Notable Alumnae/i
Rahm Emanuel '81
Congressman from Illinois: U.S. House of Representatives; chair, Democratic Caucus; 2006 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; former senior advisor to President Bill Clinton
Selected in November 2008 to be President-elect Barack Obama's White House chief of staff
"The four years I spent at Sarah Lawrence College taught me that with hard work and dedication, anything can be accomplished."
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Rahm Emanuel worked for a public interest group, became an advisor with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and co-founded a political consulting firm. Joining the Clinton presidential campaign team in 1991, Emanuel demonstrated the tenacity and drive that would characterize his years at the White House: as financial director for the campaign he raised a record $70 million in funds. He then planned Clinton's inauguraton, continuing on to serve as the political director and senior advisor to the President at the White House. As a member of Congress, he has continued to champion causes he considers vital to the public welfare.
Alice Walker '65
Writer
Alice Walker has published 19 books, including The Color Purple (Harcourt Brace, 1982), which won the Pulitzer Prize for literature and which Stephen Spielberg made into a major motion picture. In The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (Scribner, 1996), she describes the making of that film. She signed her first book contract before graduating from college.
"It was at the College that I wrote my first published short story and my first book, there that I learned to feel that what I thought had some meaning."
J.J. Abrams '88
Creator, Executive Producer, Screenwriter
In his final year at Sarah Lawrence, J.J. Abrams collaborated with a friend to write a feature film treatment, which became 1990's Taking Care of Business. Since then he has written such films as Regarding Henry, Forever Young, Armageddon and Joy Ride, and served as co-creator and executive producer of the TV series Felicity and creator and executive producer of the series Alias. His most recent success is the Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winning show Lost, for which he serves as co-creator and executive producer.
Vera Wang '71
Fashion designer and owner: Vera Wang Bridal House
Vera Wang entered Sarah Lawrence as a pre-med student, with a career as a championship figure skater already on her résumé. Before going on after graduation to become a renowned fashion designer, she studied theater and art history.
What allowed her to change course and prepared her to become one of the top figures in today’s fashion world? The answer is less about which courses she took than about what most students at Sarah Lawrence really major in: creativity.
After graduation, Wang became an editor at Vogue, and later a design director for Ralph Lauren. Then, after a frustrating search for the perfect dress for her wedding, she did what any self-respecting Sarah Lawrence graduate would have done: she designed her own gown.
What followed was her trademark line of wedding dresses for other contemporary women like herself who defied the stereotypes. She has also created gowns for celebrities like Sharon Stone and Mariah Carey. Wang once said, “To redefine the color white is infinitely challenging.”
W. Ian Lipkin '74
Professor of Epidemiology, Neurology and Pathology: Columbia University; Principal Investigator and Scientific Director: Northeast Biodefense Center
Dr. Ian Lipkin is a vital part of one of the most important global efforts of our age: controlling the development and spread of infectious diseases. A professor and laboratory director at Columbia University, where he teaches and leads research efforts, Ian has shared his time and expertise with organizations across the globe, addressing the afflictions of both man and beast, which can no longer be counted on to be mutually exclusive. Most recently, as a result of his work advising the Chinese government on dealing with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), he has been asked to teach at and help run the first infectious disease research center in China.
Some of Ian’s most significant accomplishments heed the simplest research element of all: time. One of his teams developed a test to greatly speed up diagnosis of West Nile Virus, now a fact of life on the East Coast; at Columbia, his lab created a single test to diagnose numerous diseases at once. As scientific director of the Northeast Biodefense Center, Ian is leading research into the dreaded alliance of infectious diseases and terrorism, a nexus that must never be allowed to take shape. On still another front, he is researching links between viral infections and autism, partly through a patented process he helped develop.
Scientists studying emerging infectious diseases are advancing the cause of knowledge and capability in an area where humanity’s dominion, once assumed to be everstrengthening, has met powerful resistance. HIV. Ebola. SARS. Bird flu. West Nile Virus. If medical and scientific research hungered for fresh challenges, they are here. As Ian noted in his 2000 Commencement address at Sarah Lawrence, “Research is most exciting when the facts don’t quite fit.” Great tests inspire those with vision, strength and ability to step forward. This is where Ian is working with distinction, in the vanguard of efforts to understand some of the most inaccessible and dangerous corners of our world.
Ian has taken the principles of the liberal education to the farthest reaches of scientific and medical research—as an open-minded, inquisitive and accomplished student of the sciences, and of life. In this he embodies not only the Sarah Lawrence ideal, but also the learned and ambitious individual on whose work some portion of our collective future may rest.
Ann Patchett '85
Writer
Before Ann Patchett graduated from Sarah Lawrence—where she studied with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks and Grace Paley—she sold her first story to The Paris Review. But her course work wasn’t focused only on what it took to get ahead, she recalls.
“As it turned out, it proved to be an excellent foundation for a novelist, but it would have been just as helpful to a linguist, a painter, a mathematician,” says the author of Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and England’s Orange Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
“The education at Sarah Lawrence was not so much a matter of filling our heads up with facts, but more of learning how to be able to go out and find facts yourself,” explains Patchett, who went on after her graduation to attend the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. “And it was about teaching us how to be curious.”
Patchett’s first three novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft and The Magician’s Assistant, brought her recognition, honors and awards. In 2004, Truth & Beauty, her first work of nonfiction, was published. Winner of the Chicago Tribune’s 2004 Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, it is the story of the Patchett’s friendship with the late Lucy Grealy ’85, the author of the memoir Autobiography of a Face, whom she met at Sarah Lawrence. She has also written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Gourmet, O (the Oprah Magazine) and Vogue.
“Sarah Lawrence taught me to desire knowledge, to seek it out not because it would be covered later on a test, but to seek it out because I knew it was something I had to have. It was the kind of education that made you hungry to know everything.”
Damani Baker '96
Documentary filmmaker, director: Grenada: A Dream Deferred
In the few years since his graduation, Damani Baker has founded Soulfire Films, his own production company; directed and produced films for PBS, the Sundance Institute and Danny Glover’s Carrie Productions; and been named one of “25 new faces in independent film” by Filmmaker magazine.
Baker loves the many people and talents it takes to make a film. “You can’t do it by yourself,” he notes. “You have a vision, and you have to communicate that vision to the five or 500 people working on the film. Ideally, everyone has the same goal: to produce a moving piece of art that will make people think.”
After studying both African-American history and film at Sarah Lawrence, Baker received his M.F.A. from the UCLA School of Film and Television. He worked as Glover’s personal assistant on the set of Beloved, then went on to direct and produce documentaries and shorts. Baker is currently developing feature films.
He’s also back at Sarah Lawrence, teaching film (and working on several productions, too). “It’s inspiring—I can see myself in my students,” he says. “They have the fire in their eyes, the conviction that anything is possible. It reminds me of why I love this craft.”
Elisabeth Röhm '96
Actress
As an actress, Elisabeth Röhm makes a lot of demands on herself. She’s her own boss, and a tough one at that.
Röhm made her name as the dedicated detective in TV’s Angel, and is now the ambitious assistant district attorney on the series Law & Order.
Röhm says she found success for herself by setting her own goals and sticking to them—much as she was taught to do at Sarah Lawrence under the donning system.
“That type of learning makes you your own best teacher,” says Röhm. “It also makes you accountable. And as an adult, it serves you well, especially if you—like many artists—have an unstructured life.”
An independent professional who isn’t interested in climbing a corporate ladder, Röhm describes herself as an entrepreneur—just one who prefers to draw outside of the lines and set her own boundaries. “For me, Sarah Lawrence was the perfect match,” she says. “At Sarah Lawrence, I learned how to organize my day without someone standing over me.”
Meredith Monk '64
Performance artist, composer, singer, director/choreographer, and performer; recipient, MacArthur "genius grant"
Having founded The House, a company dedicated to an interdisciplinary approach to performance, expanded the musical territory of voice with Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, and pioneered in site-specific performance for more than 40 years, Meredith Monk refuses to be categorized.
Her work has been featured in a retrospective art exhibition, Meredith Monk: Archaeology of an Artist, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
David Krakauer '78
Clarinetist, performer, recording artist and teacher
"I will always remember the special environment at Sarah Lawrence College—theatre and music and dance all coming together in one place. For me it was perfect, because I wasn't ready to jump into a strict conservatory atmosphere. I needed more."
Today, David Krakauer's clarinet resonates with many voices—among them the sounds of a musician with a sure sense of himself. Known for his mastery of a myriad of styles including classical chamber music, klezmer music, the avant-garde, rock and jazz, his innovative work has been the subject of articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times and other periodicals, and he has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman and on National Public Radio.
Barbara Walters
Co-Anchor and correspondent: ABC's 20/20 and The Barbara Walters Specials; co-host and co-executive producer: ABC Daytime's The View
Before she became one of the deans of American television journalism, internationally famous for her interviews of American presidents and foreign heads of state as well as of entertainment figures and all manner of other newsmakers, Barbara Walters sat at her Sarah Lawrence graduation with little idea of what she wanted to do in life. While Walters had felt loved, nurtured and happy at Sarah Lawrence, she had not emerged with a plan. Which is ok, she told students at the 2001 Sarah Lawrence commencement ceremony.
College "is about the joy of growing, and testing and thinking... finding out, exploring, adapting, maybe even failing and trying again. That is what you learned here. This College has given you the tools—as no other college can in quite the same way—that will last you all your life. They have in mine."