Where are they now? 

Debo is a partner in the Government and Regulatory Litigation Group, focuses his practice on a range of matters at the intersection of law, business and government policy. He has significant experience in commercial, government-facing and appellate litigation, as well as strategic counseling in high-stakes cases, anti-discrimination matters and investigations. His work includes leading civil rights audits or workplace reviews and equity audits for corporate clients includes advising top management and boards in the wake of high-profile allegations of specific misconduct, shareholder proposals or demands. Mr. Adegbile also advises clients in connection with congressional inquiries and testimony and has himself testified before congressional committees on multiple occasions. In addition, he currently serves as a commissioner on the US Commission on Civil Rights, appointed by President Obama in 2016. His broad legal experience draws upon years of practice in the law firm, government and not-for-profit sectors, including senior roles with the Senate Judiciary Committee and in the leadership of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), Inc.

Daniel is a political scientist, organizer, and writer. He holds a doctorate in Politics and a Masters in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is currently the Co-Executive Director of Make the Road Action and the Director of Politics and Strategic Communications at Make the Road New York (MRNY). He was previously MRNY's Director of Civic Engagement and Research and the Coordinator of the Long Island Civic Engagement Table. Daniel’s academic research focused on civic and political participation and civil society in Honduras and Guatemala. He published The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala (2013, Palgrave-MacMillan) with Javier Corrales, as well as other academic articles. He has recently held positions as a Visiting Scholar at the Milano School of International Affairs, Management, and Public Policy at the New School for Public Engagement (2013-14) and Copeland Fellow at Amherst College (2010-11), where he continued with academic and journalistic writing. Daniel's journalistic work has focused on Central American politics and US immigration politics, and he has recently been published in such venues as The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, Americas Quarterly, CNN, Foreign Policy, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Dissent.

Kim Conroy’s practice focuses on high-stakes complex civil litigation and investigations. Kim represents numerous investment firms and hedge funds, financial institutions, corporations and individuals in a wide range of disputes, including securities, fraud and business matters, with extensive experience handling large complex disputes in state and federal civil and bankruptcy courts at the trial and appellate levels, as well as in arbitrations. She also has extensive experience handling electronic discovery disputes and overseeing e-discovery requirements, both domestic and abroad. Kim has been recognized as a Notable Hispanic Leader and Executive by Crain’s New York Business, a Top Latino Lawyer by Latino Leaders Magazine and a Rising Star by Super Lawyers in the areas of Securities Litigation, Civil Litigation and Business Litigation. Additionally, Kim is committed to public service. She serves on the Board of Directors for Directions For Our Youth, a Bronx-based non-profit organization that provides quality out-of-school and in-school programming for young people in underserved areas of New York City. She was also instrumental in organizing a Latin Dance Party fundraiser at The Copacabana in Manhattan, raising significant funds for Puerto Ricans in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria, in coordination with the Hispanic National Bar Association - Region II, Long Island Hispanic Bar Association, Latino Lawyers’ Association of Queens County and Dominican Bar Association.

Katy Chevigny is an award-winning filmmaker and co-founder of Big Mouth Productions. She has produced and/or directed over a dozen documentary features. Most recently, she produced the Netflix Original documentaries BECOMING, about former First Lady Michelle Obama which was nominated for four Primetime Emmy® awards, and DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (dir. Kirsten Johnson) which premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and won the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Non-fiction Storytelling, was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and later earned a Primetime Emmy®. Katy also produced DARK MONEY (dir. Kimberly Reed), which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and CHARM CITY, which premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Both DARK MONEY and CHARM CITY were shortlisted for the 2019 Academy Awards® - Best Documentary Feature. Katy also co-directed (with Ross Kauffman) the documentary E-TEAM, which premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, won several festival awards around the world, was nominated for two Emmy® Awards and was acquired as a Netflix Original. She also directed one of the storylines in Kartemquin Films’ documentary series HARD EARNED — winner of a 2016 Alfred I. DuPont Award. Previously, Katy directed ELECTION DAY which premiered at SXSW and was broadcast on POV in 2008. She also co-directed (with Kirsten Jonson) DEADLINE, which premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, won the Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award, and, in an unusual acquisition, was broadcast as a primetime special on NBC. Her work has won multiple awards, been shown on networks including Netflix, PBS, NBC, HBO, Netflix, Arte/ZDF and has played in theaters and at festivals around the world. In 2018, Katy (together with Marilyn Ness and Big Mouth Productions) was honored with the Sundance Institute / Amazon Studios Producers Award.

Robin Takao D’Oench is a writer, director, producer from New York City. He holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His short film Tadaima won Best Short at the 2015 Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival and the 2016 Social Justice Film Festival. His latest work, Here Comes Frieda, was an Official Selection at the 2020 HollyShorts and Boston Science Fiction Film Festival and was acquired and distributed by Gunpowder & Sky. He lives in Los Angeles.

Lee is a lawyer at the ACLU’s national office in New York. He is widely recognized as one of the country’s leading public interest lawyers and has argued dozens of important civil rights cases during his career, including in the U.S. Supreme Court and virtually every federal court of appeals in the country. He has also testified as a legal expert before both houses of Congress. His recent work is featured in the documentary “The Fight.” In addition to his work at the ACLU, he is an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, and for several years was a visiting professor at Yale Law School. During the past four years, he has argued some of the country’s highest profile cases, including: A national class-action challenge to the Trump administration’s unprecedented practice of separating immigrant families at the border. In 2018, a federal court issued an injunction in Ms. L. v. ICE holding the practice unconstitutional and requiring the administration to reunite the thousands of separated families, which included babies and toddlers. Lee’s work on this case is featured in the 2020 documentary film “The Fight” and in a July 2018 New York Times Magazine cover story about the ACLU.

Karima started Senegal’s first cultural and educational hub for children, called Ker ImagiNation Afrika. Born to a Senegalese mother in the US, Karima Grant returned to Senegal to work as a teacher and was shocked by the gap she saw between what children were learning at school and what they needed to know in the 21st century. This prompted her to start Ker ImagiNation Afrika which is part of ImagiNation Afrika, the non-profit organization she founded in 2005. Her vision is focused on children's creative confidence and leadership skills, with the ultimate goal of developing tomorrow’s young change makers. The Ker ImagiNation Afrika hub is a physical site in Dakar that offers play spaces and activities for children between six months and 12 years. Facilitators help children and inspire them to find practical solutions together in innovative ways.

Adam started the volunteer project that would become Rocking the Boat in 1995 during a semester off from Vassar College. Influenced by his experience teaching kids about the Hudson River aboard the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, he developed a program that used the process of building and using wooden boats as a way to educate and empower young people from underserved communities. He has received numerous awards and accolades for Rocking the Boat, including an Echoing Green Fellowship, a Union Square Award for grassroots organizing, a Manhattan Institute Social Entrepreneurship Award, and in 2014 was named one of 25 international CNN Heroes.

Marika is a cellist, singer, a storyteller on The Moth. She grew up in a musical family – Marika’s grandfather was the great cellist Emanuel Feuermann, and her parents owned a jazz club, Burgundy, on the Upper West Side. As children, she and her younger brother were both regulars on Sesame Street, and attended the beloved Manhattan Country School. Marika continued her education in the double degree program at Barnard College and the Juilliard School, graduating with BAs in political science and cello performance, respectively. Marika has worked with Whitney Houston, Lou Reed, Anthony Braxton, David Byrne, Adele, Henry Threadgill, D’Angelo, Idina Menzel, Nels Cline, Somi and Taylor Mac, among many others. She was a founding member of the Bay Area-based bands 2 Foot Yard (Two Foot Yard, Tzadik 2003 & Borrowed Arms, Yard Work, 2008) and Red Pocket (Thick, Tzadik 2004). She is a master teacher and director for Young Arts and a teaching-artist at Carnegie Hall’s Lullaby Project. Marika currently holds the cello chair at the Broadway show, Hadestown. Marika has self-released three albums: The Simplest Thing (2011), Afterlife Music Radio (2011) and New York Nostalgia (2016). She happily leads her bands Bottom Heavy and The New String Quartet and is the co-founder and co-director of Looking Glass Arts, an artist residency and youth education program in upstate New York. With a commitment to a sliding scale fee structure, LGA is democratizing access to the space, time and natural beauty critical to artistic and educational growth. Marika lives in the countryside of Kings County.

Sophia currently serves as the Senior Director of Education, Career and Enrichment services at CASES in NYC where she develops and supports programming for youth and young adults impacted by the criminal legal system. Sophia holds a B.A. from SUNY Albany and an M.S.Ed. in Community-Based Learning from Bank Street College of Education. "Many of our youth have had a history of truancy and are over aged and under credited. This leads to a less traditional education path which can be difficult to navigate. The bureaucracy of the Department of Education can make this even more difficult and frustrating. This is where we can step in to support and advocate for the best education plan for our youth. I am a native New Yorker but did not go to public school, so public school systems were very new to me. I spent the first two years at CASES learning about the Department of Education, its inequities and bureaucracy and opportunities, and how to navigate it with our young people and their families. We have a team of teachers each serving 12-20 students. They have to build relationships with those young people outside of the classroom–the outside-the-classroom piece is what builds the relationship you can leverage in the classroom. These relationships can be fostered in more casual contexts, such as during lunch time, after class, or a recreational trip. However, the bulk of our relationship building is solidified in the classroom. Our teachers allow students to have a voice in the content in many of our lessons. This is not something many of our students are used to. Our goal is to have education look and feel different enough from what they are used so they can start to develop a positive association with learning.

In 2001, Steven joined New York Theatre Ballet (NYTB) as an apprentice and in 2006 was promoted to Principal. While there he performed leading roles in choreographies by Fredrick Ashton, George Balanchine, John Butler, Agnes DeMille, Donald Mahler, Antony Tudor, and others. In 2004, while dancing with New York Theatre Ballet, he graduated from the American Ballet Theater Studio Company Associate Program. For the 2006 season, Melendez was invited to Buenos Aires as a Guest Soloist to perform with Ballet Concierto, directed by Inaki Urlezaga. His repertory there included Carmen (Alonso), Don Quixote (Baryshnikov), Symphonic Variations (Ashton) and Borodin (Ariaz). While performing with Ballet Concierto, Melendez traveled extensively performing in international ballet galas and festivals in Argentina, New Zealand, Thailand, Venezuela, Ecuador, Estonia, Spain, and Italy. In 2007, Melendez joined the Vanemuine Theater Ballet Company in Tartu, Estonia as a principal dancer. With the Vanemuine Theater he has performed principal roles in Onegin (Medvedjev), The Nutcracker (Isberg), Giselle (Feco) and Peter Pan (Titova), the leading male role in Par Isberg’s Uinuv Kaunitar (Sleeping Beauty) as well as the title role in Ruslan Stepanov’s Kevade. In 2008, Melendez received a Diploma from the 5th Rudolf Nureyev International Ballet Competition in Budapest, Hungary. He also received special recognition from head jurist Maya Plisetskya for his second-round performance of Onegin. Afterwards, he was invited to perform in the gala entitled Celebrating the Classical Male Dancer and later represented Estonia at the 13th International Baltic Ballet Festival in Riga, Latvia. Melendez returned to New York City in March 2010 for New York Theatre Ballet’s Signature 10 series as a Principal Guest Artist performing José Limon’s Mazurkas and rejoined the company full-time for the following season. In 2011, Melendez worked with British choreographer Sir Richard Alston to create his new work A Rugged Flourish and performed Limon’s The Moor’s Pavane for NYTB’s Signatures 12. Melendez is a Van-Lier Fellowship recipient and was a 2012 Clive Barnes Foundation Award Nominee. In 2015, Melendez celebrated his 15th season with New York Theatre Ballet performing world premieres in works by Pam Tanowitz and Nicolo Fonte, and U.S. premieres of Alston’s Such Longing and Light Flooding into Darkened Rooms. He was a frequent guest artist at the Teatro Nacional de Costa Rica and Ballet Palm Beach. Melendez co-choreographed his first large-scale work, Song Before Spring, for New York Theatre Ballet which was named a Dance Europe critic’s choice “Best Premiere” of 2016. Melendez has served as a faculty member of Ballet School New York and the Joffrey Ballet School Summer Program in New York City and has held an annual summer workshop in Nagoya, Japan for over 10 years. Since 2018 Melendez has been a member of the alumni advisory committee on diversity and inclusion for School of American Ballet, the official school of New York City Ballet. From 2019, he was the Hiland Artistic Director for National Dance Institute New Mexico where he created Vastness, a socially distanced dance film for a global pandemic, which aired on New Mexico PBS. He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, LIFT, directed by Academy Award nominated filmmaker David Petersen, with Executive Producers Sam Pollard and Jannat Gargi. LIFT premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Festival where it received a 2nd place Audience Award and it has been nominated for the 2022 Children’s Resilience in Film Award at Shine Global. In May 2022, Melendez was named Artistic Director of New York Theatre Ballet. According to Steven, "I was lucky to have had the opportunities I had when I was growing up - in large part because of the supportive community at MCS who never looked at this Puerto Rican boy from the south Bronx going to ballet classes everyday with a second thought!"

John Schwartz sold his first novel, Bicycle Days (1989), a coming of age story about an American in Japan, which went on to become a critically acclaimed bestseller soon after graduating from Harvard (where he majored in Japanese studies). Reservation Road (1998), his second novel about a family tragedy and its aftermath, was also critically acclaimed and a bestseller, and in 2007 was made into a major motion picture based on his screenplay. John went on to publish The Commoner (2008), a novel inspired by the lives of the empress and crown princess of Japan, which won Schwartz the best reviews and sales of his career. In Northwest Corner (2011) John picked up the lives of some of his characters from Reservation Road a dozen years later, exploring the generational impact of violence and grief on two American families. The Red Daughter (2019) was inspired by the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. Johns’s work has been translated into more than 20 languages. He is a recipient of a 1991 Lyndhurst Prize for mastery in the art of fiction, and his journalism has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and Vogue, and numerous essays of his have been anthologized. In 2018, John was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing for his work as a screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer. Schwartz taught fiction writing at Harvard, The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Sarah Lawrence College. He is the longtime Literary Director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and the host and co-producer of the literary podcast Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and Salisbury, CT with his wife, screenwriter and food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano, and their son Garrick.

Gisele Shorter leads the national School and System Redesign Portfolio and supports K-12 policy efforts at the Raikes Foundation. The heartbeat of her K-12 portfolio is the Building Equitable Learning Environments (BELE) Network. Over the past 15 years, Gisele has led large-scale and community-based programmatic, research and policy initiatives to advance justice and equity, close health disparities, and ensure access and opportunities for BIPOC youth to excel. Her work is rooted in a deep belief that an equitable society starts with an equitable education system. Dr. Shorter earned her Ed.D. in health education from Columbia University Teachers College. She holds an M.P.A. from Long Island University and a B.A. from Amherst College. She is a Pahara-Aspen Education Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Since becoming the director of Miami's Jorge M. Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) in October of 2015, Franklin Sirmans has exponentially grown the museum’s endowment, making PAMM an international destination as well as the de facto hub for Caribbean and Latinx diaspora contemporary art studies. Helping to hone the collection’s mission and expand its fiscal support network and its strategic grassroots collaborations, Sirmans has unified a city of competing interests into one community. This is no easy task in an era when museums and cultural nonprofits face their most acute inflection point in recent history, due to the public’s renewed pledge to see collections decolonized, staff unionized, board systems interrogated, and sustainability and accessibility taken seriously. But Sirmans, who during his illustrious career has been a critic, editor, scholar, and curator—including at The Menil Collection in Houston and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)—is someone who can thoughtfully see all sides. As the artist Teresita Fernández, who has exhibited at PAMM, explains, “Franklin understands that museums are about people, and that visual culture and social change are inextricably linked. His authentic relationships with artists internationally are a testament to how true museum leadership is built on meaningful connections that inspire trust."

Sasha is a founding co-director of Bronx Community Charter School (BxC). He has been an educator in public schools in the North Central Bronx for over 20 years. He spent his entire teaching career at P.S. 51/The Bronx New School before co-founding Bronx Community Charter School. Sasha has maintained a strong connection to MCS through his school: BxC staff spend their annual retreats at the MCS Farm every summer and BxC fourth graders go on annual trips to the MCS Farm every fall. Sasha earned a B.A. in government from Wesleyan University and an M.S. in Elementary Education and an M.S. in Leadership for Social Change from Bank Street College of Education.