100 Notable alumni of Smith College

Rochelle "Shelly" Lazarus is an American business executive who is the chairman emerita of Ogilvy & Mather.

Jessica Brody is an American author and writing educator. Her writing consists mainly of young adult fiction.

Tinatin "Tina" Bokuchava is a Georgian politician who has served as a member of Parliament from 2012 to 2025 and as Chair of the United National Movement since June 2024.

David Peck Todd was an American astronomer. He produced a complete set of photographs of the 1882 transit of Venus.

Emma Mulvaney-Stanak is an American politician who has served as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont since 2024. A member of the Vermont Progressive Party, she was a member of the Burlington city council from 2009 and 2010 to 2012, and the Vermont House of Representatives from 2021 to 2024.

Angela Lynn Rasmussen is an American virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

Mary Abby van Kleeck was an American social scientist of the 20th century. She was a notable figure in the American labor movement as well as a proponent of scientific management and a planned economy.

María Eugenia Estenssoro is a Bolivian Argentine politician, journalist and activist for women's rights. She represented the city of Buenos Aires in the Argentine Senate from 2007 to 2013.

Katherine Stieglitz, or Katherine Stieglitz Stearns, was the daughter of Emmeline, or Emmy, and Alfred Stieglitz, an American photographer and modern art promoter. She was the subject of many of her father's photographs, particularly in her early years. They were exhibited and received praise for their wholesome sentiment. She graduated from Smith College before marrying Milton Sprague Stearns. After the...

Sallie McFague was an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how Christians may speak about God. She applied this approach, in particular, to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the Earth as if it were God's "body". She was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of...

Brinda Somaya is an Indian architect and urban conservationist.

Mary Berenson was an American art historian, now thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings of her second husband, Bernard Berenson.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander CC OBC LL.D. was a German-born Canadian landscape architect. Her firm, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Landscape Architects, was founded in 1953, when she moved to Vancouver.

Farah Pandith is an American academic. She was appointed the first-ever Special Representative to Muslim Communities in June 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The position was made specifically for her after she briefed Secretary Clinton about her work in the Bush administration. She had the rare distinction of being a political appointee for two Republican presidents and...

Merrie Marcia Spaeth is an American public relations and political consultant.

Carolyn Dineen King is a Senior United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Her chambers are in Houston, Texas.

Alice Stuart Parker Pyle, known professionally as Alice Parker, was an American composer, arranger, conductor and teacher.

Sarah "Sally" Cruikshank is an American cartoonist, animator and artist, whose work includes animation for the Children's Television Workshop program Sesame Street, and whose short Quasi at the Quackadero (1975) was inducted into the United States National Film Registry.

Julie Courtney Sullivan, better known as J. Courtney Sullivan, is an American novelist and former writer for The New York Times.

Margery Eagan is a talk radio host and a frequent guest on CNN, ABC, Fox News, and the Imus in the Morning radio show. For many years she was a columnist for the Boston Herald. Subjects of her commentaries include gender/women's issues, Catholicism, and politics.

Edith Lewis was a magazine editor at McClure's Magazine, the managing editor of Every Week Magazine, and an advertising copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. Lewis was Willa Cather's domestic partner and was named executor of Cather's literary estate in Cather's will. After Cather's death, Lewis published a memoir of Cather in 1953 titled Willa Cather Living.

Hilary S. Franz is an American politician and conservation attorney who previously served as the 16th Washington State Commissioner of Public Lands from 2017 to 2025. She is a member of the Democratic Party who was previously a member of the Bainbridge Island City Council and was elected as commissioner in 2016. She currently serves as President and CEO of...

Jerry Zaks is an American stage and television director, and actor. He won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play and Drama Desk Award for directing The House of Blue Leaves (1986), Lend Me a Tenor (1989), and Six Degrees of Separation (1991) and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and Drama Desk Award for...

Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding...

Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes was an American mathematician and educator. She was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in mathematics, which she earned from the Catholic University of America in 1943.

Adrianne Regina Todman is an American government official who served as the deputy secretary of housing and urban development in the Biden administration from June 2021 to January 2025. Todman served as acting secretary of housing and urban development upon Marcia Fudge's resignation in March 2024. Todman was previously the CEO of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials...

Eunice Roberta Hunton Carter was an American lawyer. She was one of New York's first female African-American lawyers and one of the first African-American prosecutors in the United States. She was active in the Pan-African Congress and in United Nations committees to advance the status of women in the world. She led a massive prostitution racketeering investigation, building the case...

Senda Berenson Abbott was a figure of women's basketball and the author of the first Basketball Guide for Women (1901–07). She was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame as a contributor on July 1, 1985, the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1987, and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 1999.

Florence Rena Sabin was an American physician and medical scientist known for pioneering work on the development of the lymphatic system and for later transforming public health in Colorado. She was the first woman to hold a full professorship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and the first woman...

Kimberly Drew is an American art influencer and writer. She is best known as the former social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her use of the social media handle @MuseumMammy. Drew released her first book, This Is What I Know About Art in June 2020, as part of a children's book series from Penguin, and published...

Cheryl Crawford was an American theatre producer and director.

Dorothy Norman was an American photographer, writer, editor, arts patron and advocate for social change.

Satya Rhodes-Conway is an American politician and the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin. She was first elected in 2019 and was re-elected in 2023. She previously served on the Madison Common Council between 2007 and 2013. She is the first out lesbian elected as a mayor in Wisconsin, and only the second woman to become mayor of Madison.

Gretchen Menn is an American guitarist and composer who has her own original instrumental work and is also the lead guitarist for Zepparella, an all-female Led Zeppelin tribute band. She was included in Guitar Player Magazine's '50 Sensational Female Guitarists' and Guitar Player Magazine's '50 Years of Extraordinary Players.' In 2017 she was one of 11 female guitarists selected to...

Sandy Skoglund is an American photographer and installation artist. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art. She is well known for her intricately designed environments, which utilize painterly and sculptural techniques within staged and performative scenes. Her contributions to photography have advanced the medium as a form of conceptual art, and she is...

Laura D'Andrea Tyson is an American economist and university administrator who is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley and a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute. She served as the 16th Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and 2nd...

Olive Higgins Prouty was an American novelist and poet, best known for her 1923 novel Stella Dallas and her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in her 1941 novel Now, Voyager.

Jkvr. Corinne Elisabeth de Jonge van Ellemeet is a Dutch politician.

Helen DeWitt is an American novelist. She is the author of the novels The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods (2011) and the short story collection Some Trick (2018). In 2025, a novel which she co-wrote with Ilya Gridneff and published on her website in 2008, Your Name Here, was republished as a commercial book.

Amy Beth Bloom is an American writer and psychotherapist. She is professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University, and has been nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Louka Katseli is a Greek politician and economist. She is Professor Emerita at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She served as chair of the National Bank of Greece from 2015 to 2016, as Minister for Economy, Competitiveness and Shipping from 2009 to 2010 and as Minister of Labour and Social Security from 2010 to 2011. In January 2025...

Kathleen Woodward is an American academic. She is a Lockwood Professor in Humanities and in English at the University of Washington and has been the Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities since 2000. Her areas of specialization include 20th-century American literature and culture; discourse of the emotions; technology and science studies; and age studies; digital humanities; and gender,...

Elim Chan is a Hong Kong-born conductor. In 2025 she was the conductor at the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall.

Leyla Sarah McCalla is an American classical and folk musician. She was a cellist with the Grammy Award–winning string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, but left to focus on her solo career.

Jane Hyatt Yolen is an American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children's books. She is the author or editor of more than 400 books, of which the best known is The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella. Her other works include the Nebula Award−winning short works "Sister Emily's Lightship" and "Lost Girls", Owl Moon, The Emperor and the Kite, and...

Nicola Dickson "Niki" Tsongas is an American politician who served as a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts from 2007 to 2019. She held the seat formerly held by her husband, the late Paul Tsongas, for the district numbered as Massachusetts's 5th congressional district from 2007 to 2013 and as Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district from 2013 to 2019. She is a member...

Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. She developed the paired-associate learning technique and the theory of self-psychology. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. In 1895 Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by...

Susan Lindauer is an American journalist and former U.S. Congressional staffer who was charged with "acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government" and violating U.S. financial sanctions during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She was incarcerated in 2005 and released the next year after two judges ruled her mentally unfit to stand trial. The government...

Cynthia Lee Harris was an American film, television, and stage actress. She is best known for her roles in the television series Edward & Mrs. Simpson and the sitcom Mad About You.

Ann Matthews Martin is an American writer of children's and young adult fiction, known best for The Baby-Sitters Club series.

Antara Dev Sen is a British-born Indian journalist based in Delhi.

Mabel "Muffie" Wentworth Brandon Cabot is an American heiress and socialite. During the 1980s she served as social secretary to Nancy Reagan. She is the mother of actress Ali Wentworth.

Halina Poświatowska was a Polish poet and writer.

Kim Michelle Janey is an American politician, community organizer, and nonprofit executive who served as acting mayor of Boston for eight months in 2021. She served as president of the Boston City Council from 2020 to 2022, and as a member of the council from the 7th district from 2018 to 2022. As a black woman, her tenure as acting...

Meg Wolitzer is an American novelist, known for The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Uncoupling, The Interestings, and The Female Persuasion. She is a co-director of the BookEnds writing fellowship program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Stephanie Cutter is an American communications and political consultant. She served as an advisor to President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, First Lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Kamala Harris. She previously worked in campaign and communications roles for other prominent Democrats including Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Erin Morgenstern is an American multimedia artist and the author of two fantasy novels. The Night Circus (2011) was published in more than a dozen languages by 2013 and won the annual Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is a 2012 recipient of an Alex Award. Her second book, The Starless Sea, was published in 2019.

Catharine Alice MacKinnon is an American feminist legal scholar, activist, and author. She is the Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School, where she has been tenured since 1990, and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. From 2008 to 2012, she was the special gender adviser to the...

Jane Margaret Harman is an American former politician who served as the U.S. representative for California's 36th congressional district from 1993 to 1999 and again from 2001 to 2011. A member of the Democratic Party, she was the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee (2002–2006), before she chaired the Homeland Security Committee's Intelligence Subcommittee (2007–2011). Harman was a conservative...

Jaya Jaitly is an Indian politician, activist, author, Indian handicrafts curator and former President of Samata Party.

Emily Webster Murphy is an American attorney and former government official who served as the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA) from 2017 to 2021. Before serving in the GSA, Murphy was an attorney for the Republican National Committee and worked for several congressional committees and executive departments in the field of acquisition policy.

Jean Struven Harris was the headmistress of The Madeira School for girls in McLean, Virginia, who made US news in the early 1980s when she was tried and convicted of the murder of her ex-lover, Herman Tarnower, a well-known cardiologist and author of the best-selling book The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet.

Sally Sterling Quinn is an American author and journalist. She writes about religion for a blog at The Washington Post.

Desiree Akhavan is an American filmmaker, writer, and actress. She is best known for her 2014 feature film debut Appropriate Behavior, and her 2018 film The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

Joan Mitchell was an American artist who worked primarily in painting and printmaking, and also used pastel and made other works on paper. She was an active participant in the New York School of artists in the 1950s. A native of Chicago, she is associated with the American abstract expressionist movement, even though she lived in France for much of...

Wendy Ruth Sherman is an American diplomat who served as the United States deputy secretary of state from April 2021 to July 2023. She was a professor of the practice of public leadership and director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior counselor at Albright Stonebridge Group, and a senior fellow at the Belfer...

Stanley William Zmitrowicz Jr., known professionally as Bill Smitrovich, is an American actor.

Maya Deren was a Russian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.

Joanna Barnes was an American actress and writer.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is a Pakistani journalist, filmmaker and political activist known for her work in films that highlight gender inequality against women. She is the recipient of seven Emmy Awards and two Academy Awards.

Mary Claire "Mimi" Kennedy is an American actress, author and activist. Best known for her roles in television sitcoms, Kennedy co-starred in numerous short-lived sitcoms before her role as Ruth Sloan on Homefront (1991–93). She received wider recognition with her roles in the Chuck Lorre-created sitcoms Dharma & Greg (1997–2002) and Mom (2013–2021). For her performance in the latter, Kennedy...

Bonnie Gail Franklin was an American actress. She is best known for her leading role as Ann Romano in the television series One Day at a Time (1975–1984). She was nominated for Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe Awards.

Olatokunbo Susan Olasobunmi Abeke "Toks" Olagundoye is a Nigerian actress known for playing Jackie Joyner-Kersee on The Neighbors, Hayley Shipton on Castle and Olivia Finch on Frasier. She also voices Nanefua Pizza on Steven Universe, Mrs. Beakley on DuckTales, Countess Cleo on Carmen Sandiego, Zamfir on Castlevania and Mel Medarda on Arcane.

Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel A Little Life, which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, and for being the editor-in-chief of T Magazine.

Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh was an American writer and aviator. She was the wife of decorated pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh, with whom she made many exploratory flights.

Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed...

Sara Hilary Haines is an American television host and journalist. She is known as one of the co-hosts of the ABC daytime talk shows The View and Strahan, Sara and Keke and the host of the game show The Chase. For her work on the first two series, she received Daytime Emmy Award nominations. She has also worked as a...

Yolanda Denise King was an American activist and campaigner for African-American rights and first-born child of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, who pursued artistic and entertainment endeavors and public speaking. Her childhood experience was greatly influenced by her father's highly public activism.

Piper Eressea Kerman is an American author. She was indicted in 1998 on charges of felonious money-laundering activities, and sentenced to 15 months' detention in a federal correctional facility, of which she served 13 months. Her memoir of her prison experiences, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (2010), was adapted into the critically acclaimed Netflix...

Nancy Davis Reagan was an American actress who was First Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989. She was the second wife of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States.

Julia Carolyn Child was an American chef, author, and television personality. She is recognized for having brought French cuisine to the American public with her debut cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her subsequent television programs, the most notable of which was The French Chef, which premiered in 1963.

Gloria Marie Steinem is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She is also a former CIA operative, where she focused on anti-communism.

Barbara Bush was the first lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, as the wife of George H. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States. She was previously second lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989, when her husband was vice president under President Ronald Reagan, and founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family...

Natalie Zemon Davis, CC was an American-Canadian historian of the early modern period. She was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University. Her work originally focused on France, but it later broadened to include other parts of Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. For example, her book, Trickster Travels (2006), views Italy, Spain, Morocco and other parts...

Jacqueline Lee Kennedy Onassis, also known as Jackie Kennedy, and as Jackie O following her second marriage, was the first lady of the United States from 1961 to 1963, as the wife of President John F. Kennedy. She was regarded as an international icon for her unique fashion choices, and her work as a cultural ambassador of the United States...

Jane Cooke Wright, also known as Jane Jones, was a pioneering cancer researcher and surgeon noted for her contributions to chemotherapy. In particular, Wright is credited with developing the technique of using human tissue culture rather than laboratory mice to test the effects of potential drugs on cancer cells. She also pioneered the use of the drug methotrexate to treat...

Rebecca A. Balint is an American politician who is a member of the United States House of Representatives from Vermont's at-large congressional district. A progressive Democrat, she served as a member of the Vermont Senate from Windham County from 2015 to 2023, as majority leader from 2017 to 2021, and as president pro tempore from 2021 to 2023.

Shelley Marie Hack is an American actress, model, producer, and political activist. She is best known as the face of Revlon's Charlie perfume from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, and for her role as Tiffany Welles in the fourth season of Charlie's Angels (1979–80).

Patricia Anne Wettig is an American actress and playwright. She is best known for her role as Nancy Weston in the television series Thirtysomething (1987–1991), for which she received a Golden Globe Award and three Primetime Emmy Awards.

Julie Nixon Eisenhower is an American author who is the younger daughter of former U.S. president Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat Nixon. Her husband, David, is the grandson of former U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie Eisenhower.

Tammy Suzanne Green Baldwin is an American politician and lawyer serving since 2013 as the junior United States senator from Wisconsin. A member of the Democratic Party, she has also served as the secretary of the Senate Democratic Caucus since 2017. Baldwin has been the dean of the United States congressional delegation from Wisconsin since 2023, when Representative Ron Kind...

Ruth Diana Lounsbury, better known as Ruth Ozeki, is an American author, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. Her books and films, including the novels My Year of Meats (1998), All Over Creation (2003), A Tale for the Time Being (2013), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021), seek to integrate personal narrative and social issues, and deal with themes...

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved....

Janet Margaret Mitchell is a Scottish Conservative Party politician. She was a Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) for the Central Scotland region from 2003 to 2021.

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and author. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for The Colossus and Other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965), and The Bell Jar (1963), a semi-autobiographical novel published one month before her suicide. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection...

Shehrbano "Sherry" Rehman is a Pakistani politician and journalist who has been the member of the Senate of Pakistan since 2015. She was the first female Leader of the Opposition in the Senate from March to August 2018 and served as Pakistan's Ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2013. She is currently serving as the Federal Minister for...

Saadia Zahidi is an economist and senior managing director at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and co-authors the WEF's Future of Jobs, Global Gender Gap and Global Risks Reports. She has served on the United Nations Secretary General's high level panel on women's economic empowerment and on the European Space Agency's (ESA) high level advisory group on human and robotic...

Deborah Bergamini is an Italian politician, manager and journalist currently member of the Italian Parliament.

Susan George was an American and French political and social scientist, activist and writer on global social justice, Third World poverty, underdevelopment and debt. She was the president of the Transnational Institute, a think-tank located in Amsterdam. She was a fierce critic of the present policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (IBRD) and what she called their...