2021-2022 Year in Review

Jack Antonoff, a five-time Grammy® Award-winning artist, songwriter, musician, producer and the creative force behind the band Bleachers, joined the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as an artist-in-residence for the 2021-2022 academic year. NYU  joined a new, National Science Foundation-supported center that will develop the next generation of data-driven, physics-based climate models, with the larger aim of providing actionable information for societies to adapt to climate change and to protect vulnerable populations. Nicole R. Fleetwood, a professor in NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Victor J. Torres, a professor in NYU Grossman School of Medicine, were  named MacArthur Fellows by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Alumnus Daniel Lind-Ramos joined Fleetwood and Torres as a MacArthur Fellow for the Class of 2021.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a two-year grant to a project directed by NYU  and New Zealand’s University of Waikato to protect cultural knowledge and data of Native American, Māori, and other First Nations communities. A collaborative effort between the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and NYU , received $11.6 million in funding from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities to develop the Rutgers-NYU Center for Asian Health Promotion and Equity. Rosanne Cash, the Grammy-winning songwriter, performer, recording artist, author, curator, and intellectual property advocate, joined the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development as the 2021-22 NYU/Americana Artist-in-Residence—the first artist residency,Singer, songwriter, award-winning poet, and educator Jamila Woods joined the Clive Davis Institute as an artist-in-residence for the 2021-2022 academic year. . The Grey Art Gallery, New York University’s widely admired fine arts museum, announced a major gift from Dr. James Cottrell and Mr. Joseph Lovett, longtime art patrons, social activists, and downtown Manhattan residents. The gift includes over 200 artworks from their extensive collection of downtown New York artists from the past 50 years.  NYU Steinhardt announced three Scholars-in-Residence for the 2021-2022 academic year: Kaya Henderson, CEO of Reconstruction and the former chancellor of DC public schools; Danielle Nierenberg, co-founder of the nonprofit Food Tank; and visual and performance artist Julie Tolentino. Henderson, Nierenberg, and Tolentino joined Steinhardt’s departments of administration, leadership, and technology; nutrition and food studies, and art and art professions, respectively.

Katie Vinten, senior vice president of A&R at Columbia Records and CEO of Black Diamond Artist Management, became  the Clive Davis Institute’s Executive-in-Residence. NYU  College of Dentistry received a significant grant from United Concordia Dental Charitable Fund in support of its Veterans Oral Care Access Resource (VOCARE). Twenty-four NYU  professors were named  among the world’s most-cited researchers on the  Clarivate Analytics’ 2021 Highly Cited Researchers list. An international team of scientists from NYU, the University of the Witwatersrand, and 15 other institutions announced, in the open access journal e-Life, the discovery of two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative. The University of Sydney and NYU  signed a partnership agreement that will give their students the opportunity to study together, take course offerings from both universities’ curricula, and participate in a reciprocal student exchange program. 

Callie Holley (Tisch ‘22) was  selected as a 2022 Marshall Scholar, which provides financial support to outstanding American scholars to pursue graduate study in the United Kingdom in any subject at the academic institution of their choice. NYU Tisch received a major gift from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation to establish the Martin Scorsese Institute of Global Cinematic Arts, an academic and production institute that  will encompass the new, state-of-the-art Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center, the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies, and support for student scholarships. 

Michael A. Lindsey—a leading scholar of poverty, inequality, and child and adolescent mental health; the Constance and Martin Silver Professor of Poverty Studies at NYU; and executive director of NYU’s McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research—was named dean of NYU’s Silver School of Social Work, effective July 1, 2022. The U.S. Army, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture,  awarded researchers at NYU College of Dentistry funding to implement an evidence-based program to assess and respond to incidents of family maltreatment in the military. NYU announced that applications for the Class of 2026 exceed 105,000—a 5% increase over the historic numbers from last year, when NYU surpassed 100,000 for the first time, and among the highest number of applications received by any US university. NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, one of the nation’s leading institutions for international contemporary performance and artistic research, received three grant awards totaling $45,000 from the New York State Council on the Arts  to support the recovery of the nonprofit arts and culture sector. 

President Andrew Hamilton delivered remarks to the University Senate and the University community about the war in Ukraine. Jonathan Niles-Weed, an assistant professor in NYU’s  Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Center for Data Science, was awarded a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

C. Debra M. Furr-Holden—Michigan State University C.S. Mott Endowed Professor of Public Health, associate dean for Public Health Integration, and the director of the NIH-funded Flint Center for Health Equity Solutions at MSU’s College of Human Medicine—was named dean of NYU’s School of Global Public Health, effective July 1, 2022. Four NYU research teams—in nursing, chemistry, and public health—were chosen to compete in STAT Madness 2022, a virtual tournament of the best innovations in health and science inspired by college basketball’s March Madness. President Hamilton and Board of Trustees Chairman William Berkley announced a historic “double header” Commencement at Yankee Stadium to celebrate the Classes of 2020, 2021, and 2022, with speakers and honorary degree recipients Taylor Swift and Judith Heumann. The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU  and National Sawdust  announced six new Toulmin Fellows to be supported by a grant from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation to foster collaboration between women composers and choreographers. Dan Mulhall, ambassador of Ireland to the United States,  was chosen to become Global Distinguished Professor in Irish Studies at NYU  in September. Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, was  named Seryl Kushner Dean of NYU’s College of Arts & Science (CAS), effective September 1, 2022..

NYU President Andrew Hamilton and Provost Katherine Fleming announced the appointment of Victoria Rosner as the dean of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study, effective July 15, 2022. The Fusion Film Festival—NYU Tisch’s ’ premier student film festival celebrating women and non-binary creators in film, TV, and new media—named Zola director  Janicza Bravo “Woman of the Year” for 2022. NYU Tisch’s  Purple List shared its  annual selection of the best production-ready screenplays from Tisch  graduate film students and recent alumni. Three NYU  professors were  awarded 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships. The  180 recipients were chosen from nearly 2,500 applicants. This year’s NYU Guggenheim Fellows are: Lorie Novak, professor in NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Department of Photography and Imaging, Terike Haapoja, adjunct instructor in NYU Steinhardt’s Department of Art and Art Professions and adjunct professor in NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, and Ishmael Houston-Jones, adjunct instructor in NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Drama program. NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named Astha Rajvanshi, a journalist who writes about human rights and marginalized communities, the winner of its eighth Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. Rajvanshi will use the grant to pursue a story about environmental justice and indigenous rights in India. Troy McKenzie—the Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law, faculty co-director of the NYU Law Institute of Judicial Administration, and faculty co-director of the NYU Law Center on Civil Justice—was named the new Dean of the NYU School of Law, effective June 1, 2022.

The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, an international research institute for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences, announced the four fellows for the 2022-2023 academic year. The fellows include Anurima Banerji, Hope Boykin, Brooke Holmes, and Kara Yoo Leaman. Dental students at NYU College of Dentistry became the first in the U.S. to perform dental implant surgery using state-of-the-art robotic technology. Four NYU faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences: Fedor A. Bogomolov and Michael J. Shelley, professors in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; sociologist Paul DiMaggio; and Benjamin G. Neel, director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health. New York University historians Nicole Eustace and Ada Ferrer were jointly awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for their respective works—Eustace’s “Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America” and Ferrer’s “Cuba: An American History”. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) elected eight New York University faculty as fellows: Cristina M. Alberini, a professor in the Center for Neural Science; Richard R.W. Brooks, a professor in the School of Law; Oskar Eustis, a professor in the Tisch School of the Arts; Sherry Glied, dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service; Robert I. Grossman, chief executive officer of NYU Langone Health and dean of NYU Grossman School of Medicine; Fred Moten, a professor in the Tisch School of the Arts; author Salman Rushdie, a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Carter Journalism Institute; and Bambi B. Schieffelin, professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology.