Simone Forti is widely celebrated as a pioneering and innovative dancer, choreographer, artist, and writer, working at the nexus of minimalism and postmodern dance. Her contributions to the Fluxus movement have made her a highly influential figure, and Forti’s seminal work Dance Constructions (1960-61) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.

Artist Alice Aycock was not only a graduate of Hunter College, but also an esteemed professor at the school. Former students have equally praised her as a dedicated educator and prolific sculptor. Aycock has lived in New York City since 1968, when she moved to the city for the MA program at Hunter College. Active in the downtown art community in the 1960s and ’70s, she exhibited at 112 Greene Street, an experimental space run by her friend and fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark.

Roy DeCarava was an American artist, photographer, and educator known for his groundbreaking photographs of African Americans revealing a unique sensitivity and intimacy. Born in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood in 1919, DeCarava graduated with honors from the Textile High School in 1938.

Esteemed cultural historian, writer, curator, and educator Maurice Berger graduated with his BA from Hunter College in 1978. He continued on to earn a PhD in art history and critical theory from CUNY’s the Graduate Center, where he studied with former Hunter faculty member Rosalind Krauss.

Author, curator, and educator Tom Finkelpearl received his MFA from Hunter College in 1983. Former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and former director of the Queens Museum, Mr. Finkelpearl is currently the Teaching Scholar-in-Residence at the Social Practice CUNY initiative.

Artist Lisa Corinne Davis is best known for her abstract paintings and works on paper resembling multilayered maps exploring perceptions of racial, social and psychological identity. Born in Baltimore, and currently living and working in Brooklyn, Davis received her MFA from Hunter College in 1983—studying with Lynda Benglis, Rosalind Krauss and Ron Gorchov.

Now director of the Noguchi Museum, Hunter College graduate Amy Hau began her career in 1986, as the assistant to the museum’s founder, Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi.

Innovative curator of contemporary art and photography, Roxana Marcoci is currently the David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Born in Bucharest, Romania, Marcoci was immersed in the performing and visual arts as a child through her parents’ careers; her mother worked as an actress and her father was an architect.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic at The New York Times and a graduate of the Master’s in Art History program at Hunter College. After earning his BA from Harvard College in 1970, Cotter moved to downtown Manhattan and found work as a freelance writer and eventually as a contributing editor at Art in America.

Esteemed artist Nari Ward is both a graduate of Hunter College and a distinguished faculty member. A longtime resident of Harlem, Ward’s family immigrated to New York from Jamaica when he was 12 years old. After earning his BA at Hunter in 1989 and then an MFA at Brooklyn College, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and was included in the 45th Venice Biennale just a few years out of school.

Paul Pfeifer is a contemporary artist whose work explores themes of celebrity culture, mass media, and the intersection of technology and humanity. Born in 1966 in Honolulu, Hawaii, Pfeifer moved to the Philippines as a child with his parents, classically trained musicians.

Multidisciplinary artist Elia Alba’s book, Elia Alba, The Supper Club (2019), brings together artists, scholars, and performers of diasporic cultures, through photography, food, and dialogue, to examine race and culture in the United States.  Alba received her BA in 1994 from Hunter College, where she completed a special honors curriculum for interdisciplinary studies and minored in studio art.

Artist, curator, and writer Julie Ault earned a BA in art history and political science from Hunter College in 1995. Ault arrived in New York City from Winthrop, Maine, in 1976, after finishing her high school diploma by taking classes at the nearby University of Maine. It was in the art department on the university campus that she met and became friends with art student Tim Rollins.

Interdisciplinary artist Margarita Cabrera graduated from Hunter’s MFA program in 2001. Her work centers on social-political community issues including cultural identity, migration, violence, inclusivity, labor, and empowerment. Cabrera often creates sculptures made out of mediums ranging from steel, copper, wood, ceramics, and fabric.

Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Crowner is recognized for her innovative large scale paintings that test the boundaries of geometric abstraction while engaging in its art historical legacy. She has been making art since the 1990s, and her paintings using a craft-oriented process of cutting and sewing the canvas to create abstract forms—along with the bodies of work that followed—have garnered her much attention.

Stockholm, Sweden-based multi-disciplinary artist Ellie Ga was born and raised in New York City, and earned her MFA at Hunter College in 2004. Her wide-ranging investigations address pressing social issues, often in unexpected contexts that explore the limits of the human capacity to objectively document and reconstruct both personal and historical events.

An experienced museum leader, curator, and noted scholar of modern and contemporary Asian art, Yasufumi Nakamori became Museum Director and Vice President of Arts and Culture for Asia Society in 2023. He oversees the museum’s exhibition program and collection, as well as arts and culture programming across the global organization.

Artist Julia Whitney Barnes works in a variety of media from cyanotypes, watercolor, gouache, oil paintings, stained glass, murals, and site-specific installations. Born in Newbury, Vermont, Whitney Barnes spent two decades in Brooklyn, before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015. Prior to attending Hunter College she received her BFA from Parsons School of Design.

Brooklyn-based artist Ryan McNamara is both a member of the Hunter College faculty and a graduate of the MFA program. He works in a multitude of media and methods including performance, installation, photography, drawing, and sculpture.

Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer, who grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to the undocumented and cancer communities. A cancer survivor who now seeks to heal others, Maravilla is also a former unaccompanied, undocumented immigrant, who at the age of eight was part of the first wave of children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Hunter College graduate Derek Fordjour was born in 1974 in Memphis, Tennessee, to parents of Ghanaian heritage. He earned a BA at Morehouse College before receiving an MEd in Arts Education at Harvard University. After a circuitous path to art making, Fordjour enrolled in the MFA program at Hunter College, graduating in 2016.