Alumni News and Notes: Spring 2025

Jazz pianist Darius Brubeck ’69, GP’14, ’17 and his wife, Catherine, have released a book—Playing the Changes: Jazz at an African University and on the Road—about their 1983 move to South Africa during the height of apartheid and their ensuing mission to build an academic program in jazz music at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. A film by the same name, Playing the Changes, was also released, documenting Brubeck’s life and career as a jazz musician through archival footage and interviews with former students, musicologists, jazz historians, and Brubeck himself.  

Twenty years after the premiere of How I Met Your Mother, Craig Thomas ’97 (who co-created the show with Carter Bays ’97) and Alek Lev ’97 have launched a rewatch podcast with star of the show, Josh Radnor. How We Made Your Mother launched on March 10, 2025, and takes an episode-by-episode look back at this groundbreaking show about a group of friends navigating life in New York City and whose core members met as undergrads at Wesleyan.  

Joedan Okun ’00 won a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Music Film as a producer on American Symphony, a feature documentary about musician Jon Batiste and writer Suleika Jaouad.  

Leah Seldin ’21, MA ’22 co-founded an organization to help build community among New York City women in their 20s, which has grown to over 1,400 members in less than three years. The group, The Girls NYC, was featured on ABC News Nightline and in Bon Appétit.  

The documentary Sugarcane, produced by Kellen Quinn ’05, received several International Documentary Association’s 2024 IDA Documentary Awards nominations, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film was nominated for Best Feature Documentary, among other category nominations. 

On October 2, 2024, Saidiya Hartman ’83, Hon. ’19 joined Kaneza Schaal ’06 in a conversation about their collaborative process of creating the new performance work Litany for Grieving Sisters. Moderated by Kiara Benn ’20, the event was hosted by Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts and convened in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism.  

Eric Weiskott ’09 reviewed Elizabeth Willis’s literary epic Liontaming in America for Los Angeles Review of Books. Weiskott, who studied under Willis during the latter’s tenure as Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, calls the work “as sprawling as the country it addresses”—at once an anatomy, a biography, and a cartography. 

Director Bridget Savage Cole ’05 screened her new movie The House of Spoils at the Cabot theater in her hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts. Savage Cole spoke with WBZ News Radio about the screening. “Los Angeles and Hollywood is like Mars when you grow up in Massachusetts. It’s just so far away and you’re not even thinking about it, never conceived that that was an actual career path, that filmmaker was even an actual job.”  

The Council on Foreign Relations welcomed David Hart ’83, P’24, professor of public policy at George Mason University, to the David Rockefeller Studies Program as senior fellow for climate and energy. Hart has worked to increase funding for federal energy research and development and the establishment of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. He is a lifetime fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—the largest multidisciplinary scientific society in the world.  

On February 2, 2025, after 34 years and more than 17,000 performances, the Blue Man Group held its final production in New York, ending one of the longest runs in Off Broadway history. Chris Wink ’83, who founded the group with Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton in the late ’80s, summed up the show’s unique absurdist appeal and widespread fandom, saying, “There’s something weird about drums and music and getting together that is magical and sublime.”  

Hannah Reale ’20 was named a 2024–2025 Becton Fellow by Boston public media producer GBH. The Becton Fellowship honors promising GBH producers and content creators whose work reflects the organization’s commitment to public service. 

Incident, a film about the 2018 shooting of Chicago barber Harith Augustus told through surveillance video and police body cam footage, was nominated for the 2025 Best Documentary Short Oscar award. The doc is produced by Jamie Kalven ’69 and is based on his reporting.  

During Wesleyan’s February Engagement Month, more than 1,000 alumni attended Wesleyan Social Meetups hosted by alumni throughout the world. These small social gatherings took place in 30 states and four countries and took many forms—snowshoeing in Colorado, a salsa class, brunch in Manila, community non-profit volunteering, hikes, curling classes, brewery meetups, happy hours, and more. Notably, 40 class years were represented by alumni hosts and alumni from more than 60 classes participated.