Alumni News

A serial entrepreneur, Brandon Hudson was RIT’s first Gap Year fellow in 2018. Before that, Hudson had a knack for business, selling wristbands for the then-new Apple Watch.

Janessa Steenberg initially created the original recipe for herself to bridge a culinary gap between her vegan diet and the Italian-Maltese cuisine from her Toronto childhood and her grandmother’s kitchen.

Independent game developer Rami Ismail hired former Gap Year fellow Sam Magnolia and their cofounders at Aesthetician Labs — Noah Magnolia and Aidan Markham — to lead the development and production team for Australia Did It.

Hridiza Roy followed a summer internship at Disney Studios, with a fall position in the Gap Year Entrepreneurial Fellowship. The RIT program gave her a block of time and a stipend to advance her passion project—Painterly, an animation software tool.

When Don Pettit, NASA’s most senior astronaut, sought a way to accurately capture his view from the International Space Station, alumnus Peter Blacksberg connected him with Ted Kinsman, associate professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.

Check out some of the great things our Saunders alumni are doing around the globe.

Nearly 60 RIT students and 20 alumni and faculty members helped document the 2026 Winter Games as part of an ongoing collaboration with Special Olympics New York.

Georg Seifert (from Germany) and Rainer Erich Scheichelbauer (Austria), cited for their innovative work with game-changing font editing software Glyphs, will accept RIT's prestigious Goudy Award in April. The honor has long celebrated outstanding practitioners in type design and related fields.

Steve Matteson's two-year appointment as as the Melbert B. Cary Professor in RIT’s School of Design marks a return to where his affinity for letterforms all started. Since graduating from RIT, he went on to become a typeface trailblazer, responsible for creating recognizable fonts and graphic language for huge brands.

Charles Gaines '67 MFA (art and design), a pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, has an upcoming exhibition in RIT’s University Gallery that traces a loose arc of his career and illustrates his sustained interest in the lyrical potential of logical systems. He will also give a companion artist talk Thursday, March 26.

CBS News talks to Jacquelyn Martin ’01 (applied photography), staff photographer for the Associated Press, about capturing Lindsey Vonn's devastating crash on Sunday.

Paley is internationally renowned for his large-scale decorative arts, and has a long association with RIT as a Distinguished Professor and artist-in-residence in the School for American Crafts.