Alumni Profiles & Trailblazers
Alumni Profiles
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Alex Ambrose '94
Curating the sound of a new generationRead MoreJiwon Simpkins - Class of 2019Culture Editor of the Grace Gazette
In the age of high-speed internet streaming, popular music is determined by the choices the listeners make. Songs and artists can become instantly popular across the globe, which allows us, the consumer, to shape our own mainstream.
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Rebecca Naomi Jones '95
Read MoreActress, singer, performer
Paper magazine said that Rebecca Naomi Jones was "the girl to call when there's a cooler-than-thou musical in town." Looking at her appearances in some of the hottest rock musicals around, including "Murder Ballad," "Passing Strange," Green Day's "American Idiot," and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” the fact seems hard to deny.
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Claude Kelly '95
Read MoreThree-time Grammy NomineeClaude Kelly ’95 has three Grammy nominations under his belt and has written hits for a host of pop stars including Miley Cyrus, Bruno Mars, Britney Spears, Jessie J, Kelly Clarkson and Adam Lambert. Music legends Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson have recorded his songs.
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Valerie Paley '75
Read MoreHistorian
Valerie Paley ’75, makes history with her work at the New York Historical Society, which reopened in November. GCS caught up with Valerie to discuss her journey from ballet dancer to graphic designer to a doctorate in history, and her work on these new exhibitions.
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Emi Knafo '96
Read MoreZoological Veterinarian
Surgery on a goldfish (it needed bladder repair). Mending the wing of a great blue heron (humeral osteotomy). Dental exams and pregnancy checks on endangered zebras. Sterilizing Galapagos tortoises to help restore a delicate ecosystem on Pinta Island. Monitoring the health of Cape buffalo and wildebeests in South Africa. Any of these are all in a day’s work for Emi Knafo ’96.
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Lloyd Wesley Perkins '43
Read MoreA View from Bikini Atoll, 1946Jason McDonald, HistoryAt the beginning of the atomic age, the United States Navy was anxious to show that naval warfare still had relevance. Desperate to prove that their ships could survive atomic attack, the U.S. armed forces gathered a fleet that included obsolete battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, submarines, surrendered German and Japanese warships and numerous auxiliary and amphibious vessels, to use as targets for nuclear explosions at Bikini Atoll, 2,500 miles south-southwest of Pearl Harbor, in July 1946.
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Andy Bragen '85 and Charles Linehan '85
Read MoreClass of '85 Double FeatureOld friends Andy Bragen and Charlie Linehan, whose lives have gone in very different directions since they were classmates at Grace, remain lifelong friends. The two men, a playwright and an attorney, sat down to interview each other for GCS News.
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Eva Chen '93
by Caitlin Leffel '94Read More
Creative Director, BeachMint's Lucky Group
Eva Chen has been called the first editor-in-chief of her generation. In 2013, Anna Wintour, Condé Nast's artistic director and the editor-in-chief of Vogue, tapped her to take over as editor-in-chief of Lucky, the publisher's fourteen-year-old shopping magazine.
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Abigail Kamen Holland ‘81
Reinventing a School LibraryRead More
A guide to using the Internet that was published in 1997…a book on how to drive, written for a British audience…a spelling primer from the 1920s. What do these books have in common? Not much, except they were all found on the dusty shelves of the library at Park East High School, where I spent last year as an intern as part of my training to become a school librarian.
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Kit Rachlis '65
Editor in Chief, Los Angeles MagazineRead More
As adults, we think back to our school years and remember teachers who made a difference; a course of study that made a significant impact on what we decided to do with our lives. When Kit Rachlis, editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Magazine, looks back, it was a GCS teacher who nurtured his talent for writing and daily chancery services that fueled it.
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Alex Boghosian '03
From Grace to Antarctica: The Journey of a Female ScientistRead MoreKatie Hoffman - Class of 2017Editor-in-Chief of the Grace Gazette
You never know where you will end up when you start at Grace. The possibilities are endless. Take for example, Alexandra Boghosian. From a young age, Alex’s mind was filled with intellectual questions, yet she never imagined becoming a female scientist. She was interested in the arts and math; she even thought would grow up to be an architect. She never dreamed that her quest to find answers would lead her across the world to join a research team in Antarctica.
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Katie Orlinsky '97
Photojournalist/CinematographerRead MoreAt 32, Katie Orlinsky has found her stride: she regularly works for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, La Monde, and a variety of international magazines and non-profit organizations such as Too Young to Wed, an organization and campaign to end child marriage around the world.
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Hale Bradt '45
Read MoreProfessor Emeritus, M.I.T.I attended Grace Church School for two years in the middle of World War II. My mother, my sister, and I were in NYC because of the war. I was born in Washington State where my Dad was a Professor of chemistry.
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Charles Best '90
In 1999, Charles Best ’90 was a history and English teacher at Wings Academy, a public high school in the Bronx. Frustrated that simple learning materials were often missing from classrooms, and thinking that people would be probably be willing to give small amounts directly to particular classroom projects if they knew about them, Charles set out to find a way to make that connection.Read More
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Vivian Rosenthal ’90
Tech EntrepenuerRead MoreVivian Rosenthal is a marketing whiz with a master’s degree in architecture. She founded Tronic Studio with a classmate from Columbia and spent 10 years creating edgy, large-scale interactive installations, CGI (computer generated imagery) and live action short films, web virals and animated ads for a host of clients including Yahoo, Target, Sharp and HP.
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Grace Church School is a co-educational independent school in downtown Manhattan, New York City providing instruction for over 700 students in Junior Kindergarten through Grade 12.
