100 Notable alumni of New School

Heron Preston Johnson, known professionally as Heron Preston, is an American artist, fashion designer, and disc jockey. He is a co-founder of the men's streetwear brand Been Trill, alongside Virgil Abloh, Justin Saunders, and others; and founder of his eponymous brand, Heron Preston.

José James is an American composer, baritone singer, guitar player and vocalist who combines contemporary jazz and hip hop.

Chella Man is an American actor, model, artist, YouTuber, and LGBTQ activist. They are known for sharing their experiences as a transgender, deaf, Asian, and Jewish person of color. Man rose to wider prominence in 2019 for portraying Jericho in the second season of the DC Universe series Titans.

Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work on challenging predatory practices around debt.

Sydney Woodrow Parfrey was an American film and television actor from the 1950s to the early 1980s. He is often remembered as "one of TV's great slimeball villains".

Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher was a German philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.

Tara Lyn Subkoff is an American actress, conceptual artist, director, and fashion designer.

Dmitry Sholokhov is a Belarusian-American fashion designer, instructor, and reality television contestant, best known as the winner of season ten of Project Runway and season four of Project Runway: All Stars.

Cécile McLorin Salvant is a French-American jazz vocalist. Salvant is one of the most highly regarded jazz vocalists of her generation, often winning DownBeat annual critics polls. She has released eight albums since 2010, six of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards. She is a 3-time winner of the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy Award for her 2015 album...

Stephanie A. Kelton is an American heterodox economist and academic, and a leading proponent of modern monetary theory. She served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Senate Budget Committee under his chairmanship. She is also the author of The Deficit Myth, a New York Times bestseller, on the subject of modern monetary theory.

Adrian Adolph Greenburg, also known mononymously as Adrian, was an American costume and fashion designer. Widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in Hollywood's Golden Age, he was usually credited onscreen with the phrase "Gowns by Adrian". Early in his career, he chose the professional name Gilbert Adrian, a combination of his father's forename and his own.

Thomas G. Waites is an American actor and acting instructor born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Waites runs an eponymous acting studio in New York City. He has been a member of the Actors Studio since 1984.

Leandra Medine Cohen is an American author, blogger, and humor writer best known for Man Repeller.

Gerald Sheldon Herman was an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway theatre.

Jason Wu is a Canadian artist and fashion designer based in New York City.

Narciso Jesus Rodriguez III is an American fashion designer.

Sailor Lee Brinkley Cook is an American model and the daughter of supermodel Christie Brinkley. Billy Joel is her godfather.

Julio Torres is a Salvadoran writer, comedian, and actor. He is known as a writer for Saturday Night Live and as the co-creator, writer, and executive producer of the HBO series Los Espookys and Fantasmas. Both of Torres' HBO series won a Peabody Award. He previously wrote for The Chris Gethard Show on truTV. He directed, wrote, and starred in...

Franco Modigliani was an Italian-American economist and the recipient of the 1985 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a professor at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT Sloan School of Management.

Elliott Erwitt was a French-born American advertising and documentary photographer known for his black and white candid photos of ironic and absurd situations within everyday settings. He was a member of Magnum Photos from 1953.

Carine Roitfeld is a French fashion editor, former fashion model, and writer. She is the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, a position she held from 2001 to 2011. In 2012, she became founder and editor-in-chief of CR Fashion Book, a bi-annual print magazine headquartered in New York City.

Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made significant contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology.

Ragowo Hediprasetyo Djojohadikusumo, or more commonly known as Didit Prabowo, is an Indonesian fashion designer and socialite. He is the only child of current Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto and his former wife, Titiek Suharto, as well as the maternal grandson of former Indonesian president Suharto.

Bradford Alexander Mehldau is an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger.

Sasha Meneghel Szafir Figueiredo is a Brazilian model.

Anne was the wife of King Michael I of Romania. She married Michael in 1948, the year after he had abdicated the throne. Nonetheless, she was known after the marriage as Queen Anne (Romanian: Regina Ana).

Roy Anthony Hargrove was an American jazz musician and composer whose principal instruments were the trumpet and flugelhorn. He achieved critical acclaim after winning two Grammy Awards for differing styles of jazz in 1998 and 2002. Hargrove primarily played in the hard bop style for the majority of his albums, but also had a penchant for genre-crossing exploration and collaboration...

Isaac Mizrahi is an American fashion designer, actor, singer, television presenter and chief designer of the Isaac Mizrahi brand for Xcel Brands. Based in New York City, he is best known for his eponymous fashion lines. Mizrahi was previously a judge on Project Runway All Stars. In 2022, he played Amos Hart in the long-running Broadway revival of Chicago.

Judith Malina was a Jewish-American actress, director and writer. With her husband Julian Beck, Malina co-founded The Living Theatre, a radical political theatre troupe that rose to prominence in New York City and Paris during the 1950s and 1960s.

Anna Sui is an American fashion designer. Her brand categories include several fashion lines, footwear, cosmetics, fragrances, eyewear, jewelry, accessories and home goods.

Sisy Chen or Chen Wen-chien is a Taiwanese journalist, television commentator, writer and former politician. She hosts Sisy's World News, a weekly newscast at the Chung T'ien Television and UFO Dinner, a daily radio talk show at UFO Radio. She was an independent member of the Legislative Yuan from February 1, 2002 to January 31, 2005. Since 2005, she also...

Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and...

William Ralph Wright is an American video game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis, which later became part of Electronic Arts. In April 2009, he left EA to run Stupid Fun Club Camp, an entertainment think tank in which Wright and EA are principal shareholders.

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her visual word art that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing...

Mustafa Shakir is an American actor known for his portrayal as Bushmaster in Marvel's Luke Cage, Big Mike in The Deuce and Jet Black in Cowboy Bebop (2021).

Princess Maria-Olympia of Greece and Denmark is a fashion model, socialite and member of the former Greek royal family. She is the oldest child and only daughter of Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece, and his wife, Marie-Chantal Miller. Her paternal grandparents are Constantine II of Greece and Anne-Marie of Denmark, who were the last King and Queen of the Hellenes,...

Laura Poitras is an American director and producer of documentary films.

Jillian Kristin Williams is an American dancer, singer, and vocalist for the musical duo Lion Babe. She is the daughter of Ramon Hervey II and singer, actress, and former Miss America Vanessa Williams.

Elaine Stritch was an American actress, singer, and comedian, known for her work on Broadway and later, television. She made her professional stage debut in 1944 and appeared in numerous stage plays, musicals, feature films and television series. Stritch was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.

Gregory Allen Kurstin is an American record producer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter. He has won nine Grammy Awards, including Producer of the Year, Non-Classical in 2017 and 2018, and contributed to five songs that peaked atop the Billboard Hot 100.

Donna Karan, also known as DK, is an American fashion designer and the creator of the Donna Karan New York and DKNY clothing labels.

Andrew Jordt Robinson is an American actor and the former director of the Master of Fine Arts acting program at the University of Southern California. Originally a stage actor, he works predominantly in supporting roles on television and in low-budget films. He is known for his portrayals of the psychopathic serial killer Scorpio in Dirty Harry (1971), Larry Cotton in...

Kelly Chen Wai-lam is a Hong Kong singer and actress. She has been referred to as a "Diva of Asia" (Chinese: 亞洲天后; lit. 'Asia's Heavenly Queen'). Chen has great success in the East Asian entertainment industry with nearly 20 million record sales of 38 albums.

Nina Arianda Matijcio is an American actress. She won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Vanda Jordan in Venus in Fur, and she was nominated for the 2011 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for portraying Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. She starred in Amazon Studios legal series Goliath and...

Ella Rose Emhoff is an American artist and fashion designer. As the daughter of former U.S. Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and stepdaughter of former Vice President Kamala Harris, she was a member of the Second Family of the United States from 2021 to 2025.

Alexander Wang is an American fashion designer. Wang launched his eponymous fashion brand in 2005 and came to prominence after being awarded the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2008. He is known for his urban-inspired designs and use of black.

Adam Saul Pally is an American comedian and actor. He first earned recognition for starring as Max Blum in Happy Endings, as Dr. Peter Prentice in The Mindy Project, and as Wade Whipple in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), its sequels, and the spin-off series Knuckles (2024). Pally also starred in Making History and was an executive producer of The President...

Biagio Anthony "Ben" Gazzara was an American actor and director of film, stage, and television. He received numerous accolades including a Primetime Emmy Award and a Drama Desk Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards and three Tony Awards.

Matthew Paul Miller, known by his stage name Matisyahu, is an American singer, rapper, beatboxer, and musician.

Martin Henry Balsam was an American actor. He had a prolific career in character roles in film, in theatre, and on television. An early member of the Actors Studio, he began his career on the New York stage, winning a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for Robert Anderson's You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's...

Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. He is one of America's most renowned artists and known for his skill in depicting modern American life and landscapes.

Rodney Stephen Steiger was an American actor, noted for his portrayal of offbeat, often volatile and crazed characters. Ranked as "one of Hollywood's most charismatic and dynamic stars", he is closely associated with the art of method acting, embodying the characters he played, which at times led to clashes with directors and co-stars. He starred as Marlon Brando's mobster brother...

Marc Jacobs is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs, and formerly Marc by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line, which was produced for approximately 15 years, before it was discontinued after the 2015 fall/winter collection. At its peak, it had over 200 retail stores in 80 countries. He was the creative...

Norman Percevel Rockwell was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country's culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis...

Sufjan Stevens is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He has released ten solo studio albums and multiple collaborative albums with other artists. Stevens has received Grammy and Academy Award nominations.

Soleil Moon Frye is an American actress. She began her career as a child actress at the age of two. When she was seven, Frye won the role of Penelope "Punky" Brewster in the NBC sitcom Punky Brewster. The series debuted in September 1984 and earned consistently low ratings, but the Punky character was a hit with young children. After...

Shelley Winters was an American film actress whose career spanned seven decades. She won Academy Awards for The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and A Patch of Blue (1965), and received nominations for A Place in the Sun (1951) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the latter of which also earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a...

Walter John Matthau was an American actor, known for his "hangdog face" and for playing world-weary characters. He starred in 10 films alongside his real-life friend Jack Lemmon, including The Odd Couple (1968) and Grumpy Old Men (1993). The New York Times called this "one of Hollywood's most successful pairings". Among other accolades, Matthau won an Academy Award, two BAFTA...

Cecily Louise "Cicely" Tyson was an American actress. In a career spanning seven decades, she portrayed complex and strong-willed African American women. She received several awards including three Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and a Tony Award, as well as nominations for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award. She was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors in 2015, the...

Thomas Lanier Williams III, known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.

Harry Belafonte OM was an American singer, actor, and civil rights activist who popularized calypso music with international audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Belafonte's career breakthrough album Calypso (1956) was the first million-selling LP by a single artist.

Kevin Patrick Smith is an American writer, director, producer, film editor, and actor. He came to prominence with the low-budget comedy film Clerks (1994), which he wrote, directed, co-produced, co-edited, and acted in as the character Silent Bob of stoner duo Jay and Silent Bob. These characters also appeared in Smith's later films Mallrats (1995), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1999),...

Shimon Peres was an Israeli politician and statesman who served as the prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996 and as the president of Israel from 2007 to 2014. He was a member of twelve cabinets and represented five political parties in a political career spanning 70 years. Peres was elected to the Knesset...

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the longest-serving first lady of the United States, during her husband Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms as president from 1933 to 1945. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role. Widowed in 1945, she served as a United States delegate to the United...

Beatrice Arthur was an American actress, comedian, and singer. She began her career on stage in 1947, attracting critical acclaim before achieving worldwide recognition for her work on television beginning in the 1970s as Maude Findlay in the popular sitcoms All in the Family (1971–1972) and Maude (1972–1978) and later in the 1980s and 1990s as Dorothy Zbornak on The...

Marlon Brando Jr. was an American actor widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential performers in the history of cinema. His career spanned six decades, and he received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, three BAFTAs, a Cannes Film Festival Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award. Brando is credited with being one of...

Isabella Khair Hadid is an American model. Hadid has made 35 appearances on international Vogue covers. In 2022, she was named Model of the Year by the British Fashion Council. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world on its annual list in 2023.

Tony Curtis was an American actor with a career that spanned six decades, achieving the height of his popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s. He acted in more than 100 films, in roles covering a wide range of genres. In his later years, Curtis made numerous television appearances.

Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.

Michael Ross Doughty is an American singer-songwriter and author. He founded the band Soul Coughing in 1992, and as of The Heart Watches While the Brain Burns (2016), has released 18 studio albums, live albums, and EPs, all since 2000.

Jonah Hill is an American actor and filmmaker. Hill ranked 28th on Forbes's list of highest-paid actors from June 2014 to June 2015, at $16 million. Among his accolades are nominations for two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards.

Paul Rand was an American art director and graphic designer. He is known for his corporate logo designs, including logos for IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and NeXT. He developed an American Modernist style from European influences and was one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design. Rand was...

Robert Bartleh Cummings, known professionally as Rob Zombie, is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, filmmaker, and actor. His music and lyrics are notable for their horror and sci-fi themes, and his live shows have been praised for their elaborate shock rock theatricality. He has sold an estimated 15 million albums worldwide. He rose to fame as a founding member...

Peter Michael Falk was an American actor. He is best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo on the NBC/ABC series Columbo (1968–1978, 1989–2003), for which he won four Primetime Emmy Awards (1972, 1975, 1976, 1990) and a Golden Globe Award (1973). In 1996, TV Guide ranked Falk No. 21 on its 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time list....

Jacob Penn Cooper Hurwitz is an American comedian, writer, actor, and member of the comedy duo Jake and Amir. He was hired by the comedy website CollegeHumor after becoming an intern there in 2006, and has written and appeared in original videos for the website, as well as contributing articles which have been published both online and in print. He...

Esther Elizabeth Rolle was an American actress. She is best known for her role as Florida Evans, on the CBS television sitcom Maude, for two seasons (1972–1974), and its spin-off series Good Times, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Musical or Comedy in 1976. In 1979, Rolle became the first...

Óscar Núñez, sometimes credited as Oscar Nunez, is an American actor and comedian. He is best known for his role as the Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martínez on NBC's The Office and its spin-off The Paper. The accolades he has received include two Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Daytime Emmy Awards, alongside a Primetime Emmy Award nomination.

Joel T. Schumacher was an American film director, producer and screenwriter. Raised in New York City by his mother, Schumacher graduated from Parsons School of Design and originally became a fashion designer. He first entered filmmaking as a production and costume designer before gaining writing credits on Car Wash, Sparkle, and The Wiz.

Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and contributions to sociological theory.

Angela Maria "Ani" DiFranco is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums. DiFranco's music has been classified as folk rock and alternative rock, although it has additional influences from punk, funk, hip hop and jazz. She has released all her albums on her own record label, Righteous Babe.

Jenny Han is an American author, screenwriter, executive producer, and showrunner. She is best known for writing The Summer I Turned Pretty trilogy, which she adapted into a TV series for Prime Video. She also wrote the To All the Boys trilogy, which was adapted into a Netflix film series.

James Arthur Baldwin was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. His 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son helped establish his reputation as a voice...

Lena Dunham is an American writer, director, actress, and producer. She is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls (2012–2017), for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham also directed several episodes of Girls and became the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing...

Adrian Joseph Cronauer was an American radio personality and United States Air Force Sergeant, whose experiences as an innovative disc jockey on American Forces Network during the Vietnam War inspired the 1987 film Good Morning, Vietnam starring Robin Williams as Cronauer.

Bradley Charles Cooper is an American actor and filmmaker. He is the recipient of various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award and three Grammy Awards. In addition, he has been nominated for twelve Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award. Cooper appeared on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list three times and on Time's list of the...

Kevin Kwan is a Singaporean-born American novelist and writer of satirical novels Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend, and Rich People Problems. His latest book, Lies and Weddings, was released in June 2024.

Deborah Eisenberg is an American short story writer, actress and teacher. She was a professor of writing at Columbia University.

Mary Jo White is an American attorney who served as the 31st chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 2013 to 2017. She was the first woman to be the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, serving from 1993 to 2002. On January 24, 2013, President Barack Obama nominated White to replace Elisse B....

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first Black American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes:...

Stacey Farber is a Canadian actress. After making an uncredited appearance in season 1, she played Ellie Nash in seasons 2 through 8 of the television series Degrassi: The Next Generation. From 2010 to 2011, she starred in the CBC series 18 to Life. From 2014 to 2017, she played Sydney Katz on the Canadian medical drama Saving Hope, and...

Prabal Gurung is a Nepalese American fashion designer based in New York City. He launched his own eponymous label in 2009. Since 2017, he has also been the creative director for Japanese jewelry house Tasaki.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese government and its stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan...

Julia Chan is an English actress and presenter.

Hage Gottfried Geingob was a Namibian politician who served as the third president of Namibia from 2015 until his death in February 2024. Geingob was the country's first prime minister from 1990 to 2002, and served again from 2012 to 2015.

Elettra-Ingrid Rossellini Wiedemann is an American food editor, writer, fashion model, and socialite. She is the daughter of Italian actress and model Isabella Rossellini and Jonathan Wiedemann, an American. Her maternal grandparents were Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian film director Roberto Rossellini.

Pasqual Maragall Mira is a Spanish retired politician and former President of Generalitat de Catalunya. He had previously been Mayor of Barcelona, from 1982 to 1997, and helped run the city's successful Olympic bid.

Doris Dörrie is a German film director, producer, and author. She is known for her comedic and socially critical films, particularly Men… (1985), which achieved both national and international acclaim. Dörrie has received critical recognition for both her cinematic and literary work, earning several awards, including the 2012 Bavarian Film Award and the 2003 German Book Award.

Thomas Carlyle Ford is an American fashion designer and filmmaker. He launched his eponymous fashion brand in 2005, having previously been the creative director at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. He wrote and directed the films A Single Man (2009) and Nocturnal Animals (2016), and served as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of America from 2019 to 2022.

Andrea Albert Pierre Casiraghi is the elder son of Caroline, Princess of Hanover, and her second husband Stefano Casiraghi. He is the eldest grandchild of Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, and American actress Grace Kelly. Casiraghi is currently fourth in the line of succession to the Monegasque throne, following his twin cousins and his mother.