Dean’s 2024 Holiday Letter
Dear Friend of COM,
Many congratulations to our students, faculty, and staff for a wonderful year – and huge thanks to you for your support of COM!
Our college continues to attract national recognition. This year, the Global Creative College Rankings named COM a top school for advertising, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and The Wrap listed it among the best for filmmakers, and PRWeek included it on its annual Education A-List.
I’m excited to share a selection of many more achievements by our students, alumni and faculty.
STUDENTS
COM journalism students provided blanket coverage of the New Hampshire presidential primaries and then the November election through BUTV and BU News Service.
COM advertising students took home 16 Hatch Awards, more than any other school, in one of the country’s premier competitions for New England creatives in marketing and advertising.
Tianyu Du won a national Directors Guild of America Student Award for her film, “Bob.”
Eight received the first-ever COM Graduate Student Awards, including Graduate Student of the Year Shivangi Sethi.
PRWeek honored COM students at PRoBono, who worked overnight creating campaigns for worthy causes, with its Impact Communications Award.
BUTV’s Good Morning BU won a prestigious Silver Telly award, honoring the best in local and regional video and television.
COM student journalists produced stories with national and local impact: an investigation for Good Morning America and ProPublica of judges who did not recuse when facing potential appearances of impropriety; a story for the Associated Press about Congressional members traveling the globe with family members paid by private interest groups; and a six-part series for Boston NBC 10 exploring the troubled state of Massachusetts police.
Julian Zhu and Andrew Burke-Stevenson won for spot news at the College Photographer of the Year awards.
Kairen Shi and Iraj Chaudhry’s campaign for Fanta received three coveted pencils at the Young Ones advertising awards.
The 44th annual Redstone Film Festival celebrated student work in film and screenwriting for a near-capacity crowd of families and friends.
ALUMNI
Reporting for ProPublica, Kristen Berg (COM’11) and colleagues won a Pulitzer and other major journalism awards.
Bill Fine (COM’77) was inducted to Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
Alexa Sudarto (COM’23) won the Silver at Young Lions Indonesia, recognizing top digital advertising.
Four COM grads received nominations for Writers Guild Awards: Julia Cox, Benny Safdie, Felipe Torres Medina and Rob Turbovsky.
ABC News multi-platform reporter Em Nguyen (COM’15) won BU’s Young Alumni Award.
Two COM alums – Alex Cooper (COM’17) and Howard Stern (COM’76) – scored interviews with Kamala Harris.
Adweek named Vanessa de Beaumont (COM’17) of the ad agency Mischief to the magazine’s annual Creative 100 list.
FACULTY
COM welcomed new department chairs: Craig Shepherd for Film and Television and Sung-Un Yang for Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations.
Maria Elizabeth Grabe joined as the inaugural Dalton Family Professor in New or Emerging Media and Division of Emerging Media Studies director.
Michelle Amazeen and Sung-Un Yang were listed among the top 2% most highly cited scholars, according to the annual Stanford University survey.
Greg Marinovich launched a new summer course in Padua, Italy, for students aspiring to report in conflict zones.
David Abel produced two documentaries, In The Whale and Inundation District, each touring the film circuit.
COM’s Roy Grundmann received a Fulbright Award to serve as visiting faculty at Karl Franzens University in Austria – the first faculty member so awarded since 2008.
Local USA, hosted by Tina McDuffie, won a Webby with Retro Report for the episode, “Generations Stolen.”
The International Communication Association recognized AnneMarie McClain and her co-author with a Top Faculty Paper Award, and Kathryn Coduto with an Emerging Scholar Award.
“Pooja, Sir,” a new feature film by COM’s Deepak Rauniyar, was featured at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival before its U.S. debut later in the year.
COM faculty were busy with podcasting. Amy Geller (COM’16) examined Black-Jewish solidarity in The Rabbis Go South. Richard Lehr completed a second season of the true crime podcast, Truth & Lies, for ABC. COM’s Communication Research Center premiered The COMversation, with an episode exploring political misinformation, hosted by Charlotte Howell.
The Journalism Department brought together key figures in the industry: nationally, with top editors from major newspaper coming together for two days of meetings, and regionally, leaders of nonprofit news startups seeking to fill the void left by local newspaper closures.
Films of COM’s Jan Egleson were celebrated in career retrospective at storied Brattle theater.
Adam Lapidus and A. Sherrod Blakely received this year’s top COM faculty awards, honoring their work in instruction and advising, respectively.
Best,
Mariette DiChristina
Dean
