Get involved now with these four service outings happening in January and February.

1. Help Provide School Supplies for Neighborhood Children

Monday, January 27, 2 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Lowenstein Center, Room 1004

Join your fellow Rams on the Lincoln Center campus to wrap school supply care packages for neighborhood children. Participants can also include personal notes of affirmation.

2. Create Food Packages for Senior Citizens in Need

Saturday, January 25, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
239 West 49th Street

Fordham’s commitment to the Broadway community goes beyond excellence onstage and behind the scenes. This month, the University is joining Encore Community Services—a Catholic Charity partner just a short subway ride from the Lincoln Center campus—to create food parcels that will support neighborhood seniors in need, many of whom worked in the performing arts. Since 1977, Encore has provided seniors with a range of services to help them live independent and dignified lives in the midtown Times Square and Clinton communities. For this reason, and its focus on initiatives such as “aging gracefully through the arts,” Encore has earned a reputation as “Broadway’s Longest Running Act of Loving Care.”

This event is sponsored by the Office of Alumni Relations, as part of its For and With Others Volunteer Day, but it’s open to the entire University community.

3. Fight Food Insecurity in the Bronx

Friday, January 31, 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
St. Ignatius Middle School

Wednesday, February 12, 11:30 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
McShane Campus Center Entrance

Among the issues affecting New Yorkers daily, food insecurity is one of the most pressing. According to the New York State Department of Health, about one in four New Yorkers report that they do not have sufficient access to food.

Two upcoming events give the Fordham community an opportunity to promote food security in its own backyard. Students and other volunteers will gather to make up to 200 meal packs for community fridges, and conclude the day with a brief Ignatian reflection. The first of these events will happen alongside students at St. Ignatius Middle School in the Bronx. The second will take place at the McShane Campus Center.

Both events are offered through Fordham’s Department of Mission Integration and Ministry, which is rooted in the Jesuit tradition of balancing reflection and action, a practice developed by St. Ignatius Loyola, the 16th-century founder of the Jesuits.

4. Connect with Those Experiencing Houselessness

Sunday, February 23, 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Meet in the Lowenstein Center Lobby

Volunteers will join forces with students enrolled in the Philosophical Ethics course at the Lincoln Center campus and visit Xavier Mission, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Together they will share in conversation and serve a hot meal to people experiencing houselessness in New York City. Attendees will take the brief subway trip together, with MetroCards provided.

This experience is presented by Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, which connects Fordham with dozens of local and global partners to provide students with opportunities for experiential learning, research, and civic engagement.

B.A. Van Sise was driving his young nephew to the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, several years ago when he heard Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on the radio. The Moana actor was reflecting on his Samoan heritage. For years he had a hole in his heart, he said, because he didn’t speak the language of his maternal ancestors.

“I suddenly had this moment of epiphany,” Van Sise recalled.

Since graduating from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2005, Van Sise has worked as a photojournalist, artist, and author, but he studied linguistics at the University, and his degree is in both visual arts and modern languages. He took courses in Italian and Russian, and he also speaks French, German, and Ladino, an endangered language he learned from his mother and maternal grandfather growing up in New York.

“I realized I wanted to explore language in America,” he said. “​​What does American language look like?”

It’s more diverse than you might think.

The Resilience of America’s Endangered Languages

English has been dominant on the North American continent for centuries, subsuming other languages, “turning them upside down and shaking their pockets for loose vocabulary,” Van Sise said. And yet, “against unspeakable odds”—despite colonial forces, disease, cultural displacement, migration, and remixing—hundreds of Indigenous and diasporic languages exist in America.

Much of these languages’ variety and complexity is on brilliant display in Van Sise’s latest book, On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, and in a solo exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles through March 2.

The book features speakers, learners, and revitalizers of more than 70 languages in the United States. From Afro-Seminole Creole to Zuni, each language featured includes a brief cultural summary. And each portrait is paired with a single, often hard-to-translate word designed to inspire Van Sise’s visual approach and “show off the poetry inherent in each language,” he said. “Fundamentally, it is not an ethnicity project. It’s about the poetry of languages.”

In that sense, it’s a sequel of sorts to Van Sise’s first book, Children of Grass: A Portrait of American Poetry (2019), and it bears a kinship to his portraits and essays about Holocaust survivors in Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust (2023). Like Holocaust survivors he met, endangered language speakers and revitalizers are “obsessed with the future,” Van Sise said, “the future of their stories, their legacies, their own families, and the people who come after them.”

Van Sise initially thought he might photograph “the last speakers” of various languages, “a really colonialist idea that I’m slightly embarrassed of,” he said. But he ultimately focused on the many people and groups working to revitalize—and in some cases resurrect—these languages. He traveled to 48 states with pivotal support from the Philip and Edith Leonian Trust, he said, and worked with dozens of Indigenous and diasporic cultural organizations, Native tribes and nations, and the Tribal Trust Foundation.

And while he photographed a Bukhari speaker and a Judeo-Spanish singer in his hometown of New York City, most locations weren’t so easy to reach. “Endangered languages really do best in places that are remote and where communities can still speak to each other,” he said.

Striving for Balance

Laura Tohe, former poet laureate of the Navajo Nation, met Van Sise near the Superstition Mountains, two hours east of Phoenix. She had a turquoise dress made specifically for the photo session, and “God gave me the sky” to match, Van Sise said. His playful sense of humor is on display in the way he and Tohe depicted hózhó, or striving for balance, “an extremely famous concept in Diné,” the Navajo language, he said.

Whimsy is also evident in Van Sise’s portrait of former Houma chief Kirby Verret in Gibson, Louisiana. Verret and an alligator teamed up to show off the Houma French word onirique, or something that comes from a dream.

Van Sise spent nearly a week with Amish community member Sylvan Esh before Esh agreed to work with Van Sise on the photograph. Part of getting to know Esh included waking up at 4 a.m. several days in a row to milk his cows, Van Sise said. The Pennsylvania Dutch concept he ultimately depicted with Esh, dæafe, or to have permission to do something, is “extremely, unbelievably important in the culture,” Van Sise said.

A Movement to Revive Lost Languages

Amber Hayward, a member of the Puyallup tribe in Tacoma, Washington, chose the Lushootseed word ʔux̌ʷəlč, or the sound of saltwater waves washing onto the beach. Lushootseed once numbered 12,000 speakers along the Puget Sound “before going extinct approximately twenty years ago,” Van Sise writes. As director of the Puyallup language program, Hayward has aided its rebirth. It’s just one of several languages featured in the book that boast healthy revitalization programs.

Another is the Kalispel language, represented by Jessie Isadore. She recommended the word cn̓paʔqcín, or the dawn comes toward me, said Van Sise, who explained that Kalispel is one of several languages historically spoken in what is now Montana and Washington state that make no distinction between nouns and verbs. “The whole thing just becomes one idea,” he said. “There’s something really lovely about that.”

Nahuatl is one of few languages highlighted in the book that is not spoken primarily in the U.S., but Van Sise could not resist the Aztec language’s centuries-old tradition of making as big a poem as possible with a single compound word. He and Los Angeles–based folkloric dancer Citlali Arvizu (pictured at the top of the story) chose tixochicitlalcuecuepocatimani, or, you are bursting into bloom all over with stars like flowers.

Working with people like Arvizu to create “visual poems” in these languages is more than an artful way to document linguistic diversity. For Van Sise, the goal is to raise awareness and inspire further education and preservation.

“I can’t do much to make the Haida language revitalization program more robust,” he said, picking just one example. “But I can provide the sizzle for the steak.”

8 Uncommon Words to Spark Your Interest in Endangered Languages

B.A. Van Sise’s book On the National Language features conceptual portraits of more than 70 speakers, learners, and revitalizers of endangered languages in the U.S. Each image is inspired by a single word in the speaker’s language, one that isn’t always so easy to translate into English. He hopes readers might “find one impossible word, and want to learn another and another.” Here are eight.

tekariho:ken
between two worlds
Mohawk

kapará
worse things have happened
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino

puppyshow
showing off behavior
Afro-Seminole Creole

amonati
something you hold and keep safe for others
Bukhari

koyaanisqatsi
nature out of balance
Hopi

ma’goddai
feeling when the blood rises that makes you act both violently and lovingly
Chamorro

opyêninetêhi
my heart is taking its time
Sauk

uŋkupelo
we are coming home
Lakota

Attendees included music students, music and art faculty members, donors who supported the project, Fordham President Tania Tetlow, and Father Grimes himself, as well as members of his family. (See related story about the fundraising effort.) They gathered at the Lincoln Center campus outside the Robert R. Grimes, S.J. Music Studios, which opened this fall, providing students with five soundproof rooms designed to enhance their music practice.

Related story: Student musicians began the academic year on a high note when the music studios opened. (With video)

Speakers took turns thanking donors and lauding Father Grimes, a former Fordham music professor and a singer himself.

“You have been always a supporter of the arts here, whether that meant the [Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program], the theater program, visual arts, and of course the music program,” said Daniel Ott, D.M.A., associate professor of music and chair of the Department of Art History and Music.

Students Finding Their Musical Voice

The gathering took place in the Lipani Gallery, part of a newly renovated visual arts complex adjacent to the five new music practice rooms. In her remarks, Tetlow spoke of “how profoundly Jesuit music is” because of its mix of intellect and passion.

“Know, for all of you who gave to this project, that you are creating a space where every day, Fordham students … are going to literally find their voice and discover what they have to say to the world, and that will be true for the rest of their lives, so thank you so much.”

Father Grimes thanked the donors as well, and said he was “so happy for the students to have something that is so important to any music program.”

In an interview before the event, he said “it’s quite an honor” to be the namesake for the new music suite. “Fordham College Lincoln Center is very, very close to my heart,” he said. “I loved my time there. And so if I’ve left a little of my sense there, I’m very happy for that.”

‘We Need Artists’

The event was emceed by Maco Dacanay, a junior and a music major.

“In this world that we all live in, not only do we need artists, but we need people who are willing to put in the work to become their best selves for the sake of the community,” he said. “These practice rooms grant us the space to put in that work, and for that, I am beyond grateful.”

The five rooms range from smaller rooms for individual practice to larger spaces for ensembles. Their features include recording capability and virtual acoustic environments so that students can hear how they would sound in a cathedral, concert hall, or other settings, Ott said. He noted that the rooms—open 8 a.m. to midnight—are available to all students, not just music majors.

A student group called the Lincoln Center Jazz Ensemble provided background music. Another group of student musicians performed Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, to applause and cheers. “That just made my day,” Father Grimes said after their performance.

Vincent DeCola, S.J., an assistant dean in the Gabelli School of Business, spoke last, giving a blessing of the new space. “No doubt, we each have experienced the divine in listening to the particular music which enlivens our spirits,” he said.

But before that, he brought the house down with some singing of his own, “with apologies to Misters Gilbert and Sullivan”—an adaptation of the song He Is an Englishman, with lyrics tailored to Father Grimes.

Its title? “He Is a Fordham Ram.”

“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

In an email last week to students and colleagues, May Adrales, director of the Fordham Theatre program, called Jenness’ death an “enormous loss for Fordham, for the theatre community, and for the world at large.”

“Many playwrights and directors working today can trace their beginnings in American theatre back to Morgan,” said Adrales of Jenness, who used they/them and she/her pronouns. “Their support didn’t end with encouragement; Morgan championed the work they believed in, often connecting creators with exactly the right collaborators to bring bold theatrical visions to life.” 

A Powerful Mentor to Young Playwrights

Fordham graduate Morgan Gould, FCLC ‘08, credits Jenness—who Gould described as her “professor/mentor/kooky aunt/mom/theater doula”—with where she is today: a published playwright, director, and writer for television shows such as A League of Their Own. 

“She treated every student as if it was only a matter of time that you were going to be a world-famous auteur. She would drag me to every kind of theater opening and introduced me to everyone as a young director. Having someone so sure that it will happen is something you never forget, and for so many of us, she was the first person to do that.” Today, Gould said, “I make my living only in the arts. Morgan was a huge part of making that possible.”

Another former mentee of Jenness’, Peter Gil-Sheridan FCLC ’98, said that countless Fordham friends reached out to talk about Jenness’ impact on their lives.

“Morgan left the world a better place than they found it,” said Gil-Sheridan, a former Fordham adjunct professor who is now assistant professor of playwriting at Vassar College. “Their passing is seismic in the theatre community. But so is their impact. I am so proud to be one of the students that was so deeply held and felt by my dear teacher. We can all honor them by continuing to demand more of our selves in our work, to see the theatre as a space for activism, cultural critique, and radical love.”

Uplifting Playwrights 

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, said that Jenness helped redefine the role of a dramaturg, who is traditionally called upon to aid actors, directors, and playwrights in their understanding and presentation of a play. 

“Morgan was one of the first generation of people who were defining what a new play dramaturg was: the midwife and support system of a playwright,” he told The New York Times, whose obituary noted Jenness’ impact on the careers of successful playwrights, including MacArthur “genius” grant winner Taylor Mac and David Adjmi, who wrote the 2024 Tony Award-winning play Stereophonic.  

“Countless” artists “across all generations” felt “seen and loved” by Jenness, said Fordham’s former head of playwriting, Daniel Alexander Jones.

“In everyday conversation, she would lift the names and works of artists and advocate for them constantly. Carl Hancock Rux, Erik Ehn, Luis Alfaro, Taylor Mac, Bridget Carpenter, Marcus Gardley, Keith Josef Adkins, David Adjmi, and Alice Tuan are the first names that come to mind when I turn on the spigot of those early memories of time with Morgan. … When she taught, she carried us into the lesson plans, alongside those departed luminaries whose beacons she also tended.”

Jenness is survived by a brother, four nephews, and two nieces, one of whom, Martinique Gann, is quoted in The New York Times about Jenness’ dedication to students and the theater. 

“There was no stopping my aunt for anything,” Ms. Gann recalled. “She picked me up in a cab from the airport. And right away, with my two suitcases, we drove straight to Fordham University to see a play one of her students had written.”

The Lincoln Center Learning & Innovative Technology Environment, located on the fourth floor of Lowenstein in room 416, was operating at full tilt as of last Thursday. A miniature, plastic model of the Eiffel Tower was coming to life in the belly of a 3D printer. Students with virtual reality goggles practiced hurling imaginary objects across a giant flat-screen. And inside the brand-new video/podcasting studio, a pair of LITE’s work-study students demonstrated how to record a video while jotting notes on a screen, weatherman-style.

“People say when they walk into the space, they feel more creative—that LITE lets them think outside the box and be able to apply these technologies in their classes,” said Nicole Zeidan, Ed.D., assistant director of emerging educational technologies and learning space design. She helps connect LITE’s resources to students and faculty, such as Assistant Professor of Art History Nushelle de Silva, Ph.D.

Virtual Reality for Museum Studies

Earlier this fall, de Silva wanted her Museum Architecture students to see how a museum experience changes when you “visit” it virtually. Using VR headsets at Rose HIll’s LITE, students were able to view the “Mona Lisa” up close without the hordes of tourists in the Louvre. 

With this technology now available at Lincoln Center, said de Silva, “ I could turn this into homework. And then we would have the whole of the class time to talk about that experience.”

Printing Sturdy Replicas of Fragile Artifacts 

The tools at the LITE Center in Lowenstein and its counterpart at Rose Hill are designed to make classes experiential and creative work more accessible. Students can fashion theater costumes with LITE’s sewing machines or repair objects with its soldering equipment. A too-fragile-to-touch artifact can be 3D scanned, then 3D printed to create a durable facsimile, like the medieval seals the LITE Center recreated for Center for Medieval Studies Director Nicholas Paul. “The originals … are made out of wax and, obviously, extremely old, so having copies that we can pass around and look at closely is really useful in classes,” he said.

Fleur Eshghi, Ed.D., associate vice president of educational technology research computing, said she thinks many academic departments will make good use of the center. 

“We have been looking for space for Lincoln Center to build the same facilities [as Rose Hill],” she said. “And we have finally succeeded … I’m extremely excited.” 

Letting the Light in

Nicola Terzulli, learning space design lead for the Office of Technology, made the most of Lincoln Center’s light-filled space when designing the different stations.

“Lowenstein has those iconic windows for each floor,” said Terzulli, so he found a manufacturer who could soundproof a podcasting room but keep the glass walls. When the studio is not in use, you can see through it. But should you need privacy—or want to use the room to record a media-rich lesson for Panopto, Fordham’s platform for video classes—you just draw the room’s thick black curtains to enclose it.

Terzulli even used all-glass cabinets to make the tools at Lincoln Center’s LITE easy to see. 

“We wanted as much glass as possible … so people when they walk in, they see [these tools]and they’re like, ‘Hey, what’s that? Can I do that? Can I use that?’”

For details on the features and hours of the Lincoln Center and the Rose Hill LITE Centers, visit their site.

Coco de Marneffe and Ian Muir Smith, both FCLC ’22, were the lead organizers of this year’s Local Conference of Youth (LCOY USA), an annual event that brings together over 125 young people from across the country carefully selected for their leadership in the climate movement. Ashira Fisher-Wachspress, FCLC ’23, and current Fordham student Kenny Moll were also part of the 15-person organizing team for the event, which took place in Tempe, Arizona in September.

De Marneffe, who majored in theology, served as the conference’s general coordinator. She said a “Religion and Ecology” class she took her senior year, taught by Christiana Zenner, Ph.D., started her down this path. She hopes LCOY will inspire other young people to get involved in climate advocacy. 

“You don’t have to be a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to contribute to this work. You just have to find your place in your community,” she said. “For me, it started with one class I took in college. Thanks, Fordham.”

The National Youth Statement

The centerpiece of the conference is the National Youth Statement, a list of climate-related policy demands that the young delegates draft together. Smith describes the statement as a democratically-crafted tool that advocates can use to push policy makers further on climate change. Once complete, the statement is shared with local governments and incorporated into the Global Youth Statement, the official youth stance on climate change presented at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of Youth and Conference of Parties, which will be held in November in Baku, Azerbaijan.  

Smith acknowledges that some of the statement’s demands may seem radical — such as disbursing at least $446 billion annually in climate finance to the Global South, or increasing federal investment in public transportation to reduce car dependency by 50% by 2030 — but he says that’s as it should be. “It’s the responsibility of youth in some ways to push our policymakers to consider what is radical. Really, it only seems radical because what we’re doing now is so inadequate,” he said. 

Climate Week in NYC

De Marneffe, Smith, Moll, and Fisher-Wachspress also organized a NYC Climate Week event, which coincides with the U.N. General Assembly in New York City. There, they presented the National Youth Statement to U.S. climate negotiators from the State Department as well as to other young climate organizers. 

“A lot of this work is unglamorous,” said de Marneffe. “What makes it worth it is the people around you who are encouraging you, and who believe in the same things you believe in.”

According to professor Jordan Alexander Stein, Ph.D., there are deeper truths left to explore through the lens of fantasy: Simone’s fantasies about herself, as well as those residing in our cultural imagination. 

“Fantasies always express something that is at some psychic level genuine to the person expressing them,” writes Stein in his new book, Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press, September 2024). The book is an exploration of Simone’s life and work, and the ways she constructed her artistic persona to claim race and gender privilege that weren’t available to her otherwise. It’s also an exploration of the public’s relationship with Simone, and how we’ve lost some of her complexity in making her an icon. 

A professor of comparative literature in Fordham’s English department, Stein draws his conception of fantasy from psychoanalysis, which holds that, like free association and “Freudian slips,” our idle daydreams offer insight into the unconscious mind. 

“Yes, fantasies can contain lies, falsehoods … and any number of other conscious or unconscious delusions,” Stein writes. “Yet the appearance of these dishonesties … tends very much to reflect things we honestly wish or desire.”

Breaking Barriers

According to Stein, who drew upon a vast archive of her performances, images, and writings for the book, we can find clues to Simone’s desires in her subtle artistic choices. The way she injected a word with unexpected melancholy, or the songs she chose to cover and the way she chose to cover them, often point to a wish to rise above the confines of her marginalized identity as a Black woman.

For example, Stein notes, when Simone covered Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan, she rarely switched the pronouns from “she” to “he” when singing about a love interest, as many singers do. Her choice to cover these white male artists at all is notable. Through her music, “she’s claiming certain kinds of race and gender privilege that weren’t afforded to her in other ways,” Stein said. 

A One-of-a-Kind Icon

So, why choose Nina Simone’s music for this exploration? Because, Stein said, “There’s nothing like it.” 

He related a story about ’90s musician Jeff Buckley covering “Lilac Wine” and calling it a “Nina Simone song” without seeming to realize he was covering a cover. “[Her music] is so unique and beautiful that people don’t even understand this is secondhand material. She’s so thoroughly made it hers. It’s a power that some artists have, but not many,” said Stein. 

And what about our collective fantasies of Nina Simone? Psychoanalysts might say she’s reached archetypal status, a shorthand for Black female genius, empowerment, and transcendence. Stein notes that it’s easy to forget she never got to view herself from our future vantage point, a distance that blurs much of the messy nuance of an extraordinary life. 

He hopes to restore some of it. 

“The reputations people have after they die are not always the complexity they lived in,” he said. “To honor both things and not collapse them into each other is part of the project of the book.”

As a journalism and new media major, she was connected with Brigid Sullivan, a 1970 graduate of Fordham’s Thomas More College and vice president for children’s media and educational programming at WGBH in Boston.

Sullivan provided Conde feedback on her resume and networking. For Conde, it was invaluable knowledge. 

“Having this amazing person in the media industry with me made me feel a little bit less lonely,” said Conde, a native of Venezuela native who won an Emmy for her work on the Univision program Despierta America.

Sullivan said she wanted to pay forward the knowledge she gained from the late John D. Boyd, S.J., her Fordham professor and mentor.

‘With Valeria, I saw a great talent, and I encouraged her to pursue it,” she said.

RamConnect: How to Sign Up

Jerry Goldstein, alumni relations specialist at Fordham’s Career Center, said the Fordham Mentoring program is still accepting applications for both mentors and mentees through Sept. 30. Alumni and students can sign up and list their interests, professional goals, availability, and how much time they can commit. He said it’s constantly evolving to meet the expectations of students.

“Mentorship can mean many different things to many different people. With all of the pressures and time constraints that students face, they really want flexibility,” he said, noting that the Fordham Mentoring Program is one of several programs offered through RamConnect, the University’s online community for professional development. 

When students are matched with mentors, they’re not tied down to rigid schedules focused on a formal set of goals. Rather, mentors and students are encouraged to focus on what works best for them individually.

The program has been growing 5 to 10% a year, and this year, Goldstein is hopeful that in October, the center will pair up 330 students with mentors, a 40% increase over last year. They’re especially interested in signing up students who are interested in health sciences and finance, as well as mentors who can share expertise in the arts.

Goldstein said they generally pair mentors and students from similar fields, but common interests or hobbies that are revealed through questionnaires will also result in successful pairings. Ultimately, he said, it’s part of a larger effort to make RamConnect a community of alumni. 

“In addition to formal mentoring like this, you can choose an informal approach and do flash mentoring, which is just contacting alumni and asking one or two questions or dealing with one issue,” he said.

“Between these programs, we hope that students, soon-to-be alumni, and current alumni will give back to each other and network with each other for the rest of their lives.”

They step in unison, arms pumping down in front of them like pistons. They kick a leg out and, exactly on the six-count, spin 90 degrees to repeat their march. Then again, another 90 degrees, before launching off the ground for a spin. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame their movements with views of West 55th Street and Ninth Avenue, where cars, buses, and pedestrians are engaged in their own choreography, sometimes slowing to take in the studio scene. There’s no music inside—only footsteps, hard breathing, and shouted notes of correction and encouragement.

The dancers are seniors in the Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program, which is celebrating its 25th year. They’re in the Joan Weill Center for Dance in Manhattan—home of the Ailey School, five blocks from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus—rehearsing teacher and choreographer Earl Mosley’s Running Spirits (Revival and Restaging) for the program’s annual benefit concert in mid-April.

In another ground-floor studio about a month before the concert, first-year students take West African Dance with Imani Faye. As a drummer slaps out a beat on a djembe, Faye guides the students through their own performance piece, Den-Kouly (Celebration), with its traditional Tiriba and Mané dance styles from Guinea.

As the students work to nail the choreography, they’re also grappling with bigger, more complex movements. For the first-years, it’s the culmination of nine months spent testing themselves, body and mind. Are they able to balance a rigorous dance training program and a rigorous academic curriculum? And for the seniors, it’s a time of final exams and frequent auditions. Are they ready to secure their place in the professional dance world?

Carrying on the Legacy of an American Dance Pioneer

The idea for a best-of-both worlds BFA program—top dance training and top academics in New York City—came several years before the first class arrived in the fall of 1998. Edward Bristow, then dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, struck up a conversation with Ailey School director Denise Jefferson in line at the West 60th Street post office. He believed Fordham could do more to make its presence felt “at the center of the arts world,” and Jefferson was interested in building a college degree program for Ailey dancers. “We knew that given our strengths, we could pull off something special,” he recalled.

Today, the program is led by Melanie Person, co-director of the Ailey School, and Andrew Clark, a Fordham professor of French and comparative literature who had served as an advisor to many BFA students before succeeding Bristow as co-director in 2023. Through their leadership, the Ailey/Fordham students are staying true to the vision set forth by Bristow and Jefferson, who died in 2010. They’re also upholding the legacy of Alvin Ailey himself, a towering figure in modern dance.

Ailey founded his namesake dance company in 1958, when he was 27 years old. His story and the story of the company he founded are inextricable from the histories of Black art in America and the Civil Rights Movement. At a time when Black dancers found it next to impossible to make a career through their craft, Ailey created a home for them. Since its inception, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has become not only one of the most successful Black-founded arts institutions in the United States but also one of the premier modern dance companies in the world, described in a 2008 congressional resolution as “a vital American cultural ambassador to the world.”

Texas native Antuan Byers, FCLC ’17, is one of many BFA students and alumni who say they were drawn to the program after seeing the company perform during their formative years. “I attended my first Alvin Ailey performance my senior year of high school, in that moment of still being on the fence about where I wanted to go to school,” said Byers, who was a member of Ailey II, the company’s junior ensemble, and now dances most frequently with the Metropolitan Opera. “After seeing the Ailey company, it all became clear.”

For many Black students in the BFA program, Alvin Ailey’s legacy serves both as an inspiration and a reminder of the challenges that dancers of color have faced. It’s hard to miss that legacy when you’re inside the Weill Center, with its walls lined with photos and ephemera spanning seven decades.

“Every day I try to use the weight of his legacy to further encourage me and push me in my craft,” said Naia Neal, a rising senior from Santa Cruz, California, who earned the program’s Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholarship and is pursuing a minor in math. “Alvin Ailey loved to dance, but he also understood that dance should be for everyone. He made it known that everybody deserved to be there.”

The dance landscape looks a good deal different today than it did in 1958. Black choreographers like Kyle Abraham and Camille Brown have had their work performed by New York City Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera; Black dancers are members of most major companies in the United States; and Black administrators are artistic directors at places like Pacific Northwest Ballet and Philadanco. But on many stages, Black dancers are still underrepresented, and for many students of color, a place like the Ailey School still functions as a home where they can chart a professional path.

“Something about being here has opened up a completely different relationship with me and what I add to different spaces and what it means to be a Black dancer,” said Carley Brooks, a rising Ailey/Fordham senior from Chicago pursuing a minor in communication and media studies. “The [Ailey] building allows me to feel so comfortable and confident in my body and what I have to present.”

Developing the Whole Dancer

If one thing defines the Ailey/Fordham experience, it’s the need to find balance within a hectic schedule. All students take ballet every semester, a way to keep them grounded in classical technique, and in their first year, they also take West African Dance and begin training in either the Horton technique or Graham-based modern dance. They also have foundational classes like Improvisation, Body Conditioning, and Anatomy and Kinesiology. And they take two Fordham core curriculum classes each semester, including first-year staples like English Composition and Rhetoric and Faith and Critical Reasoning.

In their sophomore year, students decide if they want to pursue a second major or a minor. It’s a decision they don’t make lightly, as it comes with extra coursework, but for many students, it’s a way to help them plan for careers beyond performing—and to infuse their dance practice with outside influences. That year, they also take Composition, and for many of them, it’s the first time they formally work on their own choreography—a complex process, with varying notation systems and a good deal of trial and error.

As juniors, the students continue to branch out intellectually. In the Ailey academic class Black Traditions in Modern Dance, they engage with history while also thinking about the artistic choices involved in a performance. Meanwhile, in Fordham classrooms, many begin fulfilling the requirements for a second major.

They also have a chance to become mentors to their first-year counterparts. Jaron Givens, a rising senior originally from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who is majoring in both dance and environmental studies, has relished the opportunity to pay forward the mentorship he received during his first year. He took part in the Ailey Students Ailey Professionals mentorship program, which pairs students with Ailey company members. Givens met with Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16, who he said “facilitated a space where I was able to be vulnerable … and showed me how much Ailey cared.”

The Ailey School has been working with Minding the Gap, an organization that offers mental health services to dancers. The hope is to give students as much access to mental health support as they have to things like on-site physical therapists at the Weill Center. On the Fordham side, faculty describe a similar focus on students’ well-being. “I try to … get a sense of what their concerns are, what they’re enjoying, and what they’re struggling with,” Clark said. “That’s where you really get a sense of the whole person and you have the ability to help out.”

There’s also a natural level of camaraderie that comes from spending so much time with fellow BFA students, both in dance classes and often in academic ones. “For us, it’s not a competition,” said Sarah Hladky, a rising junior who is majoring in English as well as dance. “Ailey very much emphasizes the fact that there is a space for everyone. And so even if people come in feeling like they need to prove themselves, at the end of the day you leave being like, ‘No, I am the dancer that I am, and you are the dancer that you are. And we can coexist and really make a great environment for each other.’”

While a sense of community is integral to the Ailey/Fordham experience, students are well aware that they’re training for a highly competitive profession. The postgrad goal for many of them is to join a dance company full time—with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ailey II often at the top of the list. Many alumni earn a spot in those companies and others such as Dance Theatre of Harlem, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the Radio City Rockettes. Others regularly appear on Broadway stages and in film and TV productions. But a benefit of their Fordham studies is that they graduate prepared for any number of career paths.

“My education at Fordham was instrumental in my formation as an artist and businesswoman, providing me with a depth of knowledge, curiosity, and appreciation for many subjects that gave me a foundation to build on,” said Katherine Horrigan, a 2002 graduate who went on to dance with Ailey II, Elisa Monte Dance Company, and a number of other companies around the world before launching a dance academy in Virginia.

Spears encourages Ailey/Fordham students to “build your academic resume as much as you build your dance resume.” She said the program expanded her ideas of what she could do as an artist and a leader. She began dancing with Ailey II in 2015, her senior year, and moved up to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater before deciding in 2023 to focus full time on ArtSea, her arts organization in the Bahamas. “I think if you focus on having viable options and stretching how many different places you are able to impact, you then have the mountaintop,” she said.

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For Samar Haddad King, a 2005 Ailey/Fordham graduate, a composition class with Kazuko Hirabayashi was so transformative that she decided to focus on choreography. For her class’s senior concert, she premiered an original piece, and the following year, with her BFA classmate Zoe Rabinowitz, she co-founded the company Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, based in both New York City and the West Bank. Nearly 20 years later, they have brought their work to 17 countries around the world.

Rabinowitz has carved out her own unique path since graduating in 2005. While she still dances in Yaa Samar! and elsewhere, her role as the company’s executive director builds upon several post-college jobs in arts administration, and she has also taught yoga and Pilates throughout her career. Acknowledging the finite amount of time most people can dance professionally, she said it’s important for young dancers not only to develop academic interests but also to take an expansive view of the dance world.

“Finding the things that you enjoy doing—the passions and the strengths that you have cultivated inside and outside of your dance training—and finding ways that you can do those things to implement jobs and create sources of income is going to be critical for most people,” Rabinowitz said, adding that dancers are known as great team members across industries. “Recognize that you come with a really strong skill set and work ethic, and that you have the capacity to do a lot of things.”

Person, the Ailey School co-director, echoed that sentiment. “The skills that they acquire as dancers are going to be transferable in any aspect of their lives. With the Fordham degree and their strong academics, they’re well situated to exist in the world.”

Whatever part of the dance or professional world they end up in, Ailey/Fordham alumni often maintain the close bonds they shared as undergraduates, and now there’s an additional way for them to stay connected. Ahead of the program’s 25th anniversary, Byers and Maya Addie, a 2021 graduate who is a member of the Radio City Rockettes, learned about Fordham’s affinity chapters—alumni communities formed around shared interests, past student involvement, or professional goals. They decided to start one for Ailey/Fordham BFA graduates.

“It’s a personal goal of ours to bring together our alumni because we have such a wealth of knowledge in that group,” Byers said. “In dance but also in our incredible business owners, or folks working in politics, folks working in finance, people teaching, people with kids. We see this 25th anniversary as an opportunity for us to really build an alumni program with all that excitement and energy.”

A Performance to Mark Endings and New Beginnings

On the evening of the spring benefit concert, after a cocktail reception on the sixth floor of the Weill Center, family, friends, and fans of the BFA program made their way to the Ailey Citigroup Theater on the building’s lower level. Following a brief video highlighting the history and mission of the program, Neal kicked off the evening’s performances with The Serpent, a solo piece choreographed by Jonathan Lee. To the pulsing beat of Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been,” she gave a high-energy performance that incorporated styles ranging from modern and hip-hop to voguing. Unlike the more restrained audience traditions one might see up the street at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the audience cheered throughout the piece.

That energy level, both onstage and in the crowd, continued with the first-year students’ West African piece, Den-Kouly (Celebration), featuring vibrant costumes and jubilant movement. The sophomores performed an excerpt from the more ballet-centric For They Are Rivers, choreographed by Becky Brown, and the juniors danced an excerpt from Darshan Singh Bhuller’s athletic, abstract Mapping. 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 final performance of the night, appropriately, belonged to the seniors. Since that March rehearsal of Running Spirits, Mosley had revealed to the students the meaning behind the piece, which he first choreographed for a group of preteen boys at a summer program in Connecticut in the late 1990s. At the time, he explained, he was dealing with a group of rambunctious kids who loved to run around—and whose parents thought of them as “little angels.” It made him imagine a scene in which a group of angels, who get around via running instead of flying, are all gathering in the morning to plan out their work agenda for the day.

“When I tell dancers that’s what it’s about,” Mosley said, “they always laugh because they’re like, ‘Really? That’s all? So we’re just literally getting ready to go to work?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re just getting ready to go to work.’”

It’s a playful piece, but the version Mosley created for these graduating dancers is one that requires strong technique and collaboration, and features impressive jumps, lifts, and, as the title suggests, speed. There was a sense of mischief onstage, an almost conspiratorial glee to the movements. That tone felt appropriate considering all the students had been through in their nearly four years together, from beginning the program at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to trying to wrap up their final semesters while planning for the future.

“This past year has probably been the most challenging in terms of juggling my schedule,” said Meredith Brown, a dance and economics double major from Asheville, North Carolina. “Because I’m also auditioning and making sure that I’m taking care of myself and enjoying the city and taking advantage of all these wonderful things.”

Brown and her fellow 2024 graduates are in a better place to manage those competing demands than they were four years ago—not only more experienced but also more confident.

“When I think about my first year, there was a lot of imposter syndrome,” said Abby Nguyen, a 2024 grad from the Bay Area who double majored in dance and psychology. “There was this constant feeling like I needed to prove myself, that I needed to prove that I was good enough to be here. But ultimately, you are here, and you are good enough to be here—or else you wouldn’t be in the building.”

The dancers’ growth has also been visible to Person, who recalled the challenges the Class of 2024 faced starting college during the pandemic. “I was watching them rehearse the other day, and I think they really came together as a class,” she said. “I think they relied on each other to push through this, honestly. … I think it gave them this inner strength that they might not have even recognized that they have.”

And while challenges certainly lie ahead—auditions, demanding dance jobs, the threat of injuries, and more—Mosley believes this group of graduates is ready to face them.

“They give me the energy like, ‘Oh, I know I’m going to do something,’” he said. “‘There’s
no doubt, I’m going to do something.’ This group as a whole is all about it.”

If you walk through the “Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—on view through July 28—you might be struck by many paintings and sculptures in their own right. But as you pass from gallery to gallery, you may also feel like you’re being guided through a conversation with everything you see.  

That kind of conversation—between works of art and viewers—is one that Fabiana Weinberg, FCLC ’07, hopes to facilitate in her role as senior exhibition designer at the Met.

“For me, it’s always a question of how do you breathe new life into these things every single time and provide the space for a dialogue with them?” Weinberg says. “I like the permanence of material culture, but also the ability to constantly think about it and marinate on it.”

The Harlem Renaissance exhibit gives people plenty to think about, including how to bring a “still-neglected art history out of the wings and onto the main stage,” as New York Times critic Holland Carter put it. The exhibit does that by featuring Black American artists from the 1920s to the 1940s like William H. Johnson, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Aaron Douglas—whose 1934 large-scale painting, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstruction, inspired the soft color palette for the gallery walls—along with portrayals of the African diaspora by European artists like Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso.

“This show is really exciting because there are a lot of paintings but also ephemera and magazines and books and sculpture,” Weinberg says. “It’s a really immersive experience going through the galleries. A lot of these works are on view for the first time, and it’s really about expanding the canon.”

Weinberg majored in visual arts and art history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and after graduating in 2007, she earned a master’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. She uses all that academic training to think broadly about the aesthetic and design choices that go into museum exhibits—from sketching design ideas, to using 3D-rendering software to move pieces of art around in a virtual replica of a gallery, to collaborating with tradespeople to build out the physical walls and cases and with curators to decide how to best showcase their selected works.

Her way of thinking about how people engage with art, though, began much earlier.

An Artistic Childhood and an Ideas-Driven Education

Weinberg grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As a kid, she trained to be a dancer, and her parents—a mother who was a photographer and a Fordham grad and a businessman father who became a high school teacher after earning a Fordham degree—frequently brought her to museums and exposed her to a wide range of performing arts.

At Fordham, she initially focused on natural sciences, but something clicked when she took an art history course—she decided to change majors. She says that Fordham’s core curriculum also gave her a foundation that added texture to her studies. “One thing I really always liked about Fordham’s approach is it was always ideas-driven, like, ‘What are you trying to say? What are you trying to do?’ And what it looks like—that comes later.”

After finishing her master’s in 2012, Weinberg moved back to New York and worked a variety of jobs across the design landscape, from scenic design to lighting design. The following year, she saw a posting for an exhibition designer position at the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. Although she had no experience in exhibition design, she heard back from the Rubin’s head of design, John Monaco, a former sculptor who saw promise in her application. She went on to spend four years at the Rubin before moving on to the Met in 2017.

‘Every Single Thing is a Decision’

In her time at the Met, Weinberg has designed or co-designed several premier shows, including 2020’s “Making the Met,” which looked back at the institution’s 150-year history; 2021’s Alice Neel retrospective; and “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” an Afrofuturist period room that opened in 2021 and remains on display.

Last December, she gave a group of Fordham alumni a private, behind-the-scenes look at “Africa & Byzantium,” which highlighted the artistic connections between these two geographically distant ancient civilizations. Before seeing the exhibit, which was darkly lit and made use of striking gold wall text, the alumni gathered in a conference room in the museum’s design department, where Weinberg demonstrated the Vectorworks 3D design software she and her colleagues use to plan out exhibitions.

“There’s still nothing like having a drawing that you see in your mind and then spatialize in a 3D model and then go into the gallery and see it being built,” she says of the work. “It’s thrilling.”

For the Harlem Renaissance exhibit, Weinberg says she tried to give viewers a sense of scale from room to room—and offer a contrast between some of the more esoteric written pieces on display and other sections with bursts of color and city life.

“At the beginning,” she explains, “there’s an introduction to the thinkers of the time, and we really wanted to create intimacy with these figures that really set the stage for what you’re going to see later. And then we have another gallery about city life that we wanted to open up. … So, using paint color and proportions of the space and dimensions, [we] give those different senses of scale between the intimacy of more domestic spaces and then more open, larger spaces.”

Weinberg says the breadth of her experience—from childhood museum visits to her understanding of space through dance—has helped her develop her eye for design. And while museum exhibition design wasn’t something she consciously thought about on all those childhood trips, it’s now front of mind for her. “When I go to museums, I can’t unsee how the spaces are designed,” she says. “Every single thing is a decision.”