Maodo Lô ’16CC, a former Columbia Lions basketball player, helped Team Germany win its first-ever gold medal at the FIBA Basketball World Cup, held this past summer in Manila. Lô, who was born and raised in Berlin, has won several national championships with German professional teams since graduating from Columbia and represented his home country at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He is currently a guard for the Italian team Olimpia Milano.
Courtney Bryan ’14GSAS, a New Orleans–based composer and pianist known for fusing jazz, classical, and religious music, received a 2023 MacArthur “genius” fellowship, an $800,000 grant for artists, researchers, and others.
Jon Hilsenrath ’96JRN, ’97BUS, an editor and writer at the Wall Street Journal, received a 2023 Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize from Columbia Journalism School for his biography of US treasury secretary Janet Yellen. John Tozzi ’17JRN, a health reporter at Bloomberg News, also received a 2023 Welles Prize, for uncovering insurance overpayments in New Jersey.
Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda presented Philadelphia resident Krista Butvydas Bard ’77GSAPP, an honorary consul general for Lithuania, with a Knight’s Cross Order of Merit medal for her efforts to strengthen international ties.
Inheritance, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art exploring the theme of legacy, includes work by Kambui Olujimi ’13SOA, a multimedia visual artist, and Chitra Ganesh ’02SOA, who creates prints inspired by South Asian iconography. The show, curated by Rujeko Hockley ’05CC, runs through February.
Actor and singer Brandon Victor Dixon ’07CC starred in the Off Broadway musical Hell’s Kitchen, which premiered at the Public Theater on October 24. The show was inspired by the life of R&B icon and former Columbia student Alicia Keys, who wrote the music and lyrics.
The American Heart Association selected Tifphani White-King ’98CC, a tax-services executive at Mazars, to spearhead New York City’s 2023–24 Go Red for Women initiative, which promotes cardiac-health awareness.
Rosemary Salomone ’76GSAS, ’84LAW, a linguist and law professor at St. John’s University, received a 2023 Premio Pavese — an Italian literary prize — for her book The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language. She is the second American to receive the award.
Christopher Zalla ’04SOA wrote and directed Radical, a 2023 film about a struggling school in a Mexican border town. The movie, which was produced by Benjamin Odell ’04SOA, hit theaters last fall after winning the Festival Favorite Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
Sculptor Bat-Ami Rivlin ’19SOA received a 2023 Socrates Annual Fellowship, which grants funding and studio space to artists creating large-scale public installations. Rivlin’s sculpture, a wheel made from recycled bathtubs, will be on view at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens until March 24.
