Sarah Lawrence College

Julianna Luisa Margulies is an American actress and producer. After several small television roles, Margulies achieved success in her regular role... as Nurse Carol Hathaway on NBC's long-running medical drama ER, for which she won an Emmy Award. After her departure from ER in 2000, Margulies appeared in the 2001 miniseries The Mists of Avalon and voiced the female Iguanodon, Neera, in Disney's CGI film Dinosaur . In 2009, she took the lead role of Alicia Florrick in the American legal drama The Good Wife on CBS, for which she has won a Golden Globe, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and the 2011 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. She holds the record for winning more Screen Actors Guild Awards than any other individual. She won six times for her work on ER, and twice for her performance on The Good Wife. Margulies, the youngest of three daughters, was born in Spring Valley, New York. Her mother, Francesca , was a ballet dancer and eurythmy teacher, and her father, Paul Margulies, was a writer.
more

Jeffrey Jacob "J. J." Abrams is an American film and television producer, screenwriter, director, actor, and composer, best known for his work in... the genres of action, drama, and science fiction. He wrote and produced feature films before co-creating the television series Felicity . He also created Alias and co-created Lost , Fringe , Undercovers and produced the television series Person of Interest and Alcatraz . Abrams directed the films Mission: Impossible III , Star Trek , and Super 8 , and produced the films Cloverfield , Morning Glory and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol . Many of his films he directed/produced are by Paramount, while many of his television series were co-produced by Warner Bros. Abrams was born in New York City and raised in Los Angeles, where he attended Palisades Charter High School. He is the son of television producer Gerald W. Abrams and executive producer Carol Abrams. Abrams is Jewish, and attended Sarah Lawrence College.
more

Dalia Sofer is an Iranian-born American writer. Born in Tehran, Iran was raised in a Jewish family during revolutionary Iran, she eventually moved... to New York City when she was 11. She attended the Lycée Français de New York, and went on to study French Literature at NYU with a minor in creative writing. She received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her first novel, The Septembers of Shiraz, was published in 2007, to critical acclaim.
more

Yoko Ono is a Japanese artist, musician, author and peace activist, known for her work in avant-garde art, music and filmmaking as well as her... marriage to John Lennon. Ono brought feminism to the forefront in her music which prefigured New Wave music and is known for her philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace and AIDS outreach programs. Yoko Ono was born in 1933 to mother Isoko Ono, the great-granddaughter of Zenjiro Yasuda of the Yasuda banking family, and to father Yeisuke Ono, a banker and one-time classical pianist who was a descendant of an Emperor of Japan. The name "Yoko" means "ocean child". Two weeks before she was born, her father was transferred to San Francisco by his employer, the Yokohama Specie Bank. The rest of the family followed soon after and Yoko met her father when she was two. Her younger brother Keisuke was born in December 1936. In 1937, her father was transferred back to Japan and Ono was enrolled at Tokyo's Gakushuin , one of the most exclusive schools in Japan.
more

Lawrence Weschler is an author of works of creative nonfiction. A graduate of Cowell College of the University of California, Santa Cruz , Weschler... was for over twenty years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Awards—for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992—and was also a recipient of Lannan Literary Award . Beginning in 1999, his "Convergences" essays appeared regularly in McSweeney's Quarterly; a collection of these essays, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, was published in 2006 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Since 2001, Weschler has been the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. He taught throughout the 1990s at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. In 2003, Weschler organized and edited a pilot issue of Omnivore, a prospective periodical described by Steven Heller as a "biannual magazine of writing and visual culture from The New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University.
more

Valerie Martin is an American novelist and short story writer. She has also taught at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University New Orleans, The... University of New Orleans, The University of Alabama, and Sarah Lawrence College, among other institutions. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has one child, Adrienne, born in 1975. Her novel Property won the prestigious Orange Prize. Her other fictional works include Set in Motion , Alexandra , A Recent Martyr , The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories , The Great Divorce , Italian Fever , The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories , and Trespass , as well as Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis , a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Her most recent novel, The Confessions of Edward Day, was published in August 2009. Her 1990 novel, Mary Reilly, a retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of a servant in the doctor's house, was released in 1996 as the Columbia TriStar Pictures film, Mary Reilly.
more