Alumni News and Notes: Fall 2026
As a coproducer of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Alex Levy ’08 (center, with glasses) won a Tony in the category of Best Revival of a Play. He joined the show’s elated cast and crew onstage at the 79th Annual Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall in June. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions.)
Tobin Anderson ’95 was named head coach of men’s basketball at Tennessee Tech on March 13. His five-year agreement was widely reported by media outlets like ESPN and The Athletic. Anderson was formerly a head coach at Iona, Fairleigh Dickinson, and Division II St. Thomas Aquinas. Most recently, he was special assistant to head coach Bryan Hodgson at South Florida.
Shannon Sampieri ’23, an alumnus of the Center for Prison Education’s program at York Correctional Institute, testified at a public hearing in support of a proposal that would eliminate life sentences for people under the age of 25 and create new rules around parole eligibility for young people in Connecticut.
Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City by Bench Ansfield ’08 was named a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in History. The book focuses on the large-scale arson committed by New York City landlords from 1968 through the 1980s.
Brian Wolpin ’95, a cancer researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, led a clinical trial crucial to the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of a new pancreatic cancer drug that has the potential to double survival times for those with the disease. According to a story in The New York Times, Wolpin’s presentation at a meeting in May of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago was met with a standing ovation.
Time and Water, a film directed by Sara Dosa ’05, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary features Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason as he grapples with issues of climate change and loss, particularly the demise of local glaciers that have been central to the lives of previous generations of his family but won’t be there for future generations.
Best known as a portrait artist, Brenda Zlamany ’81 won a Fulbright US Scholar Award for the 2026–27 academic year. Her interdisciplinary project in Italy, called 108 Letters: Portraiture, Music, and Cultural Survival in Calabria, is a collaboration with the University of Calabria. This is Zlamany’s second Fulbright.
This spring, Alice Cronin-Golumb ’79 was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the scientific society founded in 1848 that publishes the journal Science. Cronin-Golumb, whose research focuses on age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, received the Lifetime Award for Research from the International Neuropsychological Society at its meeting in Dublin.
Stephanie Fleischmann ’84 received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama and Performance Art for her work as an opera librettist.
The American Academy in Rome has awarded Cameron Anderson ’98 the highly prestigious Billie Tsien Rome Prize for her set and production design work. As one of the Academy’s Italian Fellows, she will be part of a transdisciplinary community pursuing arts and humanities projects in Rome.
Johannah Townsend ’91, P’22, ’24 received the Humanitarian Award from the Boys & Girls Club of Northern Westchester, New York, in recognition of her dedication to improving the lives of others.
Canis Major, a quartet led by jazz guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson ’02, had its Irish debut in May with a performance at the National Concert Hall.
In June, a play written and performed by Emily Weitzman ’14 had an off-Broadway run at the SoHo Playhouse. The comedy Furniture Boys then returned to the Edinburgh Film Festival, where it debuted last year, garnering a four-star review from The Guardian. Weitzman says the show “started as a spoken word poem as a part of the Wesleyan slam poetry team and when I was a Watson Fellow in 2015 studying slam poetry around the world.”
Playwright Kirsten Greenidge ’96 wrote the English dialogue for the Boston Lyric Opera’s reimagined production of Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera Daughter of the Regiment this spring. The show was adapted from the original to take place in colonial America during the Revolutionary War rather than France during the Napoleonic Wars.
A new one-act play from playwright Eric Conger ’68 called In a Blind played sold-out shows at the Chain Theatre Summer One-Act Festival this summer.
Brian Wolpin ’95, a cancer researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, led a clinical trial crucial to the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of a new pancreatic cancer drug that has the potential to double survival times for those with the disease.
