The 2023 AABC Awardees

A highlight of Reunion is the annual presentation of the Alumnae Association of Barnard College (AABC) Awards, where we recognize extraordinary honorees and have the opportunity to hear their inspiring acceptance speeches. This year’s awardees continue the tradition of spanning generations, professions, and contributions to Barnard and society as a whole.

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Jamie Babbit ’93
Woman of Achievement Award

Jamie Babbit has directed several feature films and executive-produced and directed multiple award-winning television shows. Her debut film, But I’m a Cheerleader, was listed by The Independent as one of the top 20 romantic comedies of all time. It is considered a seminal queer film and can be seen on Netflix.

Her TV directing credits include A League of Their Own, HBO’s GIRLS, Silicon Valley, Gilmore Girls, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Russian Doll, and Only Murders in the Building, for which she received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series.

Babbit began her career as Martin Scorsese’s intern on The Age of Innocence. The Itty Bitty Titty Committee, her second feature, won the Grand Jury Prize at the SXSW Film Festival, and her short film Stuck won a jury prize at Sundance. She has been profiled in The New York Times, Out magazine, Time Out, The Los Angeles Times, Filmmaker magazine, and Vanity Fair.

Babbit grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and was a Centennial Scholar at Barnard. She lives in Los Angeles with her girlfriend and two daughters. Her daughter Finley Sperling just finished her first year at Barnard.

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Jessica T. Cannon ’03
Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism

Jessica T. Cannon is a health educator and student wellness advocate who served the Barnard community for 20 years through the Wellness Spot (formerly Well-Woman) Health Promotion Program. Inspired by her time as a student peer educator (2001-2003), she joined the staff of the Wellness Spot in 2004, later becoming director of health promotion and education.

In that role, she had the privilege of providing support and education to students exploring the complexities of health and wellness, both their own and that of their communities. Working with the peer educators she trained and supervised, Cannon expanded the programming and scope of the Wellness Spot, ensuring that students had a comfortable space on campus to use their voices, ask difficult questions, support one another, and, most importantly, “come as you are,” the program’s unofficial motto.

Cannon has a passion for equitable and inclusive reproductive healthcare and was integral in supporting the Primary Care Health Service’s long-acting reversible contraceptives initiative, providing contraceptive counseling to all students seeking these options and facilitating the peer educator “IUDoula” program.

After leaving Barnard in 2021, Cannon and her husband, Hal, moved to her hometown in Virginia to be close to family. She recently began a new chapter at the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, and is eager to share the many lessons in mental and physical well-being she learned at Barnard with a new generation of students.

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Kathleen Drohan ’88
Distinguished Alumna Award

Kathleen Drohan is a veteran musical storyteller, equity activist, and community builder. She serves as the chief marketing and communications officer for the Cleveland Institute of Music, one of the world’s most prestigious conservatories. She was previously vice president of communications for the New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy, whose mission is to prepare graduates of music programs for leadership roles in professional orchestras and ensembles around the world. While there, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Drohan created Miami Art Strong, a collective of more than 100 South Florida arts organizations that came together to keep art and culture alive and accessible to audiences worldwide during the lockdown. She also oversaw the creation of radio programming with WGBH Boston showcasing the music of the Harlem Renaissance. 

Drohan is the creator of the WQXR Instrument Drive for New York Public Radio, which collected, repaired, and redistributed musical instruments to public school and community music programs in NYC and Newark. The program collected more than 6,000 instruments, supporting music education for more than 30,000 students annually. The project garnered worldwide attention and became the most high-profile outreach effort in the history of WQXR. One donation to the program inspired the 2016 Academy Award-nominated film Joe’s Violin.

She is the creator and co-founder of High 5 Tickets to the Arts, which, since 1994, has allowed access to NYC arts for hundreds of thousands of NYC students. She also conceived of and implemented the Uniquely U scholarship, which provides opportunities for NYC students to attend the Long Island-based Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts.

Drohan has served as a consultant with the Defiant Requiem Foundation, honoring the legacy of the Jewish prisoners in Terezín; the Library of Congress concert series; and singer-songwriter James Taylor. Her writing is featured in the New York Times-bestseller Worn Stories, and she has written extensively about her solo travels through the Himalayas, Andes, Atlas Mountains, and more. 

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Naomi Goldberg Haas ’83
Distinguished Alumna Award

Naomi Goldberg Haas is the founding artistic director of Dances for a Variable Population (DVP), established in 2009. DVP is a multigenerational dance company and educational organization committed to promoting strong and creative movement among older adults of all abilities, enabling them to build creativity, improve their mental and physical health, strengthen social connections, and enhance their quality of life. DVP’s model of community creative aging education program, MOVEMENT SPEAKS®, annually serves over 2,500 older adults in NYC and is a model in best practices for creative aging in community-based performance and education programs for older adults. 

As a choreographer, Goldberg Haas has over 35 years of experience in concert dance, theatre, opera, and film. She has collaborated with the Klezmatics, composer Michael Nyman, directors Brian Kulick and Oskar Eustis, and playwright Chuck Mee. She choreographed the world premiere of Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner’s It’s an Undoing World, with music by Alicia Svigals; Kushner’s A Dybbuk at the Public Theater; and plays performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival/Delacorte Theater, Manhattan Theatre Club, McCarter Theatre, and the Mark Taper Forum. Her film work includes Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Goldberg Haas conceived Talking Dance with the Los Angeles Music Center Education and Outreach Division; this unique traveling chamber piece toured for 12 years, reaching over 750,000 students throughout Southern California. She founded the successful intergenerational and mixed-ability dance company Los Angeles Modern Dance & Ballet (1990-2004).

She trained from age 8 to 18 at the School of American Ballet, holds an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and has performed with Pacific Northwest Ballet. She currently teaches and trains teaching artists in her popular MOVEMENT SPEAKS® method for older adults throughout NYC. Her work with the Silesian Dance Theatre and persons with disabilities was presented at the 17th International Dance Festival and Conference in Bytom, Poland, and with seniors and professional dancers in 2010 in Vancouver, B.C. She has been a leader in the field of creative aging and has presented at numerous national conferences and has published articles advocating for the well-being of older adults through the power of dance.

Goldberg Haas received the Gibney ART + ACTION award (2011) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s Award for Performing Arts (2014), served on the Age Friendly Media, Arts & Culture Working Group (2015-2018), and received the Dance/USA 2019-20 Fellowship for Artists addressing social change. In February 2023, she received the New York State Dance Education Association Lifetime Impact in Dance Education award in recognition of her extraordinary lifelong imprint on dance and the dance education community.

She is currently collaborating with Mikhaela Mahony ’11 on a book, Moving Through Life: The Essential Lessons of Dance (University of Florida Press, 2024).

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Gabriella Karefa-Johnson ’13
Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism

Gabriella Karefa-Johnson is a New York-based stylist and editor with a keen eye for up-and-coming designers as well as a narrative-led approach aimed at diversifying representation in fashion.

Known for her looks pairing disparate colors, textures, and silhouettes, Karefa-Johnson worked as associate fashion editor under fashion director Tonne Goodman at Vogue and as fashion director of Garage Magazine in 2017. In 2021, she became the first Black woman to style a cover of Vogue. As global contributing fashion editor-at-large, she has styled many Vogue covers, featuring Serena Williams, Paloma Elsesser, Kamala Harris, Amanda Gorman, and more. Karefa-Johnson is also a member of the Committee of Experts of the 2023 LVMH Prize, which rewards young fashion designers selected for their talent and outstanding creativity, supporting the emergence of a new generation of designers.

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Lisa Najavits ’83
Distinguished Alumna Award

Lisa M. Najavits, Ph.D., is director of treatment innovations and adjunct professor, University of Massachusetts Medical School. She was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years and was a research psychologist at Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Boston, for 12 years.

Her major clinical and research interests are substance abuse, trauma, comorbidity, behavioral addictions, veterans’ mental health, community-based care, development of new psychotherapies, and outcome research. She is the author of more than 200 professional publications, as well as the books Seeking Safety, a treatment manual for trauma and addiction; Finding Your Best Self: Recovery from Addiction, Trauma, or Both; A Woman’s Addiction Workbook, and the upcoming treatment manual Creating Change.

Najavits has served as president of the Society of Addiction Psychology of the American Psychological Association and has consulted widely on public health efforts in addictions and trauma, both nationally and internationally, including for the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Surgeon General, the United Nations, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine. She is on various advisory boards, and her awards include the 1997 Young Professional Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, the 1998 Early Career Contribution Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, the 2004 Emerging Leadership Award of the American Psychological Association Committee on Women, and the 2009 Betty Ford Award of the Addiction Medical Education and Research Association.

Najavits received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University. She is a licensed psychologist in Massachusetts and conducts a psychotherapy practice. 

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Aditi Somani ’18
Young Alumna Award

Aditi Somani is the special assistant to the first-ever counselor for racial equity at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The counselor’s office leads efforts to advance equity in all of the Treasury’s work, including implementation of the historic Inflation Reduction Act.

Prior to joining the Treasury Department, Somani served in the White House, where she was appointed to President Biden’s Oval Office team on day one of the Biden-Harris administration. She started her career as a technology investment banker at J.P. Morgan and later joined the Biden for President paid media team to support the 2020 general election campaign.

Somani received her B.A. in economics cum laude at Barnard, where she completed the Athena Scholars Program and worked with several organizations dedicated to advocacy and improving economic outcomes for women and girls. Somani is a native New Yorker from Queens and a proud daughter of Indian immigrants.

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Linda Sweet ’63
Award for Service to Barnard

Linda Sweet was a founding partner and director of the museum practice at Management Consultants for the Arts, where she is now partner emerita. Sweet began her museum career as an educator at the Brooklyn Museum and was dean of the Department of Public Education at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has taught art history and museum education at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Bank Street College, and Leslie College, and in 1974 was awarded a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to study museums in Europe.

Sweet majored in art history at Barnard and received a master’s degree from New York University and a certificate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business Administration’s Institute for Not-for-Profit Management.

An active member of the American Association of Museums (now the American Alliance of Museums), Sweet was a founder of the Education Committee and its vice chairperson from 1978 to 1980. In 1976, she was elected to the Council of the Alliance and for eight years served on the Membership Committee.

Sweet has been in service to Barnard since her undergraduate days, when she was a member of the student government. As an alumna, she has served on the Barnard Board of Trustees, as AABC president, as chair of the Annual Giving Committee and member of the Leadership, Fellowship, and Nominating committees, and in various fundraising roles that saw her connecting with fellow alumnae to raise vital funds for Barnard. An incredible force of progress and innovation for the AABC, Sweet is forever a positive fulcrum for Barnard.

Sweet is a past president of ArtTable, a national membership organization of women in the visual arts, and a former member of the Collections Committee of the Grey Art Gallery of New York University. She was a trustee of Barnard College from 2015 to 2019, where she was co-chair of the Committee on Academic Affairs, served on the Governance Committee, and was a member of the Council on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. She chaired the Annual Fund Committee and Leadership Council for the Alumnae Association of the College and was an active member of several other committees. She was a member of the board of the Greater Hudson Heritage Network and chair of its Governance Committee and is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. She sits on the Development Committee of the Tompkins Corners Cultural Center in Putnam County, New York.

Since 2015, Sweet has been a docent at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.