Welcome faculty to the 2025/26 academic year

Columbia University School of the Arts is delighted to welcome new faculty members to the 2025/26 academic year.

New full-time faculty
Angie Cruz, Associate Professor, Writing
Cruz is a novelist and editor. Her most recent novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water was named a New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Gold Medal, Latino Book Award, and finalist for multiple prizes. Previously, Dominicana was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize and selected for the GMA Book Club. She is the founder and EIC of the literary journal Aster(ix).

James Ijames, Associate Professor, Theatre
Ijames is a Pulitzer Prize–winning and Tony-nominated playwright, director, and educator. His plays have been staged nationally, including at The Public Theater, Steppenwolf, and Wilma Theatre. Awards include the Whiting Award, Pew Fellowship, Steinberg Prizes, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fat Ham, which also earned him a Tony nomination for Best Play.

Minhal Baig, Assistant Professor, Film
Baig is a filmmaker whose latest feature, We Grown Now, premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, winning the TIFF Changemaker Award and multiple festival prizes before its 2024 release by Sony Pictures Classics. Her earlier feature, Hala, premiered at Sundance and was released by Apple.

Hilary Leichter, Assistant Professor, Writing
Leichter is the author of Terrace Story and Temporary, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and The New York Times. She won the 2021 National Magazine Award in Fiction and has held fellowships at Yaddo, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and NYFA.

Term appointments, 2025–26
Leslie Ayvazian, Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Theatre
Ayvazian’s play Nine Armenians won the John Gassner/Outer Critics Circle Award and was produced nationally. Other works include High Dive and Make Me. Her film Every Three Minutes, starring Olympia Dukakis, was produced by Showtime and won a Telly Award.

Daphne Arthur, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
Arthur is an Afro-Venezuelan multidisciplinary artist. She combines painting, sculpture, and drawing to explore individual and collective history, language, symbolism, and memory. Fellowships include the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Anne Critz, The Al Held Fellowship at the American Academy of Rome, the Vermont Studio Center’s Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and The NYFA Queens Art Fund: New Work Grant.

Kenny Rivero, Assistant Professor, Visual Arts
Rivero’s work, which spans paintings, collage, drawings, and sculpture, explores the complexity of identity through narrative images, language, and symbolism. His work is represented in major collections, including the Whitney Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Keri Bertino, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing
Bertino is a fiction, nonfiction, and humor writer whose work has appeared in Joyland, Topic, BOMB, Electric Literature, The Millions, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere, and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology PARENT-SLASH-WRITER: Essays on parenting while writing. 

Lars Horn, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing
Horn is a writer and translator working in literary and experimental nonfiction. Their first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Their writing has appeared in Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, and elsewhere.

Yasmine Seale, Lecturer in Discipline, Writing
Seale’s work includes poetry, translation, criticism, and visual art. Among her books are The Annotated Arabian Nights, described by The New Yorker as “an electric new translation,” and Agitated Air, a collaboration with Robin Moger responding to the visionary poet and metaphysician Ibn Arabi. She was a Fellow of the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris as well as a Fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. 

See the complete list of faculty promotions and updates here.