now, as program director at the 52nd Street Project, he is exploring how to be a teaching artist. Kim runs the nonprofit’s New Platforms program, helping to create classes in songmaking, dancemaking, and poetry that complement the project’s original focus on playmaking. Through theater, he says, “kids are following their questions rather than looking for a right answer,” just as he did at Fordham.

The project’s goal is not to create future star performers but to help city students, ages 9 to 18, discover their passions as they learn to collaborate and develop strong communication and presentation skills. The students also get the kind of one-on-one mentorship and broad exposure to the arts that they may not be getting at school.

“We keep our doors open every day after school, even for those not in our arts programs. There’s no right way to do theater, but there is a way that involves being brave and following your questions and your own sense of self,” Kim says. “Hopefully we create a space where our students feel they can do that.”

Hanna Tadevich, FCLC ’15, is completely invested in the therapeutic power of the arts.

A graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA program in dance who double majored in English, Tadevich says that the arts have long informed who she is “as a person and as a humanitarian.”

But her experience in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps is what truly solidified her decision to “commit my life to fostering community and justice by using music, dance, creative writing, and the visual arts.”

As a Jesuit Volunteer for the past eight months, Tadevich has been working at the McClendon Center in Washington, D.C., a day program for adults with severe mental illnesses or who are recovering from addiction. Tadevich facilitates creative arts-based therapy groups there every day.

She is one of 15 Fordham graduates working locally in urban and rural areas across the U.S. as well as in Belize and Peru, through the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) and JVC Northwest. Both organizations place volunteers for one- or two-year stints in communities that are tackling some of the world’s greatest challenges: homelessness, hunger, mental illness, crime, and poverty.

A common thread among the Fordham volunteers is their participation in the University’s Global Outreach program, which brings students on cultural and service trips that focus on economic, environmental, political, and social injustices around the world.

The program’s director, Paul Francis, GSAS ’03, GABELLI ’10, explains that, much like JVC placements, Global Outreach’s one- to two-week service-learning trips “focus more on solidarity than charity.”

And they inspire many students to make a commitment to the Jesuit Volunteer Corps upon graduation. At least eight and often as many as 20 Fordham graduates volunteer for JVC each year, not including those who volunteer for JVC Northwest.

That was certainly the case for Tadevich, whose experience on four Global Outreach trips—two to Ecuador, one to the Dominican Republic, and one to Camden, New Jersey—prepared her for JVC.

“I was always interested in service work, but I didn’t have a social analysis framework to understand the systems, the issues, or even the marginalized populations I would encounter,” Tadevich says. She got that through Global Outreach. “It was an overwhelming experience to understand that charity only goes so far, and also to see that it was feasible to commit your life to something beyond yourself.”

She’s doing just that as a Jesuit Volunteer at the McClendon Center. “It’s been an incredible blend of my arts background and my love for human relationships,” she says.

Tadevich, a Chicago native, hopes to stay with the center for a second year, something she believes will be beneficial for her patients while also giving her more practical experience before she pursues a master’s degree in social work.

Patrick “PJ” Brogan, FCRH ’15, who double majored in American studies and economics at Fordham, also got interested in JVC through Global Outreach.

“Global Outreach lets you learn about a place in a particular sort of way that you don’t get to in a classroom or as a student,” says Brogan, who is originally from Philadelphia. His service-learning trips to Kentucky, Alaska, Detroit, and San Diego sparked his interest in working with people experiencing homelessness. Through JVC Northwest, he’s working at the Poverello Center, a homeless shelter in Missoula, Montana.

“It’s a population that doesn’t get enough attention, people who live without a safety net and receive a lot of repression and stigma,” he says. Since volunteering with JVC Northwest, Brogan has decided that he is “definitely interested in pursuing this kind of work professionally.”

Working with the mentally ill and homeless can be challenging. But all Jesuit Volunteers have a built-in support network of fellow volunteers—roommates and those placed nearby—who are doing similar work and share their values and their experiences.

“Having people I can talk to about work and process what my day has been like, it’s been a great resource,” Brogan says.

For Tadevich, “it’s an invitation to deepen your reflective life, no matter your faith and to engage with other people constantly. That intimate bonding and support is part of what makes it such a transformative experience.

“I feel that the people I live with and work with will be influential characters in my life for years to come,” she says, ”because we have the ability to bond so intensely.”

The students and graduates who participate in both Global Outreach and JVC “aren’t out to fix the world,” says Francis. But by forming these deep connecting with people and communities, “they learn firsthand about what’s happening in the world, hopefully transform their own lives, and make a real impact locally.”

Now William F. Baker, PhD, the Claudio Acquaviva SJ Chair and Journalist in Residence, has compiled a new book that culls some of that class’s major notes.

Baker, together with Evan Leatherwood and Warren Gibson, PhD, has published
The Worlds a Stage: How performing artists can make a living while still doing what they love (American Management Association, 2016). The book follows the storied history of the performing arts and finds that, while the artists’ world has changed, their struggle to make a living has not.

“The fine performing arts have forever existed in a precarious position,” said Leatherwood, a Slifka Fellow at Fordham’s Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education. “We’re letting people know that is normal, but we’re arming them with current knowledge.”

The book’s section titles suggest that the artist’s history of struggle and triumph is a long one. Sections include “Mozart and the Hustler,” “George Gershwin Catches a Wave,” and “Beverly Sills: Artist, Manager, Mom.”

“Only in the 20th century did people really begin to do this full-time,” said Baker.

But the book doesn’t linger in the past for long. Many contemporary managers who were guest lecturers for the Fordham/Juilliard class made themselves available for interviews—such as Peter Gelb, manager of the Metropolitan Opera. The book documents how Gelb’s embrace of technology has brought the world’s largest nonprofit performing arts institution into the 21st century.

The digital platform that has taken Met performances to millions of new viewers through its Live in HD broadcasts is examined in “The Technology Gamble.” These live broadcasts, which are shown in movie theaters around the world, bring in $17 million annually. Yet, Baker said, the institution’s budget of nearly $325 million often operates at a loss.

Baker said that most of his students, both artists and business majors, don’t realize that 30 percent of an arts institution’s budget comes from philanthropy, not ticket sales—something explained in the chapter “Fundraising.”

“When you are a performer, you don’t go back to your dressing room and relax,” said Baker. “If somebody applauded for you, you go out and find them and become their friend, because you’re going to need their support.”

Others featured in the book are Carnegie Hall Executive and Artistic Director Clive Gillison and the American Ballet Theater’s former CEO Rachel Moore.

Ken Herman, a sharp-eyed columnist for the Austin American-Statesman, wrote about life imitating art in his Sunday column:

As you’ve read in this paper, authorities are looking for a Grand Prairie convenience store clerk indicted for allegedly swiping and cashing in a $1 million-winning lottery ticket from a customer who didn’t realize he had hit the jackpot.

I know a guy who wrote a novel about a similar situation. What are the odds against that? Nothing compared to this. The Grand Prairie clerk and the clerk in the book both are college students. OK, so maybe that covers about 20 percent of convenience store clerks.

And both are of foreign origin. OK, so that’s, what, about 60 percent of convenience store clerks?

But here comes the really good stuff. The ticket thief in Paul Kushel’s novel has the same first name as the Grand Prairie guy.

Long odds, huh? Yes, but still nothing compared to this:

The first name shared by the real-life Grand Prairie clerk and the fictional New Jersey clerk in Kushel’s book is, wait for it, Pankaj.

Pankaj Joshi, a native of Nepal, is the real-life clerk that the cops really are looking for. Pankaj Kamath, a native of India, is the clerk in Kushel’s “Lotto Trouble.”

Kushel, clinical associate professor of accounting and taxation in the Graduate School of Business Administration, penned Lotto Trouble in 2003. He is an award-winning teacher, and is now working on his third novel.