Awards, Honors, and Nominations
Big Night at the Grammys
Three members of the Purchase music community won four awards at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards ceremony.
Samara Joy
Samara Joy ’21 (Jazz Studies)—who won Best New Artist and Best New Jazz Vocal Album in 2023—came back this year with the Best Jazz Performance for “Tight.” Joy has not only taken the Jazz world by storm, but she’s also reaching the next generation by amassing 6.5M likes and more than 656k followers on TikTok.
Silas Brown
Assistant Professor of Music Silas Brown ’10 (Studio Production) won two Grammy awards this year, marking the fifth and sixth of his career. As producer with Mark Dover, he won the Best Classical Compendium category with Passion for Bach and Coltrane, featuring Alex Brown, Harlem Quartet, Imani Winds, Edward Perez, Neal Smith, and A.B. Spellman.
As mastering engineer, he won the category Best Engineered Album, Classical for his work on the recording Contemporary American Composers, with engineers David Frost and Charlie Post (Riccardo Muti and Chicago Symphony Orchestra). Brown has been nominated for eight Grammy awards.
Nicole Zuraitis
Nicole Zuraitis, Lecturer of Jazz Studies, Voice, won the category Best Jazz Vocal Album for How Love Begins. Zuraitis is a singer-songwriter, pianist, arranger, bandleader, and winner of the prestigious 2021 American Traditions Vocal Competition Gold Medal. Zuraitis’ arrangement of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” co-written with renowned drummer and bandleader Dan Pugach, was nominated for a 2019 Grammy.
Nominations
Grammy-nominated artists from Purchase include musician and arranger Kendric McCallister ’17–’20 (Jazz Studies), who received a nomination for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals for his work on Samara Joy’s “Lush Life,” and producer, songwriter, and recording artist RIOTUSA ’22 (Communications), who earned nominations in two songwriting categories, Best Rap Song and Best Song Written For Visual Media, for “Barbie World” from Barbie The Album. RIOT (aka Ephrem Louis Lopez, Jr.) co-wrote the song with Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice (aka Isis Gaston)—he met the latter at Purchase. Ice Spice was nominated for Best New Artist.
Tony Awards
Brian MacDevitt ’80 (Design/Tech) earned his sixth Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Musical for his work on The Outsiders. (He shares the award with Hana S. Kim.) Playing at the Bernard Jacobs Theater, the musical is based on the 1967 classic novel by S.E. Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1982 landmark motion picture.
Peabody Awards
Rosalynde LeBlanc ’94 (Dance), a BESSIE-nominated performer, choreographer, educator, and producer, won a Peabody Award for the documentary she produced and co-directed with Tom Hurwitz. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters tells the story of Jones’ powerful and healing ballet sprung out of the heartbreaking AIDS crisis. The film opened season 15 of the popular documentary series AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange series, co-produced by Black Public Media (BPM) and WORLD.
SAG Awards
Zoë Winters ’07 (Acting) was once again honored for her work on the HBO hit Succession, which aired its final season in 2023, winning the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.
BAFTA Awards
One of independent film’s most respected casting directors and Lecturer in Acting, Susan Shopmakerreceived the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Award for Best Casting for the award-winning film The Holdovers. See her moving acceptance speech.
Cannes Critic’s Week
Blue Sun Palace, the first feature film by Lecturer Connie Tsang, was selected for Cannes Critics’ Week. One of seven selections, and the only US film, it won the festival’s French Touch prize, given with the aim of “shining a light on an act of cinema that features creativity and boldness.” Cannes Critics’ Week takes place alongside the main Cannes Film Festival and presents first and second feature films from emerging directors. Read more about the film and Tsang.
SUNY Chancellor’s Award
Caitly Dominici ’24 (Psychology, minor in Sociology) and Sara Richter ’24 (Dance and Anthropology) were both 2024 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence recipients, honored at a ceremony April 11, 2024 among the 193 students from 62 campuses who received SUNY’s highest honor for academic excellence and leadership. Read more about Caitly and Sara’s impressive achievements.
President’s Award for Public Art
The selected President’s Award for Public Art project this year highlights the work of Jessica Maffia MFA ’24(Visual Arts). On view in the Humanities Lobby to the left of the main entrance, Untitled (2023) uses soil, space, and video projections to invite the community to consider the natural world around them. Read and see more of her “implied being.”
In Other News
Scary Stuff
Midnight on Beacon Street, the debut novel by Emily Ruth Verona ’12 (Creative Writing and Cinema Studies), was included in the New York Times’ roundup “4 New Horror Novels That Are as Fresh as They Are Terrifying,” in which they described it as “an impressive debut.” The work bridges both Verona’s majors at Purchase with its references to classic horror films of the 70s and 80s.
Band to Watch
What do The Simpsons, sculptor Louise Bourgeois, skate culture, and overblown “eye candy stuff like Mad Max or the Speed Racer movie” all have in common? They represent the “non-music influences” of the unconventional band Lip Critic that’s grabbing attention, such as “Band to Watch” on stereogum.com.
Formed at Purchase in 2018, Lip Critic is Studio Production majors Connor Kleitz ’21, sampler and co-producer, Bret Kaser ’20, lead vocalist and lyricist, and Ilan Natter ’20, one of two drummers. The other is Danny Eberle ’22, an Anthropology major with minors in Journalism and Media Studies. Read more about the influence of their Purchase experiences and what other publications say about their debut album Hex Dealer.
Well Deserved Recognition
The Studio Production program made Billboard Magazine’s list of a dozen colleges students should consider if they want to be music producers in their piece “Want to Be a Producer? Check Out These Audio Engineering Programs.” They point to the hands-on learning and wide variety of music genres experienced here as solid features of the program.
