Reunion Celebration: Alumni Awards

Reunion Celebration: Alumni Awards

Most likely, you’ve already heard their names or seen their work—and if you haven’t, you will: Susan Feniger ’76, Adrian Brandon ’15, Romarilyn Ralston ’14, and Steven Liang ’10. They are, respectively, Pitzer’s 2021 and 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award (DAA) and Young Alumni Achievement Award (YAAA) recipients. Due to the postponement of Alumni Weekend last year, all four alumni were honored during this year’s Alumni Awards Ceremony, held virtually on May 1 during Reunion Celebration.

“This year’s four amazing honorees reflect what is best about Pitzer College,” said trustee and Alumni Board President Michele Siqueiros ’95, who served as master of ceremonies. “From top chefs to top artists to top leaders in Hollywood and social justice, the four are just incredible.”

The ceremony also featured some very special guests. Trustee and Pitzer alumna Robin Kramer ’75 and Professor Alicia Bonaparte introduced the 2021 awardees, and professors Nigel Boyle and Gina Lamb introduced the 2020 recipients.

Keep reading to learn more about Feniger, Brandon, Ralston, and Liang’s work and watch the video of the ceremony to hear directly from the awardees and some of the most influential Pitzer people in their lives.

Susan Feniger ’76: 2021 Distinguished Alumni Award Honoree

Pitzer’s Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes a graduate who boldly puts the spirit of a Pitzer education into action and demonstrates a commitment to making meaningful changes in their community.

Harvey Botwin, who was my economics professor, was magic. I took a macroeconomics class with him, and I was blown away. He was the most magical professor I’ve ever had. He played such an important part in my life—he allowed me, in my last year, to do an independent study from Pitzer to go to the Culinary Institute of America.
Susan Feniger

Susan Feniger, a chef and entrepreneur, is best known for founding the successful Border Grill restaurant with her business partner, Mary Sue Milliken. In 1985, the year they opened Border Grill, they won a James Beard Award. Since then, the two women have expanded their food empire to include a network of restaurants stretching from Downtown LA to Las Vegas, as well as catering services and food trucks. Most recently, they opened Socalo, a California canteen and Mexican pub in Santa Monica.

Feniger and Milliken have co-authored numerous cookbooks, including City Cuisine and Mesa Mexicana, and starred on The Food Network series “Too Hot Tamales” and “Tamales World Tour.” In 2018, Feniger and Milliken became the first women (and first duo) to win the Julia Child Award.

Feniger gives back to her community by working closely with Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, Share Our Strength, and the Human Rights Campaign. A co-founder of Chefs Collaborative, she also serves on the boards of the Scleroderma Research Foundation, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and the Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board. Feniger graduated from Pitzer with a degree in economics.

Adrian Brandon ’15: 2021 Young Alumni Achievement Award Honoree

Pitzer’s Young Alumni Achievement Award recognizes graduates of the last 10 years who apply Pitzer’s unique educational experience to their professional life and find creative and innovative ways to make impactful changes in the community.

I challenge myself to figure out how art can be my way of sharing a perspective or educating someone on an experience they may not be living. In many ways, Pitzer really shaped me as an artist by forcing me to challenge things that I see and not just take them as they come, but to take them in and pause, dig a little deeper, figure out my perspective, and understand other people’s perspective.
Adrian Brandon

Adrian Brandon is an artist whose work reflects the full spectrum of the Black experience. He captures what he describes as “the unique joy, swagger, and love” shared in the Black community and raises awareness about racial injustice and violence. In February 2019, Brandon started “Stolen”—a portrait series dedicated to Black Americans who have been killed by police. He begins each work with an outline, then colors in the portrait for an amount of time that correlates with how long the person lived: 1 year of life = 1 minute of color. The unfinished portraits embody the years of life stolen. The series was on view at his first public exhibition, in Brooklyn, NY, in November 2019, and can be viewed on Instagram, where Brandon’s work has drawn upwards of 200,000 followers. His current series, “Brooklyn Windows,” reflects the isolation and complexity of life during COVID-19.

An environmental analysis and studio art major at Pitzer, Brandon organized and exhibited in the 2015 senior art show, Nine. He studied abroad at Pitzer’s Firestone Center for Restoration Ecology in Costa Rica and played on the Sagehens Men’s Basketball team. His senior year, he was awarded a Fulbright to teach English in Taiwan. Brandon’s artwork lives on where he has lived: his powerful murals in Costa Rica, Taiwan, and on the Pitzer campus speak to art’s ability to communicate across divides of culture and time.

Romarilyn Ralston ’14: 2020 Distinguished Alumni Award Honoree

The first day I walked onto Pitzer’s campus, I felt a strong sense of empowerment, responsibility, and service, and I knew that if I were to be blessed with a Pitzer education, my life would be changed. I live each day in service to my community and the public good. Supporting the higher education and successful reintegration of the formerly incarcerated while working in the spirit of prison abolition, racial, gender, and social justice.
Romarilyn Ralston

Romarilyn Ralston ’14 is the program director of Project Rebound at California State University, Fullerton, a program that provides individualized support to assist formerly incarcerated students in pursuing higher education. Ralston, who was incarcerated at the age of 24 and served 23 years in prison, went on to receive her bachelor’s degree in gender and feminist studies as a New Resources student from Pitzer College and her master’s degree in liberal arts from Washington University in St. Louis. She has been awarded a 2014–15 Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs, the Mary McLeod Bethune 2016 Leadership Award and the 2018 Civil Rights and Advocacy Award by the Orange County Chapter of the National Coalition of 200 Black Women. She was a 2017 Leadership Fellow with the JustLeadershipUSA Leading with Conviction program and a 2018 Fellow of the Women’s Policy Institute.

Steven Liang ’10: 2020 Young Alumni Achievement Award Honoree

Pitzer’s core value of social responsibility is in the DNA of my films, and so much of who I am as a filmmaker can be traced back to my time at Pitzer.
Steven Liang

Steven Liang ’10 is a film director and storyteller who is known for his short films Afuera, Coming Home, and Falling for Angels. He has also directed two documentaries, A Better Life and Trans Lives Matter National Day of Action. Topics such as resilience, the American dream, and underdogs inspire his work. In 2019, Liang was selected to participate in the Ryan Murphy TV HALF Initiative’s Directing Mentorship Program. From 2016 to 2018, his web series was in development at the Warner Bros.-based Stage 13. He is the recipient of the 2017 Film Independent Directing Lab Fellowship, the 2017 Armed with a Camera Fellowship, the 2015 Carl David Memorial Fellowship, and the 2013 AbelCine Documentary Grant. He was also a finalist for the 2016 ABC-Disney Directing Fellowship. At Pitzer, Liang was active at CAPAS and worked as an RA at Holden Hall. In his senior year at Pitzer, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. Steven holds a BA in Asian American Studies and self-designed Communication Studies from Pitzer College. He also holds an MFA in Film Directing from the University of California, Los Angeles.