100 Notable alumni of Bryn Mawr College

Justine Polier was an American lawyer, the first woman Justice in New York. An outspoken activist and judge who served for 38 years on the Family Court bench.

Karin Stephen was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist.

Julia Anna Gardner was an American geologist who worked for the United States Geological Survey for 32 years. She was known worldwide for her work in stratigraphy and mollusc paleontology.

Lindsay Patricia Northover, Baroness Northover, is a British academic, Liberal Democrat politician, member of the House of Lords, and former junior government minister.

Joan Breton Connelly is an American classical archaeologist and Professor of Classics and Art History at New York University. She is Director of the Yeronisos Island Excavations and Field School in Cyprus. Connelly was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. She received the Archaeological Institute of America Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and held the Lillian Vernon Chair...

Sari Horwitz is a three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning member of The Washington Post's investigation unit. A reporter for The Washington Post since 1984, she has covered crime, homeland security, federal law enforcement, education, social services, and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Edna Fischel Gellhorn was an American suffragist and reformer who helped found the League of Women Voters.

Frederica Annis Lopez de Leo de Laguna (October 3, 1906 – October 6, 2004) was an American ethnologist, anthropologist, and archaeologist influential for her work on Paleoindian and Alaska Native art and archaeology in the American northwest and Alaska.

Layla AbdelRahim is a comparatist anthropologist and anarchoprimitivist author, whose works on narratives of civilization and wilderness have contributed to the fields of anthropology, literary and cultural studies, comparative literature, philosophy, animal studies, ecophilosophy, sociology, anarcho-primitivist thought, anarchism, epistemology, and critique of civilization, technology, and education. She attributes the collapse in the diversity of bio-systems and environmental degradation to monoculturalism...

Karen Kornbluh served as U.S. Ambassador to the OECD under President Barack Obama and as a senior official at the U.S. Department of the Treasury and Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. She is an expert on communications policy, international trade and issues affecting working families. Her profile in The New York Times focused on her efforts “Fighting for...

Tae Keller is an American children's book author. Her book, When You Trap a Tiger, won the 2021 Newbery Medal. The book tells the story of Lily and her relationship with her aging and ill Korean grandmother, and is inspired by Korean folktales. Keller is the youngest winner of the Newbery Medal.

Alice Erya Gerstenberg was an American playwright, actress, and activist best known for her experimental, feminist drama and her involvement with the Little Theatre Movement in Chicago.

Vivien A. Schmidt is an American academic of political science and international relations. At Boston University, she is the Jean Monnet Chair of European Integration Professor of International Relations in the Pardee School of Global Studies, and Professor of Political Science. She is known for her work on political economy, policy analysis, democratic theory, and new institutionalism. She is a...

Jean Spurney Inness was an American film, stage and television actress. Inness played nurse Beatrice Fain in the American medical drama television series Dr. Kildare.

Emily Kimbrough was an American author and journalist.

Margaret Ayer Barnes was an American playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Her 1930 novel Years of Grace was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Esther Everett Lape was a well-known American peace activist and journalist. She wrote in support of immigration and workers' rights, and between the world wars, she was a vocal advocate for the US participation in the World Court. Lape was associated with the Women's Trade Union League and was one of the founders of the League of Women Voters.

Mary Jobe Akeley was an American explorer, author, mountaineer, and photographer. She undertook expeditions in the Canadian Rockies and in the Belgian Congo. She worked at the American Museum of Natural History creating exhibits featuring taxidermy animals in realistic natural settings. Akeley worked on behalf of conservation efforts, including advocating for the creation of game preserves. She founded Camp Mystic,...

Nina G. Garsoïan FBA was a French-born American historian specializing in Armenian and Byzantine history. In 1969 she became the first female historian to get tenure at Columbia University and, subsequently, became the first holder of Gevork M. Avedissian Chair in Armenian History and Civilization at Columbia. From 1977 to 1979, she served as dean of the Graduate School of...

Margaret Levi is an American political scientist and author, known for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory, notably on the origins and effects of trustworthy government.

Joan Lyn Slonczewski is an American microbiologist at Kenyon College and a science fiction writer who explores biology and space travel. Their books have twice earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel: A Door into Ocean (1987) and The Highest Frontier (2011). With John W. Foster and Erik Zinser, they coauthor the textbook, Microbiology: An...

Helen Flanders Dunbar — later known as H. Flanders Dunbar — is an important early figure in U.S. psychosomatic medicine and psychobiology, as well as being an important advocate of physicians and clergy co-operating in their efforts to care for the sick. She viewed the patient as a combination of the psyche and soma, body and soul. Both needed to...

Bess Lomax Hawes was an American folk musician, folklorist, and researcher. She was the daughter of John Avery Lomax and Bess Bauman-Brown Lomax, and the sister of Alan Lomax and John Lomax Jr.

Fern Yvette Hunt is an African American mathematician known for her work in applied mathematics and mathematical biology. She currently works as a researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where she conducts research on the ergodic theory of dynamical systems.

Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology.

Elaine Hammerstein was an American silent film and stage actress.

Neda Ulaby is an American reporter for National Public Radio, covering arts, cultural trends and digital media. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Priscilla Johnson McMillan was an American journalist, translator, author, and historian. She was a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Eleanor Axson Sayre was an American curator, art historian, and a specialist on the works of Goya. She was the first woman to serve as departmental curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Working as curator of prints and drawings, she collected Goya's etchings from museums around the world to catalogue and create international exhibits. She was awarded a...

Agnes Hsin Mei Hsu-Tang is a Taiwan-born American archaeologist and art historian. On October 19, 2021, she became the first person of Asian heritage to be elected board chair of one of the oldest historical institutions in America, the New-York Historical Society, founded in 1804. She is chairwoman of the New-York Historical Society board of trustees and Co-chair of The...

Claire Giannini Hoffman was the first woman to serve on the boards of Bank of America and Sears, Roebuck & Company. She also was the only woman guest invited at international bank conference events for some two decades.

Dorothy Kunhardt was an American children's-book author, best known for the baby book Pat the Bunny. She was also a historian and writer about the life of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.

Nina Grace Jablonski is an American anthropologist and palaeobiologist, known for her research into the evolution of skin color in humans. She is engaged in public education about human evolution, human diversity, and racism. In 2021, she was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and in 2009, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She is an...

Bettina Warburg was a psychiatrist and a member of the Warburg family banking dynasty.

Nadia Abu El-Haj is an American anthropologist at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.

Jessica B. Harris is an American culinary historian, college professor, cookbook author and journalist. She is professor emerita at Queens College, City University of New York, where she taught for 50 years, and is also the author of 15 books, including cookbooks, non-fiction food writing and memoir. She has twice won James Beard Foundation Awards, including for Lifetime Achievement in...

Hanna Holborn Gray is an American historian of Renaissance and Reformation political thought and Professor of History Emerita at the University of Chicago. She served as 10th president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, having earlier served as president pro tempore of Yale University in 1977–1978. At both schools, she was the first woman to hold their...

Ray Strachey was a British feminist politician, artist and writer.

Olga Taussky-Todd was an Austrian and American mathematician. She published more than 300 research papers on algebraic number theory, integral matrices, and matrices in algebra and analysis.

Ellen Kushner is an American editor and writer of fantasy fiction. From 1996 until 2010, she was the host of the radio program Sound and Spirit, produced by WGBH in Boston and distributed by Public Radio International.

Sumana Shrestha is a Nepalese politician and former Minister of Education, Science and Technology. She was elected member of the Federal Parliament in the House of Representatives, representing the Rastriya Swatantra Party in 2022. Shrestha resigned from the party on 14 September 2025, citing its culture of leader-worship. Shrestha was seen recently in an event of Ujyaalo Nepal Party announcement.

Allyson Schwartz is an American Democratic Party politician who represented parts of Montgomery County and Northeast Philadelphia in the United States House of Representatives from 2005 to 2015 and Northeast and Northwest Philadelphia in the Pennsylvania Senate from 1991 to 2005. She has finished second in a statewide Democratic Party primary twice: for United States Senate in 2000 and for...

Rosemarie Janet Said Zahlan was a Palestinian-American historian and writer on the Arab states of the Persian Gulf based in London. She was a sister of Edward Said. In addition to her books, she also wrote for the Financial Times, the Middle East Journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies and the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Mary Elizabeth Taylor is an American political aide who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs from 2018 to 2020. She resigned on July 3, 2020 in protest of the handling of the George Floyd protests by President Donald Trump. She previously served in the Trump White House as the Deputy Director of Legislative Affairs of Nominations.

Elizabeth Ann Fox-Genovese was an American historian best known for her works on women and society in the Antebellum South. A Marxist early on in her career, she later converted to Roman Catholicism and became a primary voice of the conservative women's movement. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2003.

Cornelia Otis Skinner was an American writer and actress.

Anna-Misel Asimakopoulou is a Greek lawyer and politician who was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in 2019.

Genevieve Bell AO FTSE FAHA FASSA is an Australian cultural anthropologist who served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Australian National University from 1 January 2024 until her resignation on 11 September 2025 sparked by staff and student outrage over large staff cuts in an attempted restructure. She is best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice research...

Jeannette Ridlon Piccard was an American high-altitude balloonist, and in later life an Episcopal priest, one of the Philadelphia Eleven. She held the women's altitude record for nearly three decades, and according to several contemporaneous accounts was regarded as the first woman in space.

Helen Herron Taft Manning was an American historian who was dean and acting president of Bryn Mawr College. She was the middle child and only daughter of U.S. President William Howard Taft and his wife Helen Herron.

Alice Mitchell Rivlin was an American economist and budget official. She served as the 16th vice chair of the Federal Reserve from 1996 to 1999. Before her appointment to the Federal Reserve, Rivlin was named director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Clinton administration from 1994 to 1996. Prior to that, she was instrumental in the establishment...

Harriet Brooks was a Canadian nuclear physicist. She is most famous for her research in radioactivity. She discovered atomic recoil, and transmutation of elements in radioactive decay. Ernest Rutherford, who guided her graduate work, regarded her as comparable to Marie Curie in the calibre of her aptitude. She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to...

Ada Palmer is an American historian and writer and winner of the 2017 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her first novel, Too Like the Lightning, was published in May 2016. The work has been well received by critics and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Katharine Burr Blodgett was an American physicist and chemist known for her work on surface chemistry, in particular her invention of "invisible" or nonreflective glass while working at General Electric. She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, in 1926.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter is an American sociologist who is a professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008 to 2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of...

Barbara Marx Hubbard, American futurist, author, and public speaker. She is credited with The Wheel of Co-Creation 2.0 and concepts of "The Synergy Engine" and the "birthing" of humanity.

Beryl Alaine Howell is an American attorney and jurist who serves as a senior United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was appointed to the District of Columbia federal court in 2010 by President Barack Obama, and she served as its chief judge from 2016 to 2023. As chief judge, she supervised...

Alyssa Whitall "Alys" Pearsall Smith was an American-born British Quaker relief organiser and the first wife of Bertrand Russell. She chaired the society that created an innovative school for mothers in 1907.

Salima Ikram is a Pakistani professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, a participant in many Egyptian archaeological projects, the author of several books on Egyptian archaeology, a contributor to various magazines and a guest on pertinent television programs.

Elizabeth Janet Gray Vining was an American professional librarian and author who tutored Emperor Akihito of Japan in English while he was crown prince. She was also a noted author, whose children's book Adam of the Road received the Newbery Medal in 1943.

Elizabeth A. Hodges is an American politician who served as the 47th Mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018. A member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), she represented Ward 13 on the Minneapolis City Council from 2006 January 2014.

Paula Vogel is an American playwright. She is known for her provocative explorations of complex social and political issues. Much of her work delves into themes of psychological trauma, abuse, and the complexities of human relationships. She has received the Pulitzer Prize as well as nominations for two Tony Awards. In 2013 she was inducted into the American Theater Hall...

Edith Hamilton was an American educator and internationally known author who was one of the most renowned classicists of her era in the United States. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College, she also studied in Germany at the University of Leipzig and the University of Munich. Hamilton began her career as an educator and head of the Bryn Mawr School,...

Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues such as poverty, child labor, and immigration, as well as settlement work to uplift poor immigrants and reduce juvenile delinquency.

Sarah Jones is an American playwright, actress, film director, and podcast host. She is best known for her multi-character solo performances and her Tony Award-winning Broadway show Bridge & Tunnel, which was produced by Meryl Streep. She is also the writer, director, and star of the 2022 hybrid documentary film Sell/Buy/Date, based on her critically acclaimed play of the same...

Lee McGeorge Durrell MBE is an American naturalist, author, zookeeper, and television presenter. She is best known for her work at the Jersey Zoological Park in the British Channel Island of Jersey with her late husband, Gerald Durrell, and for co-authoring books with him.

Elaine Showalter is an American literary critic, feminist, and writer on cultural and social issues. She influenced feminist literary criticism in the United States academia, developing the concept and practice of gynocritics, a term describing the study of "women as writers".

Lilli Hornig was a Czech-born American scientist and feminist activist. She worked on the Manhattan Project.

Tony Krajewski Thurmond is an American politician and educator, serving as the 28th California State Superintendent of Public Instruction since 2019. Thurmond was narrowly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction in 2018 over his opponent, Marshall Tuck, and reelected in 2022. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the 15th Assembly district from 2014 to 2018, encompassing the northern East...

Anna Louise Strong was an American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. She wrote over 30 books and varied articles.

Marianne Craig Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for its formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. In 1968, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Nobel Committee member Erik Lindegren.

Nina Jankowicz is an American researcher and writer. She is the author of How to Lose the Information War (2020), on Russian use of disinformation as geopolitical strategy, and How to Be a Woman Online (2022), a handbook for fighting against online harassment of women. She briefly served as executive director of the newly created Disinformation Governance Board of the...

Carol Duhurst Leonnig is an American investigative journalist. She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 2000 to 2025 and was part of a team of national security reporters that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for reporting that revealed the NSA's expanded spying on Americans. Leonnig also received Pulitzer Prizes for National Reporting in 2015...

Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist. She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s she and her husband, James Boggs, took their own political direction, turning their focus to civil rights and Black Liberation, Asian American, and...

Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn was an American feminist social reformer and a leader of the suffrage movement in the United States. Hepburn served as president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association before joining the National Woman's Party. In 1923 Hepburn formed the Connecticut Branch of the American Birth Control League with two of her friends, Mrs. George Day and Mrs....

Ann Harding was an American theatre, motion picture, radio, and television actress. Harding was a regular on Broadway and on tour in the 1920s. In the 1930s, Harding was one of the first actresses to gain fame in the new medium of "talking pictures," and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931 for her work...

Olivia Susan Clemens was the second child and eldest daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, and his wife Olivia Langdon Clemens. She inspired some of her father's works, at 13 wrote her own biography of him, which he later published in his autobiography, and acted as a literary critic. Her father was heartbroken when...

Carolyn Goodman is an American politician who served as mayor of Las Vegas, Nevada, from 2011 until 2024. She is the second female mayor of Las Vegas and is married to former mayor and attorney Oscar Goodman. She is the founder, president and trustee emerita of The Meadows School.

Angela Kane is a German diplomat and was formerly the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and Under-Secretary-General for Management in the United Nations.

Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention....

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short-story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Ana Patricia Botín-Sanz de Sautuola O'Shea is a Spanish banker who has been the executive chairman of Santander Group since 2014.

William Kennedy Smith is an American physician and a member of the Kennedy family who founded an organization focused on land mines and the rehabilitation of landmine victims. He is known for being charged with rape in a nationally publicized 1991 trial that ended with his acquittal.

Michelle Chongmi Zauner is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and author, known as the lead vocalist of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast. Her 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart, spent 60 weeks on The New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list. In 2022, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world under the category...

Lisa Oz is an American author and radio and television personality who has been an occasional co-host of The Dr. Oz Show. She has appeared on the Oprah and Friends XM radio telecasts. Oz has authored or co-authored several books, including the You: The Owner's Manual series, and is host of The Lisa Oz Show.

Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust is an American historian and author who served as the 28th president of Harvard University from 2007 to 2018. She was Harvard's first female president, its first president since 1672 without a Harvard undergraduate or graduate degree, and the first to have been raised in the South. Faust was also the founding dean of the Radcliffe...

Margaret Claire Hoover is an American political commentator, political strategist, journalist, media personality, author, and great-granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the 31st U.S. president. She is author of the book American Individualism: How a New Generation of Conservatives Can Save the Republican Party, published by Crown Forum in 2011. Hoover hosts PBS's reboot of the conservative interview show Firing Line.

Nettie Maria Stevens was an American geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes. In 1905, soon after the rediscovery of Mendel's paper on genetics in 1900, she observed that male mealworms produced two kinds of sperm, one with a large chromosome and one with a small chromosome. When the sperm with the large chromosome fertilized eggs, they produced female offspring, and when...

Elizabeth Hadley Richardson was the first wife of American author Ernest Hemingway. The two married in 1921 after a courtship of less than a year, and moved to Paris within months of being married. In Paris, Hemingway pursued a writing career, and through him Richardson met other expatriate American and British writers.

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress whose career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned six decades. Known for her headstrong independence, spirited personality, and outspokenness, she cultivated a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly played strong-willed, sophisticated women. She worked in a varied range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, which earned her various...

Maggie Siff is an American actress. Her most notable television roles have included department store heiress Rachel Menken Katz on the AMC drama Mad Men, Dr. Tara Knowles on the FX drama Sons of Anarchy for which she was twice nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, and psychiatrist Wendy Rhoades on...

Tsuda Umeko was a Japanese educator who founded Tsuda University. She was the daughter of Tsuda Sen, an agricultural scientist, and at the age of 7, she became Japan's first female exchange student, traveling to the United States on the same ship as the Iwakura Mission.

Martha Ellis Gellhorn was an American novelist, travel writer and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career.

Daniel Dae Kim is an American actor. He is known for his many roles in network television and theater. In 2025, Time magazine listed him as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

Frances Donnelly Wolf is an American artist, oil painter and advocate for the arts. She served as the 45th First Lady of Pennsylvania during the tenure of her husband, Governor Tom Wolf, from January 2015 until January 2023.

Elizabeth Key "Bess" Armstrong is an American actress. She is known for her roles in the films The Four Seasons (1981), High Road to China (1983), Jaws 3-D (1983), and Nothing in Common (1986). Armstrong also starred in the ABC drama series My So-Called Life and had lead roles in a number of made-for-television films.

Ellis Avery was an American writer. She was the only author to win two Stonewall Book Awards, one in 2008 for her debut novel The Teahouse Fire and one in 2013 for her second novel The Last Nude. The Teahouse Fire also won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction and an Ohioana Library Fiction Award in 2007. She...

Zvezdelina Entcheva Stankova is a Bulgarian and American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at Mills College and a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the founder of the Berkeley Math Circle, and an expert in the combinatorial enumeration of permutations with forbidden patterns.