Columbia's 2008 Alumni of the Year—Len Amato, Tonya Pinkins, and Eduardo Vilaro—bring exceptional creativity to their fields, and exemplify the spirit of the college.
By William Meiners
Photography by Drew Reynolds and Andrew Nelles
How do you measure success? Working for your “hero,” Robert De Niro? Having Oprah proclaim you one of “the 10 women in America who will take your breath away”? Finding critical acclaim on a New York stage? For many Columbia College Chicago alumni, the benchmark is turning a personal passion into professional achievement. This year, the college honored three individuals who have done just that with Alumni of the Year awards, acknowledging not only their success in their fields, but also their embodiment of the values and spirit that define Columbia.
When Amato was coming of age in the early 1970s, many young American men were dealing with a lottery that had nothing to do with power balls or instant millionaires. A low draft-lottery number could mean a trip to Vietnam. When the government stopped giving college deferments, Amato spent a couple of years at Triton Junior College, taking classes and waiting to see if he was going to get drafted. A high lottery number kept him on Chicago soil, so he decided to find someplace to finish up his remaining two years and earn a college degree. A college counselor talked with him about Columbia College.
Amato liked what he saw at Columbia, which he describes as an “outlaw type of school,” with departments spread out all over the city. (He recalls that the film department had a couple of floors in a “warehouse-looking” building at Ohio and Lakeshore Drive, and the writing and dance departments were located elsewhere.) He met his future wife, a dance major named Diana Conforti (B.A. ’76), at a makeshift bookstore. “There were a bunch of Vietnam vets going there,” Amato said. “I was able to get a scholarship and became a teaching assistant, so that’s why I decided to go there.”
While at Columbia, Amato wrote and directed two films; fictional works in a time when most students were focusing on documentaries. (After graduation, he did end up working on one documentary, filming the pope in the Vatican.) In 1979, a few years after graduation, Amato moved to New York, and over the course of the next decade tried to make it as a musician. He was a member of a couple of “punk and new wave”
bands, played at CBGB, acted in a play, almost helped make a movie about a garage band, and accepted a writing fellowship at Yaddo. He also began taking steps toward the career in which he would find solid success: film production.
Amato admits he hadn’t had a straight job in years when he sent a one-page letter to his “hero actor,” Robert De Niro, regarding a film company the actor wanted to start in New York, Tribeca Productions. But that trip to FedEx, and the subsequent meeting with De Niro, would forever change Amato’s professional life. Amato got the job, reading scripts for De Niro as the legendary actor’s story editor.
Today, as senior vice president for HBO Films, Amato’s on the West Coast, working closely with writers and overseeing film development and production. Through each of the companies he’s worked for, from Tribeca to Spring Creek to HBO, Amato has continuously looked for the best stories to bring to the big screen. He contributed to Academy Award-nominated films Blood Diamond and Analyze This. His first credit as a producer came with the movie First Time Felon in 1997. “My strength has always been in story and script,” says Amato, believing “a comfortable, creative environment” can lead to artistic breakthroughs for writers, actors, and directors alike.
What does the Columbia alumni award mean to this punk rocker turned producer? “It’s an honor,” says Amato. “It makes me proud. I think it’s meaningful for the school, which had really humble beginnings. I loved going there. You had practitioners teaching you, and they brought in directors like Frank Capra and John Cassavetes to talk to us. They wanted you to start making movies right away.”
A few years later, studying theater at Carnegie Mellon University, Pinkins gave up the classroom for the stage when she got a part in the Broadway production of Merrily We Roll Along. And roll along she did, embarking on an acting career spanning stage, television, and film. Her credits range from the ABC soap opera “All My Children” (she originated the role of Livia Frye in 1991) to films such as Above the Rim. And there was her performance as Sweet Anita in Jelly’s Last Jam, for which she won the Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. “It was the highest dream I’d ever hoped for,” Pinkins says of that particular honor. “It was a hard show to do and a hard experience. I was not always the person they wanted, and I really had to stick to my guns about how I played the role.”
“My life kind of flows in a certain way and I often do what’s in front of me,” says Pinkins, recalling the tour of her hometown college—Columbia—she took in the mid 1990s. She found it fortuitous that her tour guide was a young woman in the Fiction Writing program who had turned down the Iowa Writer’s Workshop for a Columbia program that prides itself on jumpstarting imaginations and teaching people how to write. So an acclaimed actress, having only finished about a year at Carnegie Mellon, made the decision to become a student writer and signed up for classes. Her academic advisor, coincidentally an old grade-school friend, allowed her to take on coursework beyond the normal limits, enabling Pinkins to earned her degree in just two semesters.
While writing and directing are all part of the artistically evolving life of Tonya Pinkins (she published the book Get Over Yourself: How to Drop the Drama and Claim the Life You Deserve in 2006), she has also continued to act. She earned two more Tony nominations for her roles in Play On!, a 1997 musical version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and Caroline, Or Change, a 2004 musical. On screen, she’s recently played supporting roles in John Turturro’s Romance and Cigarettes and the Disney hit Enchanted.
While not always commercially successful, her work has generally been critically acclaimed, and she doesn’t shy away from controversy. She’s interpreted the words of great playwrights such as Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, and August Wilson. The film and television appearances really pay the bills, but for Pinkins, the play’s the absolute thing. So while credits including “Law & Order” and “The Cosby Show” may have made her somewhat of a familiar face on the streets, she prefers keeping it live. “The theater is my drug and I have to be on stage,” says Pinkins, who is currently trying to build a theater life for herself in Los Angeles, a town not particularly well known for its stage work.
For Pinkins, the “Chicago” part of the Columbia award is important. So much of her acting life has taken her to New York for plays, or to Los Angeles for television and film, that she always seemed to be leaving Chicago to find an audience. “It feels very nice to be recognized at home,” she says.
Eduardo Vilaro (M.F.A. ’99) had his solo stage debut in an eighth-grade production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, in which he appeared as Linus doing a rumba with his beloved blanket. The dancer went on to much more auspicious things: he trained at the Alvin Ailey American Dance School and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance before earning a B.F.A. from Adelphi University in 1988. He went on to become a principal dancer with Ballet Hispanico of New York.
Although the Cuban-born dancer grew up in the Bronx, a desire to “escape the madness” of the Big Apple led him to some Second City soul searching at Columbia College. Looking for his next career step after being a performer, he may have rediscovered himself by founding the Chicago-based Luna Negra Dance Theater. Vilaro characterizes his time at Columbia as a re-energizing period. “Columbia opened me up to looking at different art forms and processes from different perspectives,” says Vilaro, who also examined visual art forms and writing throughout his master’s studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts program. “I was a little jaded with New York and I got excited about my art form again.”
Vilaro founded his dance company immediately after receiving his degree in 1999. Luna Negra, as the name suggests, is about contrasts. “As someone who enjoys dealing with works that talk about identity, I find so many contrasts in identity and specifically in a Latino culture,” Vilaro says. “Luna Negra is more about not taking anything at face value. You can be dark, you can be light, you can be gray, in between, or mulatto. There’s much more to being Latino than just one thing, than just icons or stereotypes.”
One Chicago Tribune reviewer in particular found that outlook refreshing. “We can thank Cuban-born Eduardo Vilaro and his beguiling dancers for reshaping those flashy stereotypes into exquisite movement poems of heartfelt complexity,” wrote Lucia Mauro.
For Vilaro, who has created more than 20 original works, the dancing really can take on the shape of a prose poem. “As artists we tell stories, whether they’re abstract or have a strong narrative,” he says. “It’s the form of story that shares our experiences and who we are. And manipulating that with movement is so rich and complex. The body, the way it moves, has a language in itself. And then on top of that, adding traditions or narratives of traditions with that language is so powerful because you move beyond just a simple ‘this is what happened.’ You’re really looking at imagery that connects to emotion and to kinetic memory. Someone might look at that movement and think, ‘I’ve felt that.’”
Six full-time staffers help maintain Luna Negra, while choreographers and dancers work on contract. “The artists are taken care of and that’s important,” says Vilaro, who has earned a grant from the Cuban Artists Fund as well as a Choreography Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. He also received the 2001 Ruth Page Award in choreography and was honored at Panama’s II International Festival of Ballet for his choreographic work.
This past winter, Vilaro had his own homecoming of sorts with a two-week run of a Luna Negra show in New York, where he said his old friends “came out of the woodwork.” Beyond his company’s successful New York debut, Vilaro is proudest to be keeping Luna Negra meaningful locally, nationally, and internationally. “The company is alive and thriving and continues to create work that is relevant and important.”
Perhaps that’s the best measure of success.
William Meiners (M.F.A. ’96) is a senior writer for Purdue University’s College of Engineering and the editor-in-chief of Sport Literate, a Chicago-based literary journal available in print and online.
Drew Reynolds (B.A. ’97) is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose clients include Forbes, XLR8R, Complex Magazine, Thrill Jockey Records, and MCA Records.
Andrew Nelles (B.A. ’08) is an Illinois College Press Association award winning photojournalist who graduated in May. He spent his summer photographing in Turkey.
