TV titan: Steve Levitan Steve Levitan (B.A.’84, Communication Arts), Emmy Award-winning television director, producer and writer, received the Wisconsin Alumni Association’s highest honor in late 2015: a Distinguished Alumni Award.
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Levitan has written and produced Frasier, The Larry Sanders Show and Back to You. But Modern Family, the ABC sitcom he co-created and produces, has been his favorite project. Ironically, Levitan told On Wisconsin magazine, the hardest class he took at UW-Madison was screenwriting. “It nearly killed me,” he said, and he never suspected at the time that it would end up being his career.
On the ball: Andy Katz
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Turn on ESPN during college basketball season and you’re bound to see Andy Katz (B.A.’90, History and Political Science). Katz breaks stories, reports on games and even interviews President Obama as he fills out his March Madness bracket. He is a senior writer for ESPN.com and serves as the backup host for the network’s critically-acclaimed Outside the Lines. Katz was UW-Madison’s Public Affairs Writer-in-Residence last fall. He credited his experience at the Daily Cardinal, where he started working as a freshman in 1986, for helping him launch a rewarding career. “I learned more about life, about journalism, downstairs in Vilas Hall, than anywhere else. It just got my juices flowing and opened my eyes, not just to sports journalism, but also how to attack news and to think critically and to challenge and to be aggressive.”
Tech star: Borui Wang Borui Wang (B.S. ’12, Computer Science) put his degree and the certificate in entrepreneurship from UW-Madison to good use when he founded Polarr, a web- and mobile-based photo-editing software company. In December 2015, Forbes magazine recognized Wang as one of its 30 Under 30 in Consumer Tech. SUBMITTED PHOTO
In addition to offering an array of editing options, Polarr takes notice of the aesthetic preferences of users (called Polarrians) and performs customizations and recommendations based on them. Wang, known as the “Everything Officer” at Polarr, believes his startup represents the future of photography. As a UW-Madison student, Wang was already combining his interests in photography and technology as a photographer at the Badger Herald and a founder of The Hub, a computer sciences student organization.
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