International Superstars: 5 Alumni Share Their — Very International — Life Journeys

Around campus, they are affectionately known as "frequent flyers:" students who take a determined approach to finding creative ways to see as much of the world as they can through Princeton's offerings. Experiencing other cultures and perspectives can be transformative, personally and professionally, as exemplified by these five shining examples. To commemorate the Princeton Int'l magazine's 10 edition, we catch up with a few stellar alumni who were previously featured in the magazine.

Noah Arjomand ’10

Noah Arjomand ’10

Occupation: Filmmaker, sociologist, photographer, writer
Current Home: Riverside, Calif.
Countries visited for Princeton-sponsored projects: Turkey, Iran and Kurdish parts of Iraq.
Recent accomplishment: 2024 Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary

It started with a pitch.

Noah Arjomand ’10 had always been interested in the geopolitics of the Middle East. The son of an Iranian sociologist father and American mother “wanted to know more about this part of the world that was often being vilified or presented as a place that the U.S. needed to ‘fix’ or ‘develop,’ ” he said.

“I pitched an idea to go and study Kurdish political graffiti in Turkey, Iran and Iraq,” said Arjomand, who was raised on Long Island. “I bought a camera to photograph graffiti and pursue lots of other interesting photographs.”

The successful proposal enabled the public and international affairs major to travel to the Middle East on a research grant from the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

“The idea of doing documentary film came out of that time that I spent abroad, particularly doing these photo essays,” he explained. That project marked the start of Arjomand’s visual storytelling practice that earned him a 2024 Emmy for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary. “I’d begun thinking visually about making people question their assumptions about the world,” he added.

“The ethics and craft of telling documentary stories that I learned during my time at Princeton — and going abroad while there — is something I’m still using every day in my work on my current film project.”

International journalism seminars taught by Visiting Ferris Professors of Journalism Barbara Demick and Paul Salopek also helped guide him toward reportage abroad. “As a kind of socially awkward person, this gave me a reason to be dropping into people’s lives and getting to know them and observe them. I’d always been interested in doing this, but it was a way to do that almost professionally.”

But before the turn toward journalism, Arjomand studied Turkish at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey, with support from the Near Eastern Studies Department, from which he earned a certificate. After his sophomore year, the grant supported a year of travel, language learning and research in Turkey, Iran and Kurdish parts of Iraq.

Right after graduation, his Turkish-language proficiency led to the Eliot Kalmbach ’09 Memorial Award, which supports travel and research to Turkey or other Turkic lands.

During his Princeton-funded summer in Turkey after graduating, Arjomand interned with the Committee to Protect Journalists, assisting exiled Iranian journalists as they awaited resolution of their asylum claims.

He also attended the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Istanbul, where he learned about fixers — “local guides, interpreters and go-betweens who serve as matchmakers with the [local] people professional journalists want to get access to,” he said. “They were able to translate local realities into international knowledge and were the most interesting people to hang out with and to do research on.

Later, while doing the field research that eventually informed his Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation in sociology, he worked as a fixer himself. His dissertation became the basis for his first book, Fixing Stories: Local Newsmaking and International Media in Turkey & Syria (Cambridge University Press). It was named one of the Best Books of 2022 by Foreign Affairs magazine.

After earning his Ph.D. in 2018, Arjomand spent four years as the Mark Helmke Postdoctoral Scholar in Global Media, Development, and Democracy at Indiana University Bloomington.
While in Indiana, Arjomand finished editing the personal documentary project that he’d begun a few years earlier — filming 930 hours of his mother’s life as she endured the ravages of ALS. With the help of his co-producers and co-directors, Adam Isenberg and Senem Tüzen, Arjomand “captured my mother’s daily struggle and interactions with family and other caretakers in about the most fly-on-the-wall, unobtrusive manner possible,” he said.

The resulting 74-minute film, Eat Your Catfish, aired on PBS’ POV in 2023. It played at film festivals around the world and won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Social Issue Documentary.

This year, at the University of California, Riverside, Arjomand finished his MFA in creative writing and writing for the performing arts and became the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Media and Cultural Studies and co-director of the department’s media lab.

Arjomand also is producing another documentary film — with director Ora DeKornfeld — about journalists and fixers who cover migration in Mexico. “I’m part of a larger conversation within journalism, to get past an almost colonial approach, where the person from Europe or the United States parachutes in somewhere,” he explained. “They have a very extractive approach to their fixers and their sources: ‘Feed me the information I need.’ Then they leave their fixer without credit and to clean up a mess.

“If I’ve done something that matters for the nation or the world, it stems from the interests that were first sparked in my time at Princeton — rethinking the relationships behind media production all around the world,” he continued to say. “The ethics and craft of telling documentary stories … is something I’m still using every day in my work on my current film project.”

Katherine Clifton ’15

Katherine Clifton ’15

Occupation: Assistant Director of Communications for Migration and Refugee Services at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
Countries visited for Princeton-sponsored projects: Serbia, Greece, Japan
Recent accomplishment: Becoming a mother

Feeling like an outsider is a common experience for anyone studying, traveling or living abroad. Katherine Clifton ’15 is reminded of that feeling daily, because her work exposes her to people who may never again feel the ease of reconnecting with their home country, culture and citizenry.

For the last two years, as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ assistant director of communications for Migration and Refugee Services, Clifton has sensitively told the stories of individuals who have lost everything to start life anew in a foreign country — the United States.

Clifton cites her two stints in Serbia – the first with the Novogratz Bridge Year Program, a sponsored, tuition-free gap year that students can attend before matriculating at Princeton, the second a Martin A. Dale ’53 Fellowship, which funded a yearlong project after she graduated — as making “me much more aware of the particular vulnerabilities that migrants face,” she said.

“You don’t have to look far now to see where this is happening,” she added. “Usually, migrants are treated poorly, used as scapegoats for other societal problems that are happening and face a lot of prejudice. I was seeing that up close in Serbia.”

“Stories are key, because one person is a tragedy, and a million are a statistic. We need to tell individual stories to help to broaden people’s perspectives and see themselves in someone else.”

Clifton worked with the Roma, who are stigmatized in Serbia, the first year and with Syrian refugees the second year. She selected Serbia from among the five Princeton Bridge Year locations, “because I had read Samantha Power’s book, A Problem From Hell, about the genocide in Bosnia, and learned about the Roma as a group of forced migrants. So I wanted to work with the Romani people and teach them English.

“That second year moved me to realize how important it is to tether empathy to action, to listen and be kind, but also to ask, ‘What can I do to help right now?’ whether that’s teaching English or finding out if I can connect a family member passing through Serbia with someone who we were connected with in Germany, because that’s where they were headed,” she explained.

Through the Serbian experiences that bookended her Princeton experience, Clifton was inspired to pursue a master’s degree at Oxford University, which was funded by a Rhodes Scholarship. She chose refugee studies and forced migration her first year and public policy her second year, “because I felt like Princeton had given me this rich humanities foundation.”

That foundation was formed on two continents, Europe and Asia. Clifton, who hails from Honolulu, spent the summer before her sophomore year in Greece on a Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Global Seminar studying ancient theatre. “One of the insights that I gained was to look to the theatre diaspora and to think about how these different cultures performed and expressed themselves, which had huge ripple effects all around the world,” she said.

Princeton in Asia provided another seminal experience. The summer before her senior year, she “did a summer Osawa Fellowship in Tokyo, where I was teaching English,” she recalled. “I was also doing research on my senior thesis, which was about different adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Japanese stage and film. I saw over a dozen plays that summer.”

During her Dale Fellowship, Clifton, who majored in English and theatre, created documentary theatre with Roma and Serbian youth. “I interviewed them and then transcribed those interviews and created verbatim theatre,” she said. “I was heavily involved in the refugee aide side and supporting refugees who were passing through the Balkans, mostly from Syria, but also from all over the Middle East and North Africa.”

It was her first job out of graduate school, with Princeton’s Office of Religious Life, that taught her the beauty and value of story. Clifton led the Religion and Forced Migration Initiative (RFMI), which was funded by a $550,000 Luce Foundation grant, to study the role that religion plays in refugee resettlement in the U.S. During her nearly five years in the role, Clifton trained more than 150 students to conduct oral-history interviews with refugees.

“Those stories became the foundation for educational materials that we made that were used at many different high schools,” she said. “We had interactive digital platforms using the oral histories and some public exhibits.” Though no longer grant-funded, the program still exists.

Her work with RFMI, as well as her international experiences, have strengthened her work at the U.S. Conference for Catholic Bishops. Clifton manages media relations and creates content for a variety of communications platforms that advocates for humane and faith-informed migration policies. “I try to communicate in a way that resonates with an audience that is diverse, religiously, ethnically and so forth,” she said.

For now, Clifton has set aside the creative writing that used to occupy her spare time to attend to a new responsibility — her 15-month-old daughter: “I think it’s the hardest, most meaningful, exhausting and most emotional experience of my life, but it’s also the most creative.”

Shruthi Rajasekar ’18; photo by Roscoe Rutter

Shruthi Rajasekar ’18

Occupation: Composer, singer
Current Home: Minneapolis
Countries visited for Princeton-sponsored projects: Vienna, Munich, London
Recent accomplishment: North American premiere of her composition Sarojini

To say Shruthi Rajasekar ’18 is accomplished beyond her years is an understatement. How many 28-year-olds have had numerous musical compositions performed around the world (and already have a lengthy Wikipedia entry)? In October alone, her work was performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; a middle school in Mountain View, Calif.; the Asia Society Texas Center in Houston; and the Ted Mann Concert Hall in her native Minneapolis, among other venues.

“My work with music is so often about bringing people with different perspectives into the same concert hall. It’s my job to make sure people feel connected to one another.”

The latter concert marked the North American premiere of Sarojini. Rajasekar’s 45-minute composition united a full orchestra of 50 musicians with a 150-member choir that sang lyrics drawn from the poetry of Sarojini Naidu, a leader in India’s fight for independence from British rule. The piece featured two world-renowned soloists, Shruthi’s mother, Nirmala Rajasekar, a master of the veena, an ancient Indian stringed instrument, and Thanjavur Murugaboopathi, who plays the mridangam, a barrel-shaped drum.

Sarojini employs Rajasekar’s trademark melding of Western classical and South Indian classical music in the Carnatic tradition, with its intricate melodies, rhythmic structures and improvisation. Canadian classical music critic Natasha Gauthier has called Sarojini “the most exciting piece of new music for choir and orchestra.” 

Her prolific achievements include a 2025 McKnight Composer Fellowship Award with the American Composers Forum, given to “outstanding mid-career artists,” and a dizzying array of compositions for choirs, chamber groups, large ensembles and solo artists.

Already versed in Carnatic music when she arrived at Princeton, thanks to her “guru” mother, Rajasekar was unsure where to focus her creative energies. She took master classes in voice and performed recitals while “spending a lot of my time trying to figure out what I wanted to do with this music passion and how to bring all my different interests together,” she said.

“What helped was taking more nonmusic courses at Princeton than music ones,” she added. “I didn’t formally study how to set text in [a musical piece] in a music class, but I took a lot of classes related to literature, and that gave me different skills to bring into my [musical] work. That’s the beauty of that kind of liberal arts education.”

Rajasekar took to heart a quote from President Christopher Eisgruber she’d read in Princeton International magazine: “He said the one thing students should do at Princeton is to take a Global Seminar with PIIRS [Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies]. I had no idea that it would completely change my life.”

Her three undergraduate global experiences, where she had intense encounters with music in the Western classical tradition, helped her find her focus.

Her first significant experience was the six-week Fish Benoist Family Global Seminar: Vienna: Music, Culture and Politics after her first year. Its class setting, in the Sigmund Freud Museum, was impactful. When she and the other musician in the group asked for a practice space, “they actually ended up giving us one of the floors of the museum that had been the former apartment of Freud and his family,” she said. “Think of all the things that those floors and walls would have heard and absorbed. Where we got to practice was living history.”

That initial Global Seminar led her to declare a music major. “Thanks to Princeton, I got to see three operas, with Mozart being the classical, Verdi the romantic and Strauss representing the 20th century,” she recalled. “It enriched my learning so much, and it also helped me remember that music is a cultural product. I fell in love with music all over again in that city.”

The next summer, Rajasekar attended the German Department’s Princeton in Munich program, which helped polish the German-language skills she’d pursued back at Princeton after visiting Vienna the prior year.

Her last study-abroad experience, her junior year, was an exchange program between Princeton and the Royal College of Music. “That is when I really decided I wanted to continue my singing, but I really wanted to be a professional composer,” she explained. “So that experience in London really cemented all the things that had been brewing until then.”

It also inspired her to do more studies abroad after graduation. “The international office helped me prepare my applications for the Marshall scholarship in the UK to continue to build on what I’d learned in London,” she said. With Marshall funding, she earned a master’s degree in ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, then a master’s in composition from the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England.

“There isn’t a separation between the political or social experiences I had and the music that I learned over in the UK,” she reflected. “The arts are a reflection of society, and society reflects the arts is how I view it.

Cy Liu ’18 self-portrait. Photo by Cy Liu

Cy Liu ’18

Occupation: Artist and experiential-learning facilitator
Current Home: China
Countries visited for Princeton-sponsored projects: Hunan Province, China; Hong Kong; Cambodia
Recent accomplishment: Authentic selfhood

Cy (formerly known as Cindy) Liu ’18 arrived on campus from his home in Beijing with every intention of becoming a software engineer. Though he conscientiously hewed to that career path as a computer science major, he began to feel the pull of other perspectives and interests shortly after his first year. The catalyst was his Summer Princeton in Asia fellowship, after his freshman year, teaching English to college students at Jishou Normal University in Hunan Province.

“It expanded my understanding of a different part of China and a different demographic of people,” Liu said. “I was able to see and understand myself as more of a leader, because we were teachers in front of other students. I met new and different parts of my personality through expanding my comfort zone,” he said. “The experience also sparked my interest in telling stories, especially through photography.”

A year later, Liu roamed Hong Kong with his camera when not serving as a Keller Center REACH intern in computer science at the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute. “Even though I was doing a computer-science-focused summer internship, I was encouraged to try out other things,” he explained.

“One of the reasons why I was drawn to Princeton was the flexibility and being able to pursue a range of different subjects and classes,” he said. “Even though I was a computer science major and in the School of Engineering, I was able to take a lot of different classes in different majors, which fed my curiosity and informed some of the work that I’m doing now. I took some photography classes, classes in film and, of course, these international experiences were influential.”

Back at Princeton his junior year, he won two first-place awards in the Office of International Programs and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies Programs annual photo contest. This recognition “was the first encouragement that photography was not just something that I enjoy doing,” Liu reflected.

“I must remember to stay humble and know that I don’t know everything and to continue to be aware of my privilege, especially while working as a journalist and as a storyteller, as a medium or conveyor of other people’s stories.”

After graduation, a more transformative experience awaited — a full-year Princeton in Asia fellowship in Cambodia. His prior experience working with Outdoor Action, Princeton’s outdoor education and leadership program, made Liu a good fit for the project-based learning school in Phnom Penh, where he taught computer programming and multimedia classes.

There, he made connections in the journalism industry and decided to shift his career ambitions from computer engineering to photojournalism. “Maybe I wouldn’t have tried if I hadn’t had those experiences abroad and the curiosity to try something a little bit different than some of the more popular paths other graduates have taken,” Liu said.

For the last five years, he has been a freelance photojournalist, working for wire services such as Reuters and Getty Images as well as international and English-language publications.

“One of the stories I worked on quite extensively in the past few years was about the [financial] scam industry in Cambodia,” he explained. “A lot of these scam centers are in Southeast Asia, and some of the people forced to work in the centers are victims of human trafficking.” Popular online scams include creating a romantic or emotional connection, then swindling the victim out of money, sometimes up to six figures or more. Pro Publica published a lengthy investigative piece, to which Liu contributed photography and research.
https://www.propublica.org/article/human-traffickers-force-victims-into-cyberscamming

Besides his work as a photographer, Liu is an experiential-learning facilitator in Asia for Where There Be Dragons, a Boulder, Colo,-based company that offers immersive international experiences for high school and college students. Princeton in Asia and Princeton’s Outdoor Action program provided a solid background for his role.

As for photography, he is now “collecting more stories of queer and trans folks around the world. I’m using the visual medium to express more of my own story and share stories of the queer and trans community so that people can shift some understandings or perspectives of this community.” A self-portraiture project he created this year was part of a group show this fall in Singapore at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film.
https://www.objectifs.com.sg/wifp2025_exhibition/.

“I want to continue to follow where my heart takes me, especially with art, using it as a medium to share more about my own story and other people’s stories, to make people feel less alone,” he said. “That’s my driving motivation.”

Jack Lohmann ’18

Jack Lohmann ’19

Occupation: Full-time writer
Current Home: The Hebrides
Countries visited for Princeton-sponsored projects: England, Scotland, Greece, Spain, Morocco, Kiribati, New Zealand, Australia, Nauru
Recent accomplishment: Publishing his first book, White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus — in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World (Pantheon, March 2025)

Growing up in Richmond Va., Jack Lohmann ’19 longed to live someday in the Hebrides. But when he arrived at Princeton intending to major in environmental policy, he had never visited the rocky, picturesque islands off the west coast of Scotland. That soon changed.

“The very first international trip I took at Princeton was to this place, where I live right now,” he says from his home on the Isle of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. “I feel so lucky to have been able to see and encounter so much of the world as a student. The opportunities that I had at Princeton allowed me to explore the world outside the United States.”

Lohmann settled in his childhood dream destination in 2024, while polishing the manuscript of his critically acclaimed first book, White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus — in Our Cells, in Our Food, and in Our World. The book, which documents how phosphate mining ravaged the Pacific island of Nauru, “demonstrates that phosphate, a substance we do not think of in everyday life, tells us about our origin, the present and the future. This book reminds us of the meaning of life,” wrote the author and philosopher Kohei Saito in a blurb.

Without the critical funding support Princeton provided, most notably from the HMEI Smith-Newton Environmental Scholars Program, Lohmann would not have tackled the book that grew out of his prize-winning thesis “The Sentencing of Nauru.”

“I wouldn’t be a writer most likely, if it weren’t for Princeton. If I said, ‘Maybe this is a good idea,’ they’d say, ‘That’s a great idea,’ ” he said. “The book is so deeply researched because I had the ability to keep going back to these places that otherwise would be way too financially prohibitive for a writer like me to visit.”

While Princeton administrators offered moral and financial support, it was his Princeton journalism professors, John McPhee, Tamsen Wolff and Pico Iyer, who encouraged him to make what he’d hoped would be a magazine article into a book. Taking their classes and those of other journalism professors led him to major in English, yet his interest in the environment continues to inform his work and lifestyle.

“I really love to read something that’s written in a different voice, that makes you feel you’re getting a different take on the world. To me, that’s a good book, and that’s what I’m interested in writing.”

“I prioritize being in beautiful places that I can interact with through gardening, through walking, through learning about the culture and history of the place. I take all of those things and ask, ‘How can I look around me and interpret this?’ I find meaning in my life through walking the same paths every day, down from where I live, along the coast, along some dunes, some cliffs.”

The Hebrides are a peaceful setting in which to write his next book, set in the small rural Mongolian town of Arvaikheer, where he spent two and a half years doing research. The “experimental” book, he said, is “a poetic exploration of this town, taking readers through the founding several hundred years ago and moving forward through time. There are ties to monasteries and Buddhist saints. It goes deep into the minds of people whose job it is to be spiritual.

“Going to Princeton exposed me to questions I didn’t even know I had,” said Lohmann. The work that I’ve committed myself to doing since then has been answering those questions.”