A Look Back at 2024
With major milestones for the College, transformative new initiatives, groundbreaking creative and scholarly work, and stunning student success, Emerson had a lot to be excited about in 2024. We’re looking back at some of the stories that made us proud to be an Emersonian.
College Milestones
Emerson has had just 13 presidents in its 144 years, so when a new one is installed, it’s an occasion. President Jay Bernhardt may have arrived on campus in 2023, but in March 2024, he officially joined the College in an investiture ceremony that capped off a multi-day celebration of Emerson, featuring academic panels, performances, and parties.
This year, WERS 88.9 FM marked three quarters of a century on the airwaves, introducing Bostonians (and beyond) to their new favorite bands, and providing hands-on experience behind the mic and the soundboard for generations of Emerson students. They’ve also had some huge names stop by the studios over the years.
The Los Angeles program has been an integral part of an Emerson education for many students since 1986, but 10 years ago this year, the College opened its iconic campus on Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood hasn’t been the same since. To celebrate, Emerson community members from both coasts converged on Emerson Los Angeles in September.
In August, delegates from the Paris College of Art, Emerson’s partner in the joint Global BFA in Film Art, helped Emerson faculty commemorate five years of an innovative program that combines American-style filmmaking and European artistic sensibilities.
New Initiatives
This fall, the College launched EmersonTogether, an initiative created to build connection within the community while taking advantage of Emerson’s strengths in communication. The project kicked off in September with a community conversation on issues suggested by Emersonians, and continued with events throughout the semester with film screenings, panels, performances, and lectures that explored in different ways, the power of connection and communication. The key to EmersonTogether? Sourcing ideas for events and topics from every layer of the community.
Emersonians also were asked to contribute their vision and insight to the Strategic Planning process, which drew on community engagement and hard data to draw a roadmap that will guide the College for the next six years. Through focus groups, surveys, and anonymous feedback forms, data on peer schools and competitors, and deep dives into Emerson’s own past planning, internal working groups are putting the final touches on a Strategic Plan that will take Emerson to its 150th anniversary in 2030.
Starting in November, students, faculty, and staff who want to stay fit were able to work out on campus with state-of-the-art equipment at the new fitness center in Piano Row. Years in the planning, two-level facility is mint, with brand new gear and updated locker rooms, including two gender-neutral rooms. “It’s one of the nicest gyms I’ve seen,” said one student.
Faculty Fanfare
A slew of Visual and Media Arts faculty members had films premiere in 2024. Associate Professor Mike Ryan produced The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, an experimental film about the Martinican feminist writer, that premiered in Rotterdam in January, kicked off a summer museum tour at the Whitney Biennial, and made the festival rounds throughout the fall. Senior Scholar-in-Residence Peter Flynn’s documentary Film Is Dead, Long Live Film!, about the “vanishing world of private film collecting,” premiered in March and won three best documentary awards throughout the year.
Affiliated faculty members Margo Guernsey and Erin Trahan each tackled democracy with their new docs. Guernsey made a documentary short, The Officials, about election officials in four swing states during the 2024 election cycle that played on Time.com, and Trahan’s Dukakis: Recipe for Democracy follows former Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee Mike Dukakis as he teaches at Northeastern, co-chairs a committee, and makes turkey soup. And Cartooning America, a documentary about the creators of Popeye and Betty Boop produced by affiliated faculty member Kathryn Dietz, won a Liberary of Congress/Ken Burns Prize for Film, which awarded $200,000 to Dietz and director Asaf Galay to finish the film.
Early in the year, Becoming a Man, a play adapted from Performing Arts Senior Distinguished Artist-in-Residence P. Carl’s memoir of the same name, had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge. Carl wrote the stage adaptation, which chronicles his transition to a man at 50, with ART’s Artistic Director Diane Paulus directing.
Communication Sciences and Disorders Professor Ruth Grossman spent the 2023-24 academic year on a Radcliffe Fellowship, where (with the help of CSD grads and undergrads in the FACE Lab, as well as students from other universities), she studied the intersection of gender and autism. In April, she presented some of her findings at a talk hosted by the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
For the first time in Emerson’s history, the College won three National Endowment for the Arts grants in the same funding round in May. The Grants for Arts Projects went to ArtsEmerson to help fund theatre works that “disrupt the narrative of the racialized prison system.” Emerson Contemporary used its grant to support an exhibition series showcasing underrepresented artists in new media and digital art. And the grant to HowlRound Theatre Commons supports their Latinx Theatre Commons Carnaval of New Latinx Musicals.
Professor Jerald Walker not only published his latest book, Magically Black and Other Essays, he also had an essay selected for this year’s Best American Essays anthology — his sixth in the series — which ran alongside that of his former student, Nicole Graev Lipson, MFA ’22, whose own essay collection, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, is due out in March. “It is so difficult to get in,” Walker told Emerson Today, “and to have a student in at the same time is not something you can begin to fantasize about.” If that weren’t enough, Walker was named Distinguished Professor in the spring, alongside his new Writing, Literature and Publishing colleague, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding, author of Tinkers and This Other Eden.
Right before the November election, faculty, alums, and students converged on Washington, D.C. to discuss democracy, polling, politics, and the media at the 10th Annual Global Communication Summit, with the theme, “From Campaign Rhetoric to Civil Discourse: A Call to Action.” The summit, hosted by the Emerson-Blanquerna Center for Global Communication, a collaboration between Emerson’s Communication Studies Department and the Blanquerna School of Communication and International Relations in Spain, invited PBS senior correspondent and NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff to kick off the conference with a keynote discussion moderated by President Jay Bernhardt.
Tripp Whetsell ’94, an affiliated faculty member in Comedic Arts, fulfilled a dream when Norman Lear: His Life & Times, his biography of the TV legend, came out on November 11 to praise from Publishers Weekly and a queue of media appearances. Whetsell, who also teaches a class on Lear ’44, said he grew up watching classic Lear sitcoms, including All in the Family, Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons. “I’m honored to write this book on one of my childhood heroes and to teach the class and celebrate his legacy,” Whetsell told Emerson Today.
And Ioana Jucan, an assistant professor in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, was awarded the 2024 Calloway Prize for Best Book on Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies for Malicious Deceivers: Thinking Machines and Performative Objects. Malicious Deceivers “traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity, and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics.” The Calloway Prize, given by New York University’s Department of English, grants $9,000 to the best book in the field over the past two years.
For more examples of faculty creative work and research go to today.emerson.edu/faculty/
Student Achievement
The Emerson Speech & Debate team, directed by Assistant Professor Deion Hawkins, continued to develop into a formidable squad. Among their stellar performances was the International Forensics Association (IFA) tournament in Dublin last spring, in which Political Communication major Stella Del Tergo ’25 was the first Emerson student to compete in the finals of an international speech event in more than 25 years. Del Tergo and her teammates went on to place in the top 20 percent of all their events. And just this month, on Dec. 7 and 8, the team placed first in the International Public Debate Association (IPDA) competition at Hofstra University.
Theatre Education major Gabi Popa ’24 won a prestigious Fulbright grant to teach and study in Romania. She planned to teach at a university for the 2024-2025 academic year, while doing independent research on Romanian folklore, mythology, and storytelling. “My Romanian heritage and my deep love of education and learning are key points of my identity, so Fulbright serves as a chance to combine both loves of mine into one experience,” she said.
Three Business of Creative Enterprises students pitched their ideas for TV pilots for comedian/actor/producer Kevin Hart’s production company, and were flown out to Los Angeles to meet with the team and experience what it was like to work at HartBeat Productions. The pitch contest grew from Executive-in-Residence Jae Williams’ Fall 2023 class, which presented ideas for an Emerson/HartBeat collaboration as part of their coursework. “Walking into HartBeat is a moment that will play in my head for the rest of my life,” said Lindsay Decker ’24, one of the three winners, along with Matt Berry ’24 and Alaina Reyes ’24.
Visual and Media Arts major Brynne Norquist ’25 was named to BostInno’s “25 Under 25” list, the site’s annual roundup of young entrepreneurs and innovators making an impact in Boston. Norquist is the creator of Hiike, a film festival research and submission platform, served as head of distribution for student org Frames Per Second and won support from the Dorm Room Fund and a Girls Into VC Fellowship. Norquist joined young alum Logan Reilly ’24 on the list. Reilly is Service Delivery lead of Digital Solutions at Valere, an AI and software development service company.
One student and one recent alum had films selected for the San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain in September — a prestigious platform for emerging filmmakers. Yinuo “Chloe” Liu ’25 screened her film, Milky White in the Zabaltegi-Tabakalera category, which includes the “most varied and surprising films of the year” not yet screened in Spain. Holy Ghost Conversation, a film by Kai Luo, MFA ’24, competed in the NEST category, for short films made by international film students.
Student journalists at Emerson’s news station, WEBN, joined reporters around the world on November 5 in providing live, up-to-the-minute Election Night coverage. Spread around different Emerson studios and multiple states, on-air talent and production team members became interlocking gears running the most anticipated Political Pulse show of the last four years.
Sarim Kidwai ’27, a BCE major and animator, got to see a film he worked on as a 17-year-old selected as his native Pakistan’s submission for Best International Film. The Glassworker, a hand-drawn animated feature, follows a young glassblower and a violin prodigy as they navigate friendship, love, and war. The Oscar nominees won’t be announced until January, but Kidwai has plenty of bragging rights, nonetheless. “People don’t usually think of Pakistan … about its film or animation industry, so it’s important to bring that talent to the world,” Kidwai said.
And this year, like every year since 1953, students and clinicians at the Robbins Center, work together to train the speech-language pathologists of the future and transform the lives of their clients, young and old. As just one of countless examples, Emerson Today talked to Grace Flanagan, MS ’26 and her supervisor, Clinical Instructor Jocelyne Léger, who this fall, worked together with client Jayme Kelly, whose speech is getting sharper every day after suffering a stroke five years ago at the age of 29.
For more student stories, visit today.emerson.edu/students/.
David Ertischek and Rosie Lavery contributed to this story.
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