47 Notable alumni of Connecticut College

Martin Jeffrey Steinbach was an American vision researcher who spent most of his career in Canada. He was Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at York University. He received a master's degree from Connecticut College in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1968.

JoAnn Elizabeth "Eli" Coppola was an American poet and active contributor to the San Francisco spoken word scene in the mid 1980s and 1990s. She wrote poetry on a variety of subjects including disability, sexuality, and social injustice.

Nina F. Elgo is an American lawyer who serves as a judge of the Connecticut Appellate Court. She is the first Asian Pacific American to be appointed to the Connecticut Appellate Court and the Connecticut Superior Court.

Gloria Marie Callen was an American backstroke swimmer. She was the 1942 Associated Press Athlete of the Year.

Spencer Walker Luckey is an American artist, "Kid Architect", and president of Luckey Climbers, a design/fabrication firm that specializes in climbing sculptures for children's museums and other institutions world-wide.

Miriam Butterworth was an American educator, activist, and politician.

Linda Jane Lear is an American historian of science and biographer.

Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of...

Vicki Lee Lansky was an American author and publisher, best known for her cookbook Feed Me I'm Yours.

Jeffrey Finn is a Tony Award winning American theatrical producer. He currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Artistic Planning and Vice President of Theater Producing and Programming at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the artistic director of Broadway Center Stage. He received the Commercial Theater Institute's 2013 Robert Whitehead Award for outstanding achievement...

Sean Fine is an American cinematographer, producer and film director whose film Inocente won the 2013 Academy Award for Best Documentary. He directs his films with his wife, Andrea Nix Fine. The Fines' first feature-length film War/Dance about child soldiers was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2007. In 2013 their film, Life According to Sam...

Mary Overlie was an American choreographer, dancer, theater artist, professor, author, and the originator of the Six Viewpoints technique for theater and dance. The Six Viewpoints technique is both a philosophical articulation of postmodern performance and a teaching system addressing directing, choreographing, dancing, acting, improvisation, and performance analysis. The Six Viewpoints has been taught in the core curriculum of the...

Judy Irving is an American filmmaker. She directed the documentary The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, about writer Mark Bittner's relationship with a flock of wild parrots. The film won the Genesis Award for "Outstanding Documentary Film" in 2005, and is one of the 25 top-grossing theatrical documentaries of all time with over $3 million in box-office receipts. On May...

Vance Gilbert is an American folk singer-songwriter. He started as a jazz singer, switched to folk music, became a regular on the open mike circuit in Boston and toured with Shawn Colvin. He has recorded sixteen albums, including Side of the Road, three of them on Philo/Rounder Records.

Peggy Sundelle Charren was an American activist best known as the founder of Action for Children's Television (ACT), a national child advocacy organization. The organization was founded in an effort to encourage program diversity and eliminate commercial abuses in children's television programming. In 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Aracelis Girmay is an American poet, teacher, and editor. Girmay also works with collage and essays, and has collaborated with film and sound artists. She is the author of the poetry collections the black maria (2016), Kingdom Animalia (2011), and Teeth (2007). For her work, she was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She is the...

Fernando Espuelas is an American entrepreneur, author, and journalist.

Jeremy Stamper is an American entrepreneur, nonprofit leader and politician from South Carolina. Stamper first gained national media attention for pranks targeting incumbent politicians and has since founded several internet companies, including Spout, The Delaware Company, Progressive Homesellers and PersonRatings.com. In February 2013, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the 2014 United States Senate election in South...

Marcia Tucker was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a museum dedicated to innovative art and artistic practice in New York City, which she ran as the director until 1999.

David Haussler is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that deepens understanding the molecular function and evolution of the genome.

Peter Som is a Chinese American fashion designer. He was creative director for Bill Blass and creative consultant for Tommy Hilfiger, where he designed the women's wear collection, prior to founding his eponymous label. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Peter Som graduated from Connecticut College in 1993 with a degree in art history. He continued his...

Elisabeth A. Gotbaum is an American civil servant, politician and a former New York City public advocate. She was elected Public Advocate for New York City in 2001 and reelected in 2005. She was the third woman elected to a citywide post in NYC history. The other two were Carol Bellamy, who served as city council president from 1978 to...

Rand Pecknold is an American ice hockey coach who serves as the head coach for the men's ice hockey team at Quinnipiac University.

Patricia Ann McGowan Wald was an American lawyer and jurist who served as the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1986 until 1991. She was the Court's first female chief judge and its first woman to be elevated, having been appointed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. From 1999 to...

Anita Lucette DeFrantz is an American Olympic rower, member of the International Olympic Committee, and twice vice-president of International Rowing Federation (FISA).

Alec Ounsworth is an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and frontman of indie rock band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. He is also a member of The Pelican Picnic and Flashy Python. His first solo album, Mo Beauty was released October 20, 2009, on Anti- Records.

Sloane Crosley is an American writer living in New York City known for her humorous essays, which are often collected into books like I Was Told There'd Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There.

Gayl Carolyn Jones is an American writer from Lexington, Kentucky. She is recognized as a key figure in 20th-century African-American literature.

Cynthia Holden Enloe is an American political theorist, feminist writer, and professor. She is best known for her work on gender and militarism and for her contributions to the field of feminist international relations. She has also influenced the field of feminist political geography, with feminist geopolitics in particular.

Martha Alter Chen is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing) and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). Martha...

Timothy M. Armstrong is an American business executive. He was formerly the CEO of Oath Inc., then a subsidiary of Verizon Communications that served as the umbrella company of its digital content subdivisions, including AOL and Yahoo!. Previously, he was the CEO of AOL Inc. from 2009 until its purchase by Verizon in 2015. Currently AOL is owned by Yahoo...

Laura Cunningham Wilson is an American photographer. She has completed seven books of photography and text: Watt Matthews of Lambshead (1989), Hutterites of Montana (2000), Avedon at Work: In the American West (2003), Grit and Glory: Six-Man Football (2003), That Day: Pictures in the American West (2015), From Rodin to Plensa: Modern Sculpture at the Meadows Museum (2018), and The...

David Elliot Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author.

Kimba Maureen Wood is an American judge who is a senior district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Estelle Parsons is an American actress.

Susan Saint James is an American former actress. She is most widely known for the detective series McMillan & Wife (1971–1976) and the sitcom Kate & Allie (1984–1989).

Harry Jon Benjamin is an American actor, comedian, writer, producer, and musician. He is known for his voice roles in adult animated series, including Sterling Archer in Archer, Bob Belcher in Bob's Burgers, Ben in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, Kevin in O'Grady, Satan in Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil, and Coach McGuirk and Jason Penopolis in Home Movies, starring...

Leland Jones Orser is an American actor, director and writer. He is married to Jeanne Tripplehorn. He has appeared in numerous film and television roles since his debut in 1991, notably as Lucien Dubenko on the television series ER (2004–09), Father Romero on Ray Donovan (2015–16), Richard Stratton on American Gigolo (2022), and Sam Gilroy in the Taken film series...

Sean Michael Spicer is an American political commentator, naval officer, and former political aide who served as the 30th White House Press Secretary and as White House Communications Director under President Donald Trump in 2017. Spicer was communications director of the Republican National Committee from 2011 to 2017, and its chief strategist from 2015 to 2017. Since 2023, Spicer has...

Michael W. King is an Emmy Award-winning American filmmaker, producer, director, and writer of music videos, documentaries, and narrative films. King is the founder of Michael W. King Productions, LLC., and lives with his son, Mathias, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. He is a current member of the Directors Guild of America and a former board member of the International Documentary Association...

Samuel Lincoln Seder is an American actor and progressive political commentator. His works include the film Who's the Caboose? (1997) as well as the television shows Beat Cops (2001) and Pilot Season (2004). He also appeared in Next Stop Wonderland (1998) and made guest appearances on Spin City (1997), Sex and the City (2000), America Undercover (2005), and Maron (2015)....

Frances Wheeler Sayler was an American civil rights and labor activist. She worked in the La Follette Committee and for the United States Women's Bureau, before became an organizer in the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union. She was active in the early civil rights movement, fighting to desegregate facilities and abolish the poll tax.

Ellen M. Lord is an American businesswoman and government official who previously served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment in the first Trump administration. She was previously the CEO of Textron Systems, a global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technologies industrial conglomerate. In her position, she was the chief weapons purchaser for the United States, responsible...

Joan Alexandra Molinsky, known professionally as Joan Rivers, was an American comedian, actress, producer, writer and television host. She was noted for her blunt, often controversial comedic persona that was heavily self-deprecating and acerbic, especially towards celebrities and politicians, delivered in her signature New York accent. She is considered a pioneer of women in comedy. She received an Emmy Award...

Julia Alvarez is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something...

Henrik Takkenberg was a lead singer, songwriter, composer and producer who developed a new musical style he named Flamenco Chill.