Featured Alumni Profiles
Click on an Alumnus/a's name to read their profile or view all our Alumni profiles. Visit us often -- we add new profiles every month.
Nai Ni Chen, Dance Education '85
Dancing Across Cultures
Leaving New York City is not the usual path ambitious dancers take to jump-start their creative careers. But then again, Nai Ni Chen has hardly traveled a traditional route to success. By the time she came to the United States in 1982 to pursue a master in education (with a major in dance) she was already known in her native Taiwan for her striking and theoretical approach to dance. But after school, she found that the roles she was auditioning for in the highly competitive New York modern dance world left her creatively unfulfilled. “I had learned a lot of Chinese traditional dance and values, and that part of me needed to come out,” Chen recalls. “I had to create my own dance style.” So she moved away from the scene, “just a little, to Fort Lee, New Jersey,” she says where it was quiet: “It was a meditation stage. I could start my company. I could go back to my roots.”
Dorothy Height, ED '33, '35, Honorary Degree '75
Civil Rights Pioneer Still Marching on Washington
The freedom gates are half ajar, we must pry them fully open.” The educator and pioneering civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune uttered these stirring words five decades ago, and those words have stayed with Dorothy Height, now 91—so much so that she decided to call her newly published memoir, Open Wide the Freedom Gates (Perseus Press/PublicAffairs).
Daniel E. Marrero, BS Studio Art - concentration Photography
Arrived at NYU Fall 2002 -Deployed for Iraq Feb. 2003 Returned to NYU Spring 2004 -ReDeployed to Iraq Aug. 2004 Consecutive Dean's List 4 Semesters Filming Documentary in Panama (Sumemr 2005 - Present) Filmed Documentary in Taiwan (Winter 2006) Honorable Mention, PHotographer's Forum Magazine (Spring 2006)
Vina Orden, B.S. '02, Communication Studies
In the summer of her sophomore year at NYU, Vina Orden (far right in photo) had an internship at the legendary publishing house of Simon & Schuster. She worked in the children's books marketing division and liked the company so much she kept in touch with her coworkers while she finished her BS in Communication Studies. When she was about to graduate in May 2002, Orden's internship boss at Simon & Schuster referred her resume to the company's human resources department. Simon and Schuster hired Vina right out of school, and today she is a marketing assistant in the company's Adult Publishing division.
Tom Rooney, B.S. English Education
I’m teaching English to freshmen and sophomores back at my old high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. When I was a student there, I floated through the halls like a ghost, dodging teachers and preferring not to participate, much like Bartelby from Melville’s short story.