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As the spring term begins, thousands of Columbia students have returned to campus. Despite facing economic challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, many local galleries and art-related businesses continue to offer a diverse array of artistic experiences for Columbia students, ranging from exhibitions confronting the pressing issues of race and gender inequalities to craft and pottery workshops that provide an opportunity to step away from the screen and into the studio.

While the curtains remain closed, stage lights off, and plush seats empty, Columbia’s theater groups will not stay silent this fall. Through an array of festivals, cabaret performances, mainstage productions, and even a radio show, performance groups are coming together virtually to bring theater to the Columbia community from across the world.

Columbia Athletics has named former assistant coach Katie DeSandis, CC ’13, as the head coach of the field hockey team. DeSandis previously spent four years as a player for the Lions and joined the team as an assistant coach for the past three seasons.

For Columbia’s student theater groups, the spring semester is when creative teams, actors, and designers produce a crowded roster of musicals and plays. Beginning in January, creative teams begin planning, casting, and constructing their upcoming productions. Amid the COVID-19 crisis and cancellation of on-campus activities, however, all student-led theater groups have been forced to cancel or postpone their shows until the fall semester.

Men and women’s swimming at Columbia operate under a long shadow, that of Ivy League heavyweights Harvard and Princeton. It’s been 48 years since Harvard and Princeton were both denied the championship on the men’s side, and only one women’s team has broken the seal in the last 20 years. This means, effectively, that the Lions must battle it out for third every year.

When Columbia announced students’ departure from campus amid the COVID-19 pandemic in early March, Samuel Powell, CC ’20, was working with his classmates to create a new adaptation of Euripides’ “Medea” for the acting course entitled Performing Greek Tragedy on the Modern Stage. Prior to the evacuation of students, Powell’s group reimagined the play, setting it amid a quarantine in which characters communicated over video, incorporating the play’s themes of isolation and distance.

You can’t be what you can’t see, and the 10th Athena Film Festival took that mantra of representation to heart this year. Through a series of screenings and panel discussions, the festival shined a spotlight on the lack of LGBTQ representation in the media, the dearth of female heroes and villains in popular culture, and the inspiring women who are running for office and changing the male-dominated political landscape.

For Columbia field hockey, the 2010s were driven by a hunger for the team’s first taste of success. Going into the decade, the program was entering its 15th year, but had only ever carried four winning seasons and 24 wins in Ivy League play out of 91 games. To start off the decade, the Light Blue went 10-7, 9-8, and 9-8, rattling off three consecutive winning seasons. However, in 2013, the team stumbled, earning a 6-11 record with just two Ivy League victories.