67 Notable alumni of Mills College

Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964.

Idah Meacham Strobridge was an American writer and bookbinder. Known primarily for a trio of works about the Great Basin which mix folktales, fiction, sketches, and nature writing: In Miners' Mirage-Land (1904), The Loom of the Desert (1907) and The Land of Purple Shadows (1909).

Susannah Hays is an American artist and educator practicing in the fields of philosophy, ecology, technical processes in historical and contemporary photography and the book as art. She first gained recognition for her work in 2000 when she joined Scott Nichols Gallery in San Francisco. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions there as well as at Seager/Gray...

Thalia Gouma-Peterson was Professor Emerita of Art History and museum curator at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Born in Athens, Greece she came to the U.S. as a Fulbright student in 1952.

Ethel Ronzoni Bishop was an American biochemist and physiologist.

Roderick Schrock is an arts executive and curator. He has been the Executive Director at Eyebeam since July, 2015.

Isabel Andrews Burgess was an American politician and public official from Phoenix, Arizona, who is known for her contributions to transportation safety at the federal level, including her tenure on the National Transportation Safety Board.

Susan M. Dray is an American human-computer interaction and user experience (UX) professional who is a member of the CHI academy and the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Dray is known for her work in the field of UX design and is also a founding member of SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group for human-computer interaction.

Mark Trayle, born Mark Evan Garrabrant was a California-based musician and sound artist working in a variety of media including live electronic music, improvisation, installations, and compositions for chamber ensembles. His work has been noted for its use of re-engineered consumer products and cultural artifacts as interfaces for electronic music performances and networked media installations.

Mabel Bert was an Australian-born American actress Mabel was an actress who was in stage productions including Straight Is the Way (1921), The Wonderful Thing (1921) and Blackbirds (1920).

Marc Anthony Richardson is an American novelist. He won an American Book Award and a Creative Capital Award.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a Mexican composer and sound artist.

Mia Satya, also known as Mia Tu Mutch, is an American community organizer and activist for social justice, youth, LGBT and transgender rights. Satya was named a California Woman of the Year by the California State Senate.

Molissa Fenley is an American choreographer, performer and teacher of contemporary dance.

Blevin Blectum is an American electronic musician and multimedia composer. She is celebrated as an "icon of deviant and cerebral electronic music". The pioneering musician and composer otherwise known as Bevin Kelley has been active in the US electronic avant garde since the 1990s. A classically trained science fiction enthusiast with an enviable academic record, she’s best known as one...

Mary Oliver is an American performer on violin, viola, and Hardanger fiddle, in the areas of New Music, free improvisation, and avant-garde jazz.

Todd Boekelheide is an American composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, best known for his work scoring documentary films. He won an Academy Award for Best Sound (Amadeus, 1984) and was nominated for another in the same category (Never Cry Wolf, 1983).

Dorothy Lorayne Warenskjold was an American lyric soprano who had an active career in opera, concerts, radio, television, and recitals from the mid-1940s through the early 1970s. She made several recordings for Capitol Records; other recordings were later released from restored material. She was fully California born, trained, and resident, in an era when the ranks of classical singers were...

Gregory T.S. Walker is an American composer, violinist, and guitarist. He was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Charles Ives Fellowship in 2000, and has performed with major orchestras around the world.

Emma Kailikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina was an early Hawaiian female judge, curator and cultural writer. Descended from an American sugar planter and a Hawaiian high chiefess, she was educated in Hawaii and California. She served as curator of the Hawaiian National Museum from 1882 to 1887 and as Commissioner of Private Ways and Water Rights from 1892 to 1907. In...

Mabelle Gilman Corey was an American actress. She had an affair with William Ellis Corey which led to the dissolution of his marriage, and they later married.

Kevin Blechdom is an American experimental electronic musician and performance artist. She is based in Santa Cruz, California.

Eleanor Martha Hadley was an American economist and policymaker. Because of her relatively rare research specialization in Japanese economics, during World War II Hadley was recruited first into OSS and then the State Department to support the United States' war effort while she was a doctoral candidate in economics at Radcliffe College. Hadley helped draft the United States' plans for...

Ben Goldberg is an American clarinet player and composer.

Martha Fuller Clark is a former Democratic member of the New Hampshire Senate, representing the 21st district from 2012 until 2020 and the 24th district from 2004 until 2010. Prior to her Senate service she was a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives from 1990 through 2002.

Stanley Silverman is an American composer, arranger, conductor and guitarist.

Connie Champagne, née Kelly Kay Brock,, is an American singer, songwriter and actress. She won the SF Weekly Wammie Award for Outstanding Cabaret Performer. She is known for performing the character of actress Judy Garland in productions including Christmas With the Crawfords in 2001 and Imagine Judy Garland: An Evening With Connie Champagne in 2003. She won a 2007 San...

Emma Nevada was an American operatic coloratura soprano particularly known for her performances in operas by Bellini and Donizetti and the French composers Ambroise Thomas, Charles Gounod, and Léo Delibes. Considered one of the finest coloratura sopranos of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her most famous roles were Amina in La sonnambula, and the title roles in Lakmé,...

Dorianne Laux is an American poet.

Connie Young Yu is a Chinese American writer, activist, historian, and lecturer.

Claire Ptak is an American baker, food writer, and food stylist. She owns and runs a bakery-café Violet Cakes in London's East End. In addition, she has published an array of cookbooks and written a food column for The Guardian and The Observer. She is widely known for having baked the royal wedding cake for the wedding of the Duke...

Denise McCluggage was an American auto racing driver, journalist, author and photographer. McCluggage was a pioneer of equality for women in the U.S., both in motorsports and in journalism. She was born in El Dorado, Kansas, and spent her childhood in that state. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Mills College in Oakland, California. She began her career as a...

Ananya Roy is a scholar of international development and global urbanism. Born in Calcutta, India, Roy is Professor and Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has been a professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley....

Jade Snow Wong was a Chinese American ceramic artist and author of two memoirs. She was given the English name of Constance, also being known as Connie Wong Ong.

Renel Brooks-Moon, known on-air simply as Renel, is an American former radio personality who hosted shows on radio stations KCBS, KFRC, KMEL, and KISQ before serving as the public address announcer for the San Francisco Giants from 2000 to 2024. Though she is the second female PA announcer in Giants and Major League Baseball history, Renel is the first African-American...

Hormoz Farhat was a Persian-American composer and ethnomusicologist who spent much of his career in Dublin, Ireland. An emeritus professor of music, he was a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. Described by the Irish Times as a "gifted and distinctive composer of contemporary classical music," his compositions include orchestral, concertante, piano and choral music, as well string quartets and chamber...

Dina Kawar is a Jordanian diplomat who since June 2016 has served as Ambassador of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to the United States.

William Elden Bolcom is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, a Grammy Award, and the Detroit Music Award, and was named Composer of the Year by Musical America in 2007. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973 to 2008 and was named the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished...

Diana Lucile Paxson is an American writer, primarily in the fields of paganism and heathenism. Her published works include fantasy and historical fiction novels, as well as numerous short stories. More recently she has also published books about pagan and heathen religions and practices. She is a founder of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where she is known as Countess...

Holly Herndon is an American artist and composer based in Berlin, Germany. After studying composition at Stanford University and completing her Ph.D. at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, she pursued a music career internationally. Herndon's music often includes human singing voices (including her own), is primarily computer-based, and regularly uses the visual programming language Max/MSP...

Lateefah Aaliyah Simon is an American politician who is the U.S. representative for California's 12th congressional district since January 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the first member of Congress known to be born legally blind in both eyes, and the first Muslim member from California and outside of the Midwestern United States.

Beate Sirota Gordon was an Austrian and American performing arts presenter and women's rights advocate. Born in Vienna, Austria, she moved to the Empire of Japan in 1929 with her father, the pianist Leo Sirota. After graduating from the American School in Japan, she moved to Oakland, California, where she enrolled at Mills College. Being one of the few people...

Dixy Lee Ray was an American academic, scientist, and politician who served as the 17th governor of Washington from 1977 to 1981. Variously described as idiosyncratic and "ridiculously smart," she was the state's first female governor and was in office during the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. She was a supporter of atomic energy.

Snatam Kaur Khalsa /səˈnɑːtəm ˈkɔːr/, is an American singer, songwriter and author. Kaur performs new age Indian devotional music, kirtan, and tours the world as a peace activist. The surname "Kaur", meaning "princess", is shared by all female Sikhs.

Charmian London was an American writer and the second wife of Jack London.

Kathryn Harrold is an American former actress, best known for her leading roles in films The Hunter (1980), Modern Romance (1981), The Pursuit of D. B. Cooper (1981), Yes, Giorgio (1982), and Raw Deal (1986). She had leading roles in the horror films Nightwing (1979) and The Sender (1982). She also played Francine Sanders in HBO's The Larry Sanders Show.

Chiang Hsiao-chang is the only daughter of Chiang Ching-kuo, the President of the Republic of China in Taiwan from 1978 to 1988. Her mother was Chiang Fang-liang. She had one older brother, Hsiao-wen, and two younger brothers, Hsiao-wu and Hsiao-yung. She is the only living member of Chiang Ching-kuo's legitimate children, and was the only one among the siblings who...

Daria "Dasha" Dmitrievna Nekrasova is an American actress, filmmaker, and co-host of the Red Scare podcast with Anna Khachiyan, based in Dimes Square, New York City.

Barbara Jean Lee is an American politician who has served as the 52nd mayor of Oakland since 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, Lee previously served as a U.S. representative from California from 1998 to 2025, representing California's 12th congressional district (numbered as the 9th district from 1998 to 2013 and as the 13th district from 2013 to 2023)....

Daniella Pineda is an American actress. She has had major roles in several films and TV series, including The Originals, Netflix's live-action Cowboy Bebop, and two films in the Jurassic Park franchise. She began her career through online comedy and fashion videos, with her first movie role in 2011. She later appeared in the backdoor pilot of The Originals and...

David Warren Brubeck was an American jazz pianist and composer. Often regarded as a foremost exponent of cool jazz, Brubeck's work is characterized by unusual time signatures and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities, and combining different styles and genres, such as classical, jazz, and blues.

Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland was a British and American actress. The major works of her cinematic career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was one of the leading actresses of her time. Before her death in 2020 at age 104, she was the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and was...

Joanna Newsom is an American singer-songwriter, harpist and actress. After recording and self-releasing two EPs in 2002, Newsom signed to the independent label Drag City. Her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, was released in 2004 to acclaim and garnered Newsom an underground following. She received wider exposure with Ys (2006), which reached number 134 on the Billboard 200 and was...

Sofia Carmina Coppola is an American filmmaker and former actress. She has won an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Golden Lion, and a Cannes Film Festival Award. She was also nominated for three BAFTA Awards, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award.

Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred solo exhibitions, in addition to having been included in hundreds of group exhibitions in important museums and galleries worldwide. He taught studio art for several decades in California, beginning in...

Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner is a poet and climate change activist from the Marshall Islands.

Robert Sterling Neuman was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and an art teacher.

Mary Elizabeth Thomas Peavey Brooks was an American politician. She directed the United States Mint from September 1969 to February 1977.

Phillipe M. Cunningham is a former city council member for Minneapolis Ward 4 and was the first transgender man of color to be elected to public office in the United States. Cunningham won the council position in the 2017 Minneapolis City Council election and lost it in the 2021 election.

Elizabeth Murray was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the...

April Catherine Glaspie is an American former diplomat and senior member of the Foreign Service, best known for her role in the events leading up to the Gulf War.

Stephen Michael Reich is an American composer best known as a pioneer of minimal music in the mid to late 1960s. Reich's work is marked by its use of repetitive figures, slow harmonic rhythm, and canons. Reich describes this concept in his essay "Music as a Gradual Process" by stating, "I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be...

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American avant-garde artist, musician and filmmaker whose work encompasses performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Initially trained in violin and sculpting, Anderson pursued a variety of performance art projects in New York City during the 1970s, focusing particularly on language, technology, and visual imagery. She achieved unexpected commercial success when her song "O...

Aiden Thomas is an American author of young adult novels, best known for the book Cemetery Boys which was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards, including best of the year recognition from the American Library Association, Publishers Weekly, Barnes & Noble, NPR and School Library Journal.

Laleh Khadivi is an Iranian American novelist, and filmmaker.

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.