Each year, Columbia College Chicago honors three alumni who have demonstrated remarkable ingenuity, ambition, and achievements as Alumni of the Year. This year, the college salutes John Hellerman, Nobuko Oyabu, and David Cromer

By Audrey Michelle Mast (BA '00) Photography By Vladimir Zaytsev ('12)

The Connector
John Hellerman
(BA ‘95)

As a co-founder and partner of Hellerman Baretz Communications, John Hellerman helms a strategic communications agency with a client list that includes some of the world’s premier law, financial, and consulting firms.

Named 2008 Agency Executive of the Year by PR News, Hellerman takes on smart, tech-savvy projects that range from US Supreme Court cases to an award-winning blog discussing the legal implications of workplace hijinks on the TV sitcom The Office.

But his route to business-world stardom was a circuitous one. After prep school in Massachusetts, Hellerman attended Tulane University in New Orleans, where he says he had “a very fun time,” before transferring in his junior year to his hometown of Chicago. He went to Columbia, where Hellerman says he “got serious” about his education.

Hellerman says the environment at Columbia appealed to him because he wanted to “mingle with real professionals, who weren’t just teaching from a textbook, but were really teaching you how it shook out in the real world.”

A political science major in his first two years, Hellerman studied communications and public relations at Columbia. He cites professors Alton Miller, Jane Canepa, and Mort Kaplan as mentors who offered hands-on experiences that helped prepare him for an ever-changing and competitive field.

Hellerman says one of his strengths was his ability to build relationships with his teachers. “I thought [the Columbia experience] was just invaluable, and I still do,” he says.

After graduation, Hellerman got involved in several political campaigns—a milieu in which he met legal professionals for whom he worked on writing projects, including crafting fundraising letters.

“This was in the really early days of marketing for lawyers,” Hellerman says. It was a taste of a field in which he would later flourish.

He also worked at Comm2, a small firm founded by Chicago PR legend Kathy Posner. “We had a tremendous amount of fun every day,” he says, reminiscing about directing the Brach’s Holiday Parade and planning a fundraising event for St. Mary of the Angels Church.

Hellerman eventually narrowed his focus, finding out what he didn’t like (pitching products to the media) and discovering that his true passion was “thought leadership PR for professionals.”

“[Professionals] have a very specific expertise or talent to share with a specific, targeted market and need help to communicate with that market,” Hellerman says. “At the core of it, it’s someone’s opinion about something—an analysis, not a product, which from my perspective makes it a little more worthwhile.”

After this discovery, Hellerman moved to Washington, DC, in the late ’90s and started his own company. Today, his award-winning boutique agency, based in New York, is one of Inc.’s 5,000 fastest growing private companies.

Hellerman says one’s most important job, no matter what the field, is to “make yourself invaluable,” a skill he says he learned at Columbia. As a PR professional, Hellerman has become an invaluable connector between the public, and the movers and shakers who shape our world: someone truly invaluable.

The Change Agent
Nobuko Oyabu
(BA ‘95)

Nobuko Oyabu wanted to be a writer when she arrived in Chicago from her native Osaka, Japan, at age 19. She enrolled as a general education major at Columbia in 1991, and like many freshmen, she tried a number of things before she found what stuck.

Initially attracted to photography through courses in magazine production, Oyabu took photo classes to help her better understand visual language as an editor—in other words, to “learn to really see the pictures.

“From there, I fell in love with photography and changed my major,” Oyabu says.

A picture she shot for veteran Sun-Times photographer John White’s Photojournalism I class, taken from the John Hancock Building, received a national award.

“From there, I got a little more confident, I guess,” she says, laughing. By the time she graduated from Columbia in 1995, she was a part-time staff photographer for the Oshkosh Northwestern in Wisconsin.

She spent the next seven years as a photojournalist at newspapers in the Quad Cities and Omaha, Nebraska. Oyabu is now a freelancer based in Arlington, Virginia, where she focuses as much on motherhood as she does on writing and photographing for the Japanese media. (Much of the work she exports to Japan is human interest stories about everyday American life.)

Oyabu also works on her personal project, STAND: Faces of Rape & Sexual Abuse Survivors. The project is an ongoing series of moving, elegant black-and-white portraits of both men and women accompanied by text identifying the survivors and describing their experiences. It’s an attempt to literally give faces to statistics, as Oyabu herself is a survivor. Her rape in 1999 was the catalyst for the work.

STAND is international in scope. Oyabu says she spends at least two months out of the year taking portraits, making speeches, and exhibiting the series in Japan, where the stigma of rape can still be quite strong.

“There’s no solid support system for survivors there,” she says. “There’s not even a really solid rape crisis center.”
Through her photography, and publicly speaking about her harrowing personal experience, she is creating awareness and inciting action, particularly among government officials and other authorities in her native country. “Once they start identifying who the victims are, instead of [just] looking at the numbers … looking at the pictures of the real survivors’ faces and hearing their voices—that really does something,” Oyabu says.

Those in power started discussing what they could do. “Within five years—since I started speaking in 2006—things have changed a lot, although there’s still no [support] system [for survivors] in place yet,” Oyabu says.

Noting that the relatively small nation is still reeling from the recent earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disasters, Oyabu says there’s still much work to do. She sees the project as a way for herself and others to heal as well as a way to create change, a way to bring darkness to light.

The Genius
David Cromer
(‘86)

David Cromer told Columbia’s 2011 graduates in his May commencement speech that his professors called him “the walking argument for open admissions.” His former professors were right. Cromer, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow (an award nicknamed the “genius grant”), was a Skokie native and high-school dropout who earned a GED when he came to Columbia “by chance,” he says. He says he chose Columbia simply because it had a theater department and an open admissions policy. Yet he found the school to be a “completely, utterly life-changing experience.” Cromer studied acting, and, though he found his first year quite difficult, he eventually “figured out how to do the work.”

“The self-examination, the self assessment, the assessment from faculty just chipped away at the problem, at figuring out how to do it, how to be on stage,” Cromer says.

The real difficulty, however, “was getting the nerve to go out into the world and do it,” he says.

But professors Sheldon Patinkin and Jeff Ginsburg, who were accomplished, prolific local theater directors, encouraged Cromer to play minor roles in their large cast productions (“like ‘Brutus’s servant,’” Cromer says with a laugh).

“Work begets more work, and then the parts of me that were not ambitious enough were sort of compensated for because I was lucky enough to be given some opportunities,” Cromer says.“Columbia has been like a parent,” he says. “It’s a giant part of my life.”

Post-college, when Cromer decided to try directing, Patinkin, then chair of the theater department, mentored him. Cromer audited his courses and was hired to teach theater at Columbia.

Cromer worked in the department for about 15 years while honing his craft in local theaters including Journeymen, Writers’, and Steppenwolf, racking up awards and accolades all the while.

His stripped-down, conceptual approach to the Thornton Wilder classic Our Town, which he first staged in Chicago, soon moved off Broadway, winning both Lucille Lortel and Obie awards. Even before he moved to the Big Apple in 2009, the New York Times profiled him, with the opening gambit: “Is David Cromer the most talented theater director that Americans have never heard of?”

These days, more theatergoers than ever have heard of him. Among other projects, he is directing Nicole Kidman in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth.

The production is the latest in a long line of his successes, which Cromer defined as “placing yourself in the path of the highest number of fortuitous accidents.” It’s a path that for Cromer, as well as for his fellow alumni, began at Columbia.