After a semester in New York, CITYterm alums span the globe to discover new passions and engage with unique communities. Each month, we’ll highlight one of those alumni here and share the story of a student’s experience after CITYterm. Do you know an alumnus who would be great for such a spotlight? Please email Lily Schorr to let us know.

May 2013

Charlotte Cowles

CITYterm, Fall 2001
Miss Porter's School, 2003
Columbia College, 2007

Charlotte Cowles, a senior editor at New York Magazine, talks about how CITYterm has continued to influence her 12 years later. 

I always knew I wanted to work as a writer, but during CITYterm that was pretty far from my mind. Probably the most defining thing about my semester was 9/11, even though we didn’t go into the city that day. We were supposed to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but instead we were given the afternoon off to process what had happened and take turns calling our parents on the landline, since none of our cell phones worked. I remember taking a long nap, and feeling very clear-headed when I woke up.

I haven’t really left New York since then. I somehow convinced my parents, who live about two hours away in Connecticut, to let my wide-eyed 17-year-old self do an internship at a magazine here during the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, and then I went to Columbia for college. Sometimes I look back on my desperation to return to New York after CITYterm and wonder why I felt so strongly about it. I was just so excited to live in a place that felt so boundless.

I wasn’t really organized enough during college to plan how I would make a career out of writing, but I did a few internships at various magazines and wound up getting a job at a small newspaper called the New York Sun after I graduated. It was a great first job, even though I probably wasn’t very good at it. Then the paper folded when the recession hit in 2008, and I got hired as an editor for a startup website. I hated the work, which was mostly just copywriting, but it allowed me plenty of time to freelance. A lot of my former co-workers from the Sun had connections at New York Magazine, so I started getting very lowly assignments from them and eventually worked my way up to a staff position. That was two and a half years ago, and now I’m a senior editor here.

Editorial jobs vary hugely. My position entails tons of writing every day for New York Magazine’s website, which I really love. The web is an exciting and terrifying platform for writers -- everything happens so fast, and there’s so much feedback all the time. It’s been a tremendous learning experience, and requires imagination, humility, and a sense of humor, which are all things I learned a lot about at CITYterm. You have to be willing to walk up to strangers and smile and ask questions, and then not feel defeated if they don’t respond. You also have to be endlessly curious.

I still consider my time at CITYterm as the foundation for my life here today. It gave me a great template for learning how to explore this extraordinary place. Also, because I was here during 9/11, I feel a certain loyalty to the city -- that was a time of tremendous kindness between New Yorkers, and I’ve never forgotten how welcome I felt here. I’ve put down many more roots here since then, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg, and I love living and working in a setting that’s constantly bursting with new things to explore.

 

April 2013

Andy Freedman

CITYterm, Spring 1997
Belmont Hill School, 1998
Emory University, 2001
UW-Madison, MBA, 2006 

Andy Freedman reflects on how CITYterm impacted his career, from Dunkin Donuts to Visa to the tech start up, LevelUp.   

Since leaving CITYterm in the Spring of '97, my experiences have led me all over the country-- all of them impacted by the time I spent learning the lessons of New York with CITYterm. I have always been interested in story telling, an interest that developed during my semester in the city. I remember vividly working on my neighborhood study project (Union Square), hearing Danny Meyer talk about the NYC restaurant business, and the organizers of the Union Square Green Market and their challenge of supporting local farmers in the city - stories I retell to this day.

 

After graduating from Emory University, I began my career in brand marketing with Dunkin Donuts. It felt like the natural fit to channel my interest in understanding consumer behavior and business (and my love of baked goods was an added bonus!). The decision to go into marketing has truly paid off and led me all over the country to work with a broad range of well known brands. Had you told me as a high-school senior that I would meet my wife while living in Minneapolis, MN working at General Mills developing new products for Fruit Roll-Ups and Fiber One, I would have laughed. Or if I had known that one day my job requirements would include going to the Super Bowl while working at Visa, I wouldn't have believed it. And best of all, had I known that 15 years after graduating from CITYterm I would be working for a 23-year old college dropout pioneering the world of mobile payments at LevelUp -- well, that would have blown my mind.

Through my career, a thirst for knowledge and a passion for finding new stories to tell that first developed at CITYterm has opened me up to so many new opportunities. While I don't know exactly what the future holds, I know that I will never again be able to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge without wanting to let out a barbaric yawp -- another story I'm grateful to tell. 

*Member of the CITYterm Alumni Council 

March 2013

Frances Denny

CITYterm, Spring 2002
Concord Academy, 2003
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, BA '07
Rhode Island School of Design, MFA '14 (expected)  

Frances Denny (second from the left) discusses starting Scrapped, a magazine showcasing new and emerging art.   

After CITYterm, I graduated from Concord Academy (in ’03) and left Massachusetts for New York City to begin college at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. I credit CITYterm for making that transition a smooth one—I felt like I knew New York already and was absolutely thrilled to be returning. At Gallatin, I tailored my academic concentration to focus on “Representations of Women in Art History and Literature” and took as many photography classes as I could. Though I wasn’t a photo major, the classes I took in philosophy, comparative literature, and art history at NYU still very much inform my current photographic work. 

I remained in NYC after graduating from NYU. I decided to pursue work as a freelance photographer (a dream that first began perhaps when I made a photo collage for my Brooklyn Bridge Project at CITYterm!). I worked in art galleries, as an assistant to other photographers, and made my own photo work for several years before enrolling in school for a year at the International Center for Photography. At ICP, I made some important connections as well as some wonderful friends—other photographers keenly interested in our place in the art world.  Two summers ago, four of those friends and I were sitting around a barbeque in Brooklyn and came up with an idea to launch a magazine. We envisioned a magazine that would exist both in print and online, and would creatively showcase work made by established and emerging artists working in all media, all over the world.  So became Scrapped.

In August 2012, after a year of research, design, and curation, my partners and I launched Scrapped. What I love most about the magazine is its creative, irreverent approach to showcasing art work—we don’t publish a lot of opaque “art speak,” but rather focus on bringing interesting new work to the table. Scrapped is semi-annually published, according to a theme: our first theme was “Hit It,” a unrestricted look at desire and ambition, and our second issue’s theme (for which we are wrapping up the layout now) is “Future Dinosaur,” an exploration of nostalgia and obsolescence.  I am grateful to collaborate on such a fulfilling project with my partners, whose opinions I implicitly trust even when we disagree on something. In January, Scrapped concluded a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to publish Issue II and to re-design our website: we actually raised $14,500—well past our goal of $9,500. My partners and I are excited about our prospects for the future and are hard at work on Issue II: Future Dinosaur, due out this spring.

I began graduate school at The Rhode Island School of Design this past fall, where I am pursuing my MFA in Photography while I also work on Scrapped. RISD is proving to be an incubator where I can focus intensively on my own work as an artist. I plan to move back to New York City when I finish my degree next year, and will continue to balance my life as a creator and a curator there.

Please stay tuned for Issue II: Future Dinosaur. For all updates, calls for submission, and details about our NYC issue launch parties, please visit www.scrappedmag.com, Like us on Facebook (facebook.com/scrappedmag), and follow us on Twitter (@ScrappedMag). To view my personal work, please visit my website: www.francesfdenny.com

 

February 2013

Adrienne Campbell-Holt

CITYterm, Spring 1997
Boston Latin School, 1998
Barnard College, Columbia University BA Summa cum Laude Urban Studies, 2002

Adrienne Campbell-Holt explores her journey from growing up on a rural dairy farm to becoming a director and producer of critically-acclaimed shows and starting her own theater company.

I grew up in rural Vermont and inner-city Boston as the offspring of community organizers/educators who didn’t believe in television, conventional dolls or too much furniture. Rather than experiencing these conditions as limitations, my sister and I hung a shower curtain in the living room and regularly put on multi-part plays and dance performances. Moving from a dairy farm community in Vermont, to a predominantly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Haitian and Vietnamese neighborhood in Dorchester encouraged my curiosity about distinct voices and modes of storytelling. My current work as a theater director feels like a natural extension and continuing exploration of my childhood curiosity.

The past decade has been extremely varied--I spent stints living in Paris as well as Los Angeles—and has seen me pursuing a seemingly disparate set of professional pursuits. (Fortunately, in a profession where your entire ‘expertise’ is founded in life experience and observation, this background of adventures has been a resource.) 

After doing my Urban Studies thesis on DUMBO I started an organization called Nest that took over temporarily idle warehouse spaces for artistic programming. I ran a weekly arts-oriented flea market called the DUMBO Bazaar that had food and live music… and a 70,000 SF warehouse space with ten of my favorite dance and theater companies in residence (rent-free), plus a cinema, gallery and bar. I was working in the city as an actress, interning with Liz LeCompte at the Wooster Group, and making my own experimental performance work in my studio.When I started to feel a little stuck, like I was spending too much time focused on work that wasn’t helping me grow as a person, I decided it was time to shift my energies.

I moved to LA and continued performing but also began to focus my attentions more significantly on writing and directing. I wrote and directed several plays as well as a short film and several video projects. After three years I knew I needed to push myself again. I returned to the east coast and spent several summers at the Williamstown Theater Festival and assisting my directing heroes on shows including Peter and the Starcatcher, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters.

Finally, I felt ready to form my own theater company, and in the past three years Colt Coeur has produced three critically-acclaimed world-premieres, with three more currently in-development. One of the lines from our overripe mission statement: “We make theater that is imbued with the urgency and intensity of the present—theater that responds to and engages with the world in which we live with compassion, humor, ferocity, and an abiding, unapologetic sense of wonder,” could be a description of the feeling I found as a 16 year-old at CITYterm. Colt Coeur is comprised of actors, designers, writers and myself and thanks to my old real-estate developer connection we have a studio in DUMBO where we have the rare luxury of spending as much time as our schedules allow building plays from scratch.We also offer a free week-long playmaking workshop for Brooklyn teenagers where the students build plays using the same developmental techniques we use as a company.

As a freelance director I’ve had the privilege of getting to work all over the country and every time I’m working on a new show, in a new city, I feel like a CITYterm student all over again.I endeavor to understand the ‘logic’ of the city-- I always try to take the public transportation to unknown destinations and spend my down-time walking around, sitting in coffee shops, and eavesdropping on strangers’ conversation a la the “18-inches” assignment.More than anything making theater is about empathy and communication—and nowhere did I have the opportunity to hone these skills more than CITYterm.

January 2013

Brandon Castillo

CITYterm, Spring 1999
St. Mark's School of Texas, 2000
Pitzer College, 2004

Brandon Castillo uses lessons from CITYterm to run an outdoor market that promotes local businesses and artists, as well as helping Dallas become a "World Class City".

I was born in Brooklyn but raised in North Texas. Even though I don't remember much about living in New York City as a baby, I knew I had to get out of the suburbs as soon as possible and get back to my birthplace. CITYterm ignited my passion for cities, exposing me to a life independent of cars, surrounded by people, and adventure waiting around every corner. I took this energy to Spain after graduating college in order to learn city life in a foreign place. After teaching English in Madrid for a few years, I came back to Dallas inspired to bring everything I'd learned living abroad back to my hometown.

 

It puzzled me that Dallas didn't have the frequent outdoor events like New York or Madrid, despite having great weather! So two years ago, I started the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market in one of Dallas' most historic, yet neglected, neighborhoods. My two goals for the Market are to promote local businesses & artists and promote a pedestrian friendly environment. The first Deep Ellum Market was located under a covered parking lot behind a restaurant, and now we shut down a block of Main St. to make room for all the vendors. If you're in Dallas and want to try the latest food trucks, hear good local music, and shop for unique stuff, come to the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market on the third Saturday of the month!

 

In 2013, the Market will be expanding to different areas of the city, including the Design District, Downtown, and Lower Greenville. We are also planning a launch of a "bodega" style store in Deep Ellum, an atypical business model here in DFW, but one that certainly works in other cities.

Dallas is a city that considers itself cosmopolitan, yet stubbornly calls itself Texan at the same time. While the Lone Star shines brightly here in the Metroplex, certain things have to change if Dallas indeed aspires to be a "World Class City". I am lucky to have had the opportunity of studying and living in some of the world's greatest cities. I only hope to provide my hometown with elements of these great places.

December 2012

Molly Nussbaum

CITYterm, Fall 2005
Haddonfield Memorial High School, 2007
New York University, 2011

Molly Nussbaum, film maker extraordinaire, takes New York City by storm.

Since leaving CITYterm, I haven't really left the city. I came back to New York to go to film school at NYU, and stayed on after graduating to work, first for an independent film distributor, and currently as the script coordinator for the TV show "The Americans," which premieres on FX in January. Engrossing myself in the city's incredibly dynamic (and rapidly changing) film and television industry has afforded me some exceptional experiences: from live story slams with The Moth, to producing a commercial for Porsche, to hanging out with Grover and Elmo on Sesame Street, I've been been having a great time.

I got to combine my love of the city with my love of filmmaking while working for distributor Zeitgeist Films as they acquired "Koch," a new documentary by Neil Barsky about storied mayor Ed Koch, which opens in February. I've also been attempting to possess an entrepreneurial spirit by co-founding a small commercial production company this year as well. I hope to have the chance to explore Montreal with a new film in the spring, but til then I'll be making TV here in New York. No matter what project it is, I try to maintain the CITYterm spirit of always trying to find out what I didn't even know I didn't even know. That, and yawping barbarically at every turn.

 

 

 

November 2012

Sara Low

CITYterm, Fall 2007
Blake School, 2009
Skidmore College, 2013

Sara Low, a senior at Skidmore College, spent her summer on an archaeological dig in New Mexico.

Through the collaboration of Mercyhurst’s Archaeological Institute and Southern Methodist University, the Taos Collaborative Archaeology Program offers an in-depth and extensive introduction to archaeological field methods and research in northern New Mexico. For six weeks we excavated an apparent Valdez Phase (ca. A.D. 900-1190) Pueblan pithouse, working in a professional environment and under demanding conditions common to archaeology. We lived in two person tents, excavated from 7am to 5pm, Monday through Saturday, and had opportunities to visit other archaeological sites such as Bandelier National Monument, and participate in community project like the re-plastering of San Francisco de Asis Church. By the end of my time in Taos I felt I had gained an incredibly valuable education in archaeology which I would not have been able to find anywhere else. After finishing my senior year as an anthropology major at Skidmore College I will most definitely continue my work in the field. (top photo by Emily Dietrich at Bandelier National Monument)

 

 

October 2012

Kathleen Adams

CITYterm, Spring 2005
Hathaway Brown, 2006
Fordham University, 2010
Masters in Urban Studies from Fordham University, 2012 

Kathleen Adams, co-founder of Momma's Hip Hop Kitchen, combined her passions to form an organization that empowers women of color to express themselves through art.

My name is Kathleen Adams and I was part of S’05 at CITYerm. I am also the co-founder of Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen (MHHK). Momma’s Hip Hop Kitchen (MHHK) is a multifaceted hip hop event designed to showcase women artists, especially women of color. MHHK serves as a social justice community-organizing platform that educates and empowers women of color on issues that impact their lives, including HIV/AIDS and reproductive justice. Our mission is to create a dynamic interactive exchange and safe space for all women of color to express themselves through their art.

I co-founded MHHK while I was a sophomore in college at Fordham University. At this time I became very frustrated with the way that women of color were being portrayed in mainstream media. I was always very active as an AIDS activist and in the Reproductive Justice field and also had a love for hip hop. My business partner, Lah Tere was also very passionate and we thought we would join forces and create a one time community event to increase awareness of HIV/AIDS in communities of color in New York City, and use hip hop as a vehicle to spread our message since hip hop was started in the South Bronx, (Fordham is in the Bronx!), and reclaim space for women in the field of hip hop and the arts.

 

Our first event in February 2008, we had over 500 people attend (we thought only 75 people were going to attend originally!). From 2009 until today we’ve been at the Hostos Center for Arts & Culture in the Bronx where we have been able to achieve attendance levels of over 1000 people every year. We are going into our 6th year, and we have conducted many college tours and workshops, and were even featured in an episode of MTV’s MADE this summer.

 

 

September 2012

Juliet Knuth

CITYterm, Fall 2007
Hotchkiss School, 2009
Pratt Institute, 2013

Juliet Knuth's first solo art show, Yummy, is open until October 3rd in Bed Stuy. Check out what she's been up to since CITYterm!

Following my semester at Cityterm in Fall of 2007 and graduating from the Hotchkiss School in 2009, I decided to return to the city, for which my love has never faded. I enrolled as a painting major at Pratt Institute of Brooklyn where I will be graduating from this spring. Since living in the city I have sung in open mics, traveled to several new states, become a martial arts student in both Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Muy Thai Kickboxing, picked up the hobby of hula hooping, and befriended more fascinating artists than I could ever have dreamt of meeting back home. But while attending art school and meeting the people here has certainly been a huge inspiration, nothing about living in New York has influenced my artwork more than my unglamorous job title as a waitress in the city’s restaurant industry. In order to afford school, I currently spend more hours a week taking people’s orders, running their food and drinks and watching them eat than I spend in class or in my studio. It is no surprise then, that the subject of food and people’s relationship to it has sparked my most recent series of oil paintings: all portraits of women involving food.

Food and eating are of particular fascination to me in that the impressions eating can give a viewer are incredibly varied. The act of consuming something can be all at once primitive and sophisticated, sexual and repulsive, appetizing and nauseating. Throw a beautiful woman into the mix (most of whom, in this case, are fellow women who work in the industry with me) and immediately the works become wrack with bizarre and sexual associations. The paintings in my current series depict friends eating and drinking anything from pop tarts, to chicken wings, to avocados, pizza and tea. 

This current series is now in my first solo show “Yummy”, hanging quite appropriately at Bed Stuy’s Project Parlor, one of my favorite bars in the neighborhood. It is located at 742 Myrtle Avenue, blocks away from my own apartment, and is frequented by many of the very same people I have depicted in these paintings, including bartender and graduated MFA Pratt Printmaker Leah Matthews, who’s 8 foot portrait holding a tray of cupcakes stands right next to the entrance of the establishment. The shows opening reception on September 6th was a night of music, drinks, friends and fun, and garnered a great response from local viewers. For anyone who wants to enjoy a drink and discuss the eyes of hungry women with other fascinating local artists, “Yummy” will remain on the walls of the bar until October 3rd.

 

 

August 2012

Tess Brustein

CITYterm, Fall 2003
National Cathedral School, 2005
Barnard College, 2009

Read about how Tess has transferred her experience as an elementary school teacher into the startup of the educational connections site, SmarterCookie.

I taught elementary school in Brownsville, Brooklyn for three years after college. Most days I would come home from work and rehash all the issues I had with my school to my roommate, Mike, who was a strategy consultant at the time. He said, “I think we can fix some of these problems.” I said, “Really?” And that was how it all began.

Teaching is really hard. In my first year especially, but even in my next two years, I struggled to manage behavior, differentiate learning for my students, and juggle all the things a teacher is expected to do on a daily basis. But I desperately wanted to become a better teacher for my own sanity and especially for my 28 students who were relying on me. I needed support, but the options at hand weren’t that great: traditional professional development was one-size fits all, and administrator observations could be scary and didn’t happen often enough. What helped me the most was advice I got from other teachers at my school. But how could I leverage their support when we all squeezed out every second of the school day for teaching or preparing for the next lesson (or talking to parents or checking homework or…)?

Mike and I are solving my problem, which happens to be the problem of lots of teachers everywhere. We’ve started a company called SmarterCookie. It’s a website that makes it easy for teachers to share best practices using video. Teachers record video of a lesson, upload it directly to the site, and invite other teachers to view the videos and provide meaningful feedback. It allows teachers to get more help more often from people they trust.

However, Mike and I have never started a company before, so we applied to (and were accepted to) a program called Imagine K12, which is an incubator that invests in education technology companies and helps them get off the ground. We moved from Brooklyn out to Silicon Valley in California to get the advice and guidance we needed. We are currently in the second month of the incubator and it is a whirlwind of ups and downs. I feel like a little kid again learning so many new things everyday. Actually, to quote David Dunbar, I don’t even know what I don’t know yet. I have no idea where I’ll be or what our product will be in a year. Although this is a little scary and sometimes makes me uncomfortable, above all it is overwhelmingly exciting.
 

Update (12/17/12): Tess has been named by Forbes as a Top 30 Under 30 in Education!