Kristen Bell - From Broadway to Films

Kristen Bell is  a successful actress known for her lead role on the television show Veronica Mars as well as her comedy movie Forgetting Sarah Marshal. 


Shortly after her high school graduation, Kristen moved to New York City to attend the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She chose to major in musical theater. In 2001, during her Junior year at New York University, Bell dropped out of college while being only a few credits shy of graduating to take a role in the Broadway musical version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. From Broadway other opportunities opened for Kristen and she went from T.V. to films. 


Kristen said that she plans to return to NYU to complete her degree as soon she can move back to New York City.

Carl Icahn - Taking over NYU

Carl Icahn is notorious in the business world for being an extremely successful corporate raider. He has achieved enormous financial success and is worth over 8.5 billion dollars.  


Carl Icahn Studied psychology at Princeton and then attended NYU med school. However, after a short time he dropped out because he "didn't like working with corpses." He went instead to work as stockbroker for Dreyfus & Co. and moved into securities arbitrage. That was the beginning of his long and successful business career. 

Dennis Crowley - Check-in to NYU

Crowley thought about going to business school after he was laid off from a startup company. A friend brought him to an art show, sponsored by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Students at the show were doing cool things, like making robots just for fun. That convinced him to attend ITP.


For his graduate thesis, Crowley decided to make a product with someone he met during his first day of school at NYU. Alex Rainert helped Crowley create Dodgeball. In 2005 Google bought the company for a few millions of dollars. Crowley worked at Google for two years but felt too restricted.


He left Google and created a better evolution of Dodgeball that came to be known as Foursquare. 

M. Night Shyamalan - Behold the Horrors of NYU

M. Night Shyamalan on set of a new secret movie he is directing

Since his childhood, M. Night Shyamalan was obsessed with movies. It was because of this reason that he chose to attend New York University's Tisch School of Arts to study film making. 
During his final year at the NYU (1993), Shyamalan wrote, directed and starred in his first feature film, 'Praying with Anger'. He financed the movie using money he borrowed from family and friends.


Most accounts report that his middle name, Night, was created while attending the Tisch School, as well as where he began to develop his own style of cinematography. His style is best known for its dramatic personalized thrills, with unexpected plot twists. 


Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sense. It was nominated for six Academy Awards and has become a world wide phenomenon. 

NYU, Listen to This!

Russell Simmons Speaking about his time at NYU

In 1984 while attending NYU, Russell Simmons met another NYU student, Rick Rubin, at a club in New York City where hardcore rockers and rappers intermixed. They quickly became close friends. Rubin had a vision of fusing the two genres, rap and rock together. The two decided to go into business together, and Def Jam Records was born. They each put in $4,000 of their own money as startup capital, and the company began operating out of Rubin’s NYU dorm room. 


The first single Def Jam released was L.L. Cool Jay’s “I Need a Beat,” which sold over 100,000 copies. They followed that up with The Beastie Boys’ “Rock Hard.” Within its first year, Def Jam had released seven singles and had negotiated a distribution deal with Columbia Records. 


Def Jam is most famous for launching the career of Jay-Z who at one point became the label's president. Today Def Jam's list of famous artists include: Jennifer Lopez, Ludacris, Ne-Yo, Rihanna and Kanye West. 

And the Oscar goes to... NYU!

James Franco giving NYU a shoutout at the Oscars

Two New York University filmmakers from the Tisch School of the Arts were big winners at the this years Academy Awards ceremony.  Even more incredible is that the Oscars were cohosted by a current NYU student. Thats right, James Franco is currently attending NYU grad school. 

Luke Matheny’s, won an Oscar for Live Action Short for his thesis film God of Love and Lora Hirschberg won the Oscar for Sound Mixing for her work on the film Inception.


One of the coolest parts of the Oscars was when James Franco gave a surprise shoutout  to NYU when fellow Graduate filmmaker Matheny won his award.

In total 15 members of the NYU Tisch School were nominated for Oscars award this year.  

Maria Bartiromo - Breaking NYU News

Maria Bartiromo is the influential anchor of CNBC’s program the "Closing Bell" she is also managing editor of the nationally syndicated "Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo," recently rated the most watched financial news program in America. Bartiromo graduated from New York University in 1989, where she majored in journalism and economics. 


She leveraged the NYU's proximity to Wall Street to land a job on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange right after college. She loved the fast past action of the trading floor and decided that reporting business news was her calling. 


This past fall semester she served as an adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business and taught a class is called "Global Markets and Normative Frameworks." The class filled up 10 minutes after it opened for registration.