Three earn 2024 Alumni Award of Distinction

Carroll R. Bogert ’79

Human Rights Advocate, Investigative Journalist, Criminal Justice System Reformer

Carroll Bogert is president of The Marshall Project, a Pulitzer Prize–winning nonprofit newsroom that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. Bogert has called the state of this system “the biggest human rights issue in America today.”

The Marshall Project’s journalism has prompted federal investigations; gotten cameras installed in prisons to prevent abuse; led to canceled contracts with corrupt, for-profit prison companies; and been cited by everyone from jailhouse lawyers to justices of the Supreme Court. The Marshall Project also operates the country’s most extensive distribution network for quality journalism behind bars, via a print magazine and a television show designed specifically for incarcerated audiences.

Before joining The Marshall Project in 2016, Bogert served as deputy executive director at Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization that defends human rights globally. Under Bogert’s leadership, Human Rights Watch launched an award-winning multimedia division with websites in seven languages and a vibrant social media presence, becoming the NGO with the largest Twitter following in the world.

Bogert began her career in Beijing as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine, first in China, then in Southeast Asia, and then in Moscow for nearly five years from 1989 to 1993. She covered both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the crackdown in Tiananmen Square. She also worked as an editor in the magazine’s New York headquarters.

Bogert speaks Mandarin and Russian. She also studied French at Andover.

The environment at Andover in the 1970s, says Bogert, was “liberating.” Coming from an urban private school in Chicago, she felt like a fish out of water among sophisticated kids from Massachusetts and New York. But Andover’s academic rigor and wealth of extracurricular opportunities “opened my eyes to a world of new possibilities.”

Bogert earned an MA in East Asian studies and a BA in social studies, both from Harvard University. She has two grown daughters and lives in Harlem, New York, with a badly behaved cat named Wally.

“Information propels social change,” says Bogert. “A career at the intersection of media and advocacy has made for a truly fulfilling life.”

William A. Ellis III ’80

Award-Winning Filmmaker, Novelist, Playwright & Essayist, Screenwriter & Producer, Educator & Storyteller

William “Trey” Ellis, a two-time Emmy and Peabody award–winning filmmaker, also won an American Book Award for his novel Right Here, Right Now. As a playwright and essayist, he won the NAACP Image Award, and he has been a professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Ellis is currently a writer and consulting producer of Costiera, a TV comedy/action series for Amazon starring Jesse Williams.

Ellis’s works often address themes of identity, race, culture, and the complexity of the African American experience. “Each medium provides different advantages and disadvantages, but I tend to borrow heavily from one to give to the other,” said Ellis in an interview for the Westport (Conn.) Playhouse. “For me, storytelling is storytelling.”

Ellis was an executive producer and interviewer for the Emmy-winning HBO documentaries True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality and King in the Wilderness. His screenplay Holy Mackerel! achieved one of the highest ratings ever on Franklin Leonard’s Black List.com. Ellis is currently developing this project as a limited series with Shaka King and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Wendell Pierce.

Some of Ellis’s other screenplays include the Peabody Award–winning The Tuskegee Airmen for HBO and Good Fences for Showtime, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was shortlisted for the PEN award for Best Teleplay. In 2020, he created the online screenwriting course “Screenwriting: Core Elements” for the Sundance Film Institute that so far has been taken by hundreds of students around the world. His works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Ellis is the author of the novels Platitudes, Home Repairs, and Right Here, Right Now, as well as the memoir Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. His numerous essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, GQ, and Vanity Fair. His play, Fly, was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Institute and continues to be performed around the country in venues such as Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theatre, the Pasadena Playhouse, and The New Victory Theater in New York.

He is currently in rehearsals for Dorothy Dandridge!, a musical about the iconic African American actress and singer for which he wrote the book and is co-lyricist.

Vanessa B. Kerry ’95

Global Health Advocate, Climate & Social Justice Activist, Physician & Educator

Dr. Vanessa Kerry is CEO of Seed Global Health (Seed), a nonprofit organization focused on strengthening and transforming health systems through long-term investments and training of the health workforce. 

“I was struck by how we could build capacity, not charity, in health-care systems around the world,” Kerry said in an interview with Andover magazine. “By empowering local professionals, we create lasting change.” Under her leadership, Seed has helped educate more than 42,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives in seven countries, helping to improve health care for more than 76 million people. 

In 2023, Kerry was appointed the World Health Organization’s Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health and is leading efforts to build advocacy around the impact of climate change on health to ensure equitable and just climate action. “The climate crisis is a health crisis,” she said, addressing the interplay between climate change and public health. “We cannot separate the two if we want to protect vulnerable communities.”

As co-chair of a workstream on the World Health Organization’s Public Health and Emergency Workforce Roadmap, she is helping to galvanize consensus for investment in surveillance, detection, and treatment for the next pandemic. In her opening remarks for the Forecasting Healthy Futures Summit, Kerry shared that “decades of inaction and self-interest have led us to this moment. And…as a global health community, we have a huge responsibility to ensure more lives are saved and to change this perilous course. I believe we can be the critical levers of change we need to accelerate reducing emissions, adapt to climate change—and save lives. By fully illustrating the health impacts [of climate change], we can significantly shift the balance toward a rapid and just transition.”

Kerry is a pulmonary and critical care trained physician at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and is an associate professor at MGH as well as Harvard Medical School. She is the director of Global and Climate Health Policy in the Department of Environmental Medicine at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. 

A Yale University graduate, Kerry earned an MD at Harvard Medical School and a master’s in health policy, planning, and financing from the London School of Economics and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.