“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 Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
featuring Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01—and the Rose Hill campus

After five celebrated seasons, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has come to an end. The fan-favorite comedy about a rule-breaking 1950s housewife turned raucous comedian featured Rachel Brosnahan as the title character, Miriam “Midge” Maisel, and Michael Zegen as her soon-to-be-ex-husband Joel, vice president of a plastics company and an aspiring comedian. Fordham’s own Joel Johnstone, FCLC ’01, starred as Archie Cleary, who, along with his wife Imogene, is one of the couple’s best friends. Johnstone aside, the cast and crew were no strangers to Fordham, having filmed at the Rose Hill campus a couple of times. In fact, if you look closely at episode eight of the final season, you’ll notice something familiar in the background: Cunniffe Fountain and Edwards Parade (see above). In this episode, in which Fordham provides the setting for Midge’s college reunion, the characters engage in a lot of self-reflection, illustrated with some throwback clips, and Midge’s dad, Abraham (Tony Shalhoub), finally comes to appreciate the women in his life. Mrs. Maisel is far from the only production to be drawn to Rose Hill’s idyllic beauty. Since the 1940s, dozens of TV shows and films have been shot, in part, at Fordham—including 2015’s True Story, which starred James Franco, Jonah Hill, and Felicity Jones, and featured Fordham Theatre grad Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08, in a supporting role.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Can You Dig It?
co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99

This past August marked the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and media outlets across the world have been looking back at the early days of the culture. In this audio series, though, the focus is on events that led to the birth of hip-hop—ones that took place not far from Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. Co-created by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, Can You Dig It? chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop. Through scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, it tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin, which resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music. For Master, the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company, the series is a tribute to the peacemakers and an open “love letter to the Bronx.”
—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

The Color of Family
a novel by Jerry McGill, FCRH ’92

In his latest novel, Jerry McGill, author of Bed Stuy: A Love Story (2021) and the memoir Dear Marcus: A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me (2012), shares a portrait of the Paynes, an upper-class, African American family that lives in suburban Connecticut. Despite appearances, the Paynes aren’t quite as happy as people assume, especially when twins from France—the result of one of patriarch Harold Payne’s extramarital affairs—arrive on the family’s doorstep. One fateful night, brothers Devon and James are in a car accident that leaves Devon paralyzed. James eventually goes off to college and excels at football, the sport they both loved. When Devon is moved into a rehabilitation center across the country, the distance between the two brothers— wrought by their explosive, sports-fueled rivalry—is no longer just figurative. Years later, as Devon travels around the world over the course of a decade to visit his seven siblings, he sees how the traumatic accident of his youth has affected—and connected—all of them. They each may have moved on in their own way, but it’s only through forgiveness and by coming to terms with the past that they’ll be able to live freely in the present. Though Devon is at the center of the novel, McGill weaves in diary entries and first-person narratives from the other characters, giving readers a chance to examine the relationships, events, and heartbreaks from multiple perspectives. The novel is less than 300 pages, and that, coupled with the shifting points of view, makes it a great, page-turning read.
—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Can You Dig It? was released on August 10 by Audible, as part of a slate of original series celebrating this milestone year. The series, co-created and executive produced by Bryan Master, FCRH ’99, and narrated and co-produced by legendary Public Enemy rapper Chuck D, chronicles the 1971 gang peace treaty in the Bronx that paved the way for hip-hop.

Through both scripted scenes and unscripted interviews, Can You Dig It? tells the story of the murder of Ghetto Brothers member Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin. Benjamin had been working toward a truce among rivals when he was killed, and his death resulted in an escalation of violence. That moment of chaos was followed by the Hoe Avenue peace meeting, organized by the Ghetto Brothers’ Benjamin “Yellow Benjy” Melendez, which ushered in an era of relative calm among gangs in the South Bronx. Two years later, on August 11, 1973, with young people in the area safer to socialize across neighborhood boundaries, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

The series features documentary-style interviews with photographers Henry Chalfant and Joe Conzo, pioneering MC Coke La Rock, and a number of former members and associates of the Ghetto Brothers. These are interspersed with Chuck D’s narration, as well as dramatized portions, for which the series tapped into local voice talent from the Bronx’s community arts programs.

“It’s a love letter to the Bronx,” said Master, a composer who is also the founder and owner of Sound + Fission, a music and audio production company.

In a recent interview with Fordham student Jay Doherty, a co-host of WFUV’s What’s What podcast, Master described the story of the truce at the heart of Can You Dig It? as a manifestation of the Jesuit ideal of being people for others. “We applied that mantra by being a vehicle for a story that inspires people, that gives hope to others. That’s what this is all about. Black Benjie, Yellow Benjy, the Ghetto Brothers—they were men for others.”

The series comes at a moment when hip-hop is being celebrated not only as a revolutionary musical force but also as a vital part of New York City history. In June, the Bronx intersection of East 165th Street and Rogers Place was renamed Cornell “Black Benjie” Benjamin Way, making the site of the murder a landmark—and a reminder of the positive action that came out of the tragedy. In recent decades, Fordham has also been preserving hip-hop’s Bronx legacy, though efforts to recognize 1520 Sedgwick as the genre’s birthplace and through oral-history interviews with seminal figures such as Yellow Benjy and Kurtis Blow as part of the Bronx African American History Project.

“During this 50th anniversary of hip-hop, we hold the attention of the planet,” Chuck D told SPIN in June. “Now is the time to bring out the stories of people who paved the way for hip-hop and shaped its earliest days.”