Paul Pfeifer
Paul Pfeifer is a contemporary artist whose work explores themes of celebrity culture, mass media, and the intersection of technology and humanity. Born in 1966 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Pfeifer moved to the Philippines as a child with his parents, classically trained musicians.
Chang-rae Lee
Celebrated novelist Chang-rae Lee was the first director of the Creative Writing MFA program at Hunter College, from 1999 to 2002. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Lee emigrated to the United States when he was three, and his work often explores themes of immigration, assimilation, and the modern Asian and Asian-American experience.
Elia Alba
Multidisciplinary artist Elia Alba’s book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2019), brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food, and dialogue, to examine race and culture in the United States. Alba received her BA in 1994 from Hunter College, where she completed a special honors curriculum for interdisciplinary studies and minored in studio art.
Julie Ault
Artist, curator, and writer Julie Ault earned a BA in art history and political science from Hunter College in 1995. Ault arrived in New York City from Winthrop, Maine, in 1976, after finishing her high school diploma by taking classes at the nearby University of Maine. It was in the art department on the university campus that she met and became friends with art student Tim Rollins.
Sam Feuer
Award-winning film producer, actor, writer, and director Sam Feuer got his start when he was discovered by Steven Spielberg and cast in the Oscar nominated film Munich (2005). Before arriving in Hollywood in 2002, Feuer lived in New York City and graduated from Hunter College with honors after studying theater and film.
April Hernandez Castillo
Born and raised in the Bronx, Nuyorican actor and writer April Hernandez-Castillo explored her interest and talent for acting and performing while attending Hunter College as an undergraduate student.
Margarita Cabrera
Interdisciplinary artist Margarita Cabrera graduated from Hunter’s MFA program in 2001. Her work centers on social-political community issues including cultural identity, migration, violence, inclusivity, labor, and empowerment. Cabrera often creates sculptures made out of mediums ranging from steel, copper, wood, ceramics, and fabric.
Gary Shteyngart
Critically acclaimed author Gary Shtyngart has gained international recognition for his satirical and humorous works of fiction. Born in 1972 in Leningrad, USSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), Shtyngart immigrated to the United States with his family in 1979.
Jeannette Bayardelle
Singer and actress Jeannete Bayardelle was nominated for a Tony award for Best Performance by an Actress in 2022 for her role as Mrs. Neilsen in the Conor McPherson-Bob Dylan musical Girl from North Country. Bayardelle, who is a playwright, composer, and lyricist, has many credits to her name both on and Off Broadway. Yet she had planned to be a laboratory scientist after earning a Bachelor of Science degree at Hunter College in 2002.
Edward Burns
Award winning actor, writer, and director Edward Burns is known for his nostalgic and sometimes elegiac coming of age films set in Long Island and Queens. A native New Yorker, Burns grew up in Valley Stream, Long Island. After starting his undergraduate studies at SUNY Albany, Burns moved back to the New York City area and enrolled at Hunter College to study writing and filmmaking.
Sarah Crowner
Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Crowner is recognized for her innovative large scale paintings that test the boundaries of geometric abstraction while engaging in its art historical legacy. She has been making art since the 1990s, and her paintings using a craft-oriented process of cutting and sewing the canvas to create abstract forms—along with the bodies of work that followed—have garnered her much attention.
Janice Y. K. Lee
Janice Y. K. Lee is the author of two novels, The Piano Teacher and The Expatriates. Both set in Hong Kong, the books examine love, loss, and the formation of identity in a foreign land. Born in Hong Kong to parents who were Korean immigrants, Lee moved to the United State to attend Harvard College, where she graduated with a degree in English and American Literature and Language.
Peter Carey
One of the world’s leading novelists, Peter Carey is among only five writers who have won the Booker Prize twice, first for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and then for True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. Frequently cited as Australia’s next contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the celebrated author was the director of the Hunter College Creative Writing MFA program from 2003 to 2021.
Ellie Ga
Stockholm, Sweden-based multi-disciplinary artist Ellie Ga was born and raised in New York City, and earned her MFA at Hunter College in 2004. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts that explore the limits of the human capacity to objectively document and reconstruct both personal and historical events.
Lauren Ridloff
Tony award-nominated actress and Hunter College alumna Lauren Ridloff holds the distinction of being the first Deaf superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Although performing had been a passion, it had not been her career plan. Having graduated from Hunter’s School of Education in 2005, she intended to write children’s books and teach in a classroom. Ridloff’s acting career didn’t begin until more than a decade later, when a series of small roles and a job as a sign language consultant led to an unexpected leading role on the 2018 Broadway production of Children of a Lesser God—earning her a Tony Award nomination.
Yasufumi Nakamori
An experienced museum leader, curator, and noted scholar of modern and contemporary Asian art, Yasufumi Nakamori became Museum Director and Vice President of Arts and Culture for Asia Society in 2023. He oversees the museum’s exhibition program and collection, as well as arts and culture programming across the global organization.
Julia Whitney Barnes
Artist Julia Whitney Barnes works in a variety of media from cyanotypes, watercolor, gouache, oil paintings, stained glass, murals, and site-specific installations. Born in Newbury, Vermont, Whitney Barnes spent two decades in Brooklyn, before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015. Prior to attending Hunter College she received her BFA from Parsons School of Design.
Ari Banias
Ari Banias was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Chicago area. He now lives in the Bay Area and teaches in the MFA programs at the University of San Francisco and Antioch University. He has been the Guest Editor for poetry.org’s Poem-A-Day series. As an MFA student at Hunter College, Banias was the recipient of the Friedman Scholarship, and worked with the celebrated poet Mark Doty.
Dascha Polanco
Born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, Dascha Polanco graduated from Hunter College in 2008 with a BA in Psychology. As a student at Hunter, she juggled the responsibilities of parenting and working full-time while earning her degree.
Alex Gilvarry
Alex Gilvarry is the author of two novels, From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (2012) and Eastman Was Here (2017). Born and raised in Staten Island, Gilvarry is a graduate of the MFA in creative writing program at Hunter College, and was nominated for the PEN Open Book Award for his second novel.