Jeff Goldstein ’77, president of global theatrical distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures, will address graduates at the School of Education (SOE) on Saturday, May 9, at 4:30 p.m. in the John A. Lally Athletics Complex.

Goldstein oversees all aspects of Warner Bros. Pictures’ distribution activities worldwide, including filmmaker and exhibitor relations, release dating and patterns, business strategy, sales and administration, and specialty/premium formats.

Additionally, he manages Warner Bros. Pictures’ extensive international distribution network, which includes both affiliate offices and third-party partnerships. Goldstein also partners on marketing, and his team is responsible for distributing a diverse range of films each year, including titles from Warner Bros. Pictures, New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation and DC Studios.

A highly respected leader in the distribution field, Goldstein previously served as president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. Pictures. He began his career at the company as an intern in the Los Angeles office and quickly climbed the ranks, holding various roles across regional sales offices.

Over the years, his leadership and expertise have been instrumental in shaping the company’s distribution strategy and global success.

Goldstein’s work has been central to Warner Bros.’ recent global box office success. In 2025, the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group surpassed $4 billion at the worldwide box office across 11 releases, delivering eight consecutive No. 1 openings (nine with “Wuthering Heights” in 2026) and seven straight debuts over $40 million.

Recent highlights include “A Minecraft Movie” approaching $1 billion worldwide following its record-setting $163 million domestic opening; “Sinners” becoming the highest-grossing original horror film domestically; “Final Destination: Bloodlines” earning the best opening and highest total gross in franchise history; “Weapons” achieving the largest August horror opening; and “The Conjuring: Last Rites” securing the biggest global horror opening ever.

Additionally, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” became Tim Burton’s second highest-grossing domestic release, while “Barbie” crossed $1.4 billion worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film in Warner Bros.’ 100-year history.

In a , Goldstein explains that the roots of his career “started in Syracuse,” soon after he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in special education: “I had an uncle who was in the entertainment business. He said, if you are interested, I can get you a summer job at Warner Bros.”

When asked what connects Íű±ŹĂĆ and his School of Education degree to his success as a movie executive, Goldstein says, “I got my entrepreneurial spirit by working jobs in the dining hall, as a residence advisor and in the business affairs office. While at Syracuse, I realized I had a bent for business, as well as the ability to teach others, mentor others, [and] be curious.”

Elle Key ’93, an award-winning film, television and commercial director, writer and producer, will deliver the 2026 convocation address to bachelor’s and master’s degree candidates of the at the college’s convocation ceremony on Saturday, May 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the JMA Wireless Dome.

Key earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in illustration from VPA and was a starting goalie for the Syracuse women’s lacrosse team. She was born in New York City and is the co-president and founder of Bigger Picture Media Group.

Key spent her early years working off-Broadway with theater companies such as Malaparte, Naked Angels and the Atlantic Theater Company. She then went into television and film production and has helmed numerous national commercial campaigns as well as several projects for the NFL, the Pro Bowl, NBC Sports, Fox Sports, The Peabody Awards and The Gotham Awards.

She was officially the first female head writer for “The NFL Honors” in 2017. She came back and served as segment director, producer and head writer for “The NFL Honors” in 2021 and 2024. She was an executive producer on “Brain Games” for Disney/Nat Geo and was an executive producer with James Corden for “Game On!” for CBS.

Key is currently in development as creator and show runner for a new scripted streaming comedy series. She has been writing and directing with, and for, her Emmy and Peabody Award-winner partner, Keegan-Michael Key, for over a decade.

In 2022, Key won the Webby Award for Best Podcast Writing for her original Audible series “The History of Sketch Comedy.” Key, and the series that she created, wrote and directed, was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award.

She then followed her award-winning podcast with the book “The History of Sketch Comedy,” which became a best-seller, garnered rave reviews and quickly reached the No. 1 spot on Amazon’s comedy book list. “The History of Sketch Comedy” made 2023’s Barnes and Noble’s Best Books of the Year list as well as Vulture’s Best Books of 2023.

Key is a member of the Creative Coalition and Women in Film, and she is on the Leadership Council for RFK Human Rights.

Steven W. Barnes ’82, H’19, a devoted alumnus, University trustee and generous supporter of Íű±ŹĂĆ, will deliver the keynote address at the ‘s 2026 Convocation Ceremony. Barnes, who majored in accounting in the Whitman School, has maintained close ties to the University throughout a career spanning nearly four decades in private equity.

Bain Capital LP is one of the world’s leading global private investment firms, managing more than $215 billion in assets under management across private equity, venture capital, public equity and leveraged debt. Barnes has been affiliated with Bain since 1988 and previously served as chairman of global private equity, head of North American private equity, co-head of European private equity, and founded and led the global portfolio group.

He also served in various leadership positions within Bain’s portfolio companies, including as CEO of Dade Behring, a global diagnostic company, president of Executone Business Solutions, a telecommunications company, and president of The Holson Burnes Group, a publicly traded consumer products company.

Barnes served as chairman of the University’s from 2015-19 and as chairman emeritus from 2019-23. He currently serves as vice chair of the board. Outside of Syracuse, Barnes serves on the board of directors of the Boston Celtics as a member of ownership, and is a board member of MV Youth, The Park of West Palm Beach and the Boys & Girls Clubs of Palm Beach County. He previously served on the boards of Boston Children’s Hospital, New Profit, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Boston City Year and was the former chairman of the board of The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

“We are thrilled to welcome Steve Barnes back to campus to speak to our graduates this year,” says Whitman Interim Dean . “Steve’s extraordinary career in private equity, combined with his lifelong commitment to this University and its students, make him an ideal voice for our Class of 2026. His story, from his time as a student at Whitman to the heights he has reached in business and in his service to Íű±ŹĂĆ, is one that will truly inspire our graduates as they take their next steps.”

Barnes’ connection to the Whitman School is long-standing and wide-ranging. He is a longtime member of the , a founding investor in the Orange Value Fund and served as the founding co-chair of the Advisory Board. He received the Whitman School’s Jonathan J. Holtz Alumnus of the Year Award in 2011.

The generosity of Barnes and his wife, Deborah, has had a transformative impact across campus, including:

• providing the lead gift for the , the University’s integrated health, wellness and recreation complex;
• endowing the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities and the Barnes Professorship in Entrepreneurship at the Whitman School and establishing the Barnes Award for Academic Excellence, a merit-based scholarship recognizing outstanding first-year Whitman students; and
• supporting Remembrance Scholars, Syracuse Athletics, the Office of Disability Services and other initiatives across the University.

Barnes was recognized with an honorary doctorate degree from Íű±ŹĂĆ in 2019 and he received the Dritz Trustee of the Year Award in 2014.

The Whitman School’s Convocation Ceremony will be held Saturday, May 9, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the JMA Wireless Dome.

Olympic gold medalist and visionary executive says it has been her lifelong mission to help people win gold medals in business—and in life.

“My gold medal is the gift that keeps on giving,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “I am forever grateful, so I want to pay that gift forward.”

To get there, Fitzgerald Mosley highlights five “Olympic rings” to help people achieve their goals: Have a good start, set high goals, run your own race, power through hurdles and have a strong finish.

“You have to ask yourself, why not me?’’ Fitzgerald Mosley says. “Why can’t I be the best in the world at what I do?”

From becoming the first African American woman to win the 100-meter hurdles at the 1984 Olympics to her current role as chief executive officer of Multiplying Good, Fitzgerald Mosley has persistently broken barriers and advanced the idea that sport has the power to inspire and change the world.

Her enormous impact as a results-oriented leader in the Olympic, non-profit, and corporate worlds is why Dean asked Fitzgerald Mosley to be the keynote speaker at the Convocation at 12:30 p.m. May 10 in the John A. Lally Athletics Complex.

“Benita’s ‘why not me?’ message encourages us to challenge societal expectations and embrace our potential, while Multiplying Good is helping people bring about positive change and inspiring them to do more,” Jordan says. “The life lessons and insights that Benita will share May 10 will provide valuable inspiration to our graduates and all of us.”

Using Fitzgerald Mosley’s five Olympic rings, here is her remarkable story:

Have A Good Start

Fitzgerald Mosley often uses a quote from former American politician and motivational speaker Les Brown, who said, “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.”

Fitzgerald Mosley’s parents, Fannie and Rodger Fitzgerald, were both educators and they encouraged Fitzgerald Mosley to get started in as many extracurricular activities as possible in their hometown of Dale City, Virginia. By participating in gymnastics, softball, majorettes and track, and learning the piano, violin, flute and piccolo, Fitzgerald Mosley discovered what she loved and was good at and where to focus her attention.

“They were very supportive and stood by me in every aspect of my life,” Fitzgerald Mosley says of her parents. “They celebrated my every achievement, large and small, and I loved to make them proud.”

While she became the first chair flute for the Gar-Field High School symphonic band, Fitzgerald Mosley says she wasn’t very good at softball and grew too tall to be a gymnast. But middle school physical education teacher, family friend and gymnastics coach Gwen Washington was also the coach of the track team and when it became obvious that Fitzgerald Mosley had outgrown gymnastics, Washington suggested she join the track team because she had seen Fitzgerald Mosley outrun the boys in gym classes.

“So I went out for the track team and started winning races from the very beginning,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “It wasn’t until I was 12 years old and in the seventh grade that I even discovered my athletic prowess.”

Set High Goals

As a high school freshman sprinter and hurdler, Fitzgerald Mosley helped the track team win its fourth consecutive Virginia state championship. She was a teammate of senior Paula Girven, who represented the United States in the high jump in the 1976 Olympics and qualified for the team in 1980. Their high school track coach, Anne Locket, also led the girl’s gymnastics and basketball teams to state championships.

“Coach Locket said to me, ‘You know, you can be an Olympian someday just like Paula,’ and I looked at her like she was from Mars,” Fitzgerald Mosley says, smiling. “But having a coach believe in you and say that to a youngster at 14 years old, it set me up for great things to come.”

By 1980, Fitzgerald Mosley was 18 and already a track star—and an industrial engineering major—at the University of Tennessee, where she would become a 14-time All-American and four-time NCAA hurdles champion. Like Girven, she made the 1980 Olympic team but didn’t participate because the United States led a boycott of the 1980 Summer Games in Moscow to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Fortunately for Fitzgerald Mosley, she was still in college and had the benefit of having access to coaching, training equipment and the highest level of competition in college. This was a time when Olympic athletes were strictly amateurs who couldn’t make money off their athletic achievements, and many athletes who qualified for the 1980 Games, like Girven, weren’t able to return for the 1984 Games.

“At that point, people didn’t have these long careers spanning three and four and five Olympic Games that started with my generation because they started to allow us to make money while we were competing,” Fitzgerald Mosley says. “The two other hurdlers that were on the Olympic team with me in 1980 didn’t make it again in 1984, so that was their one and only chance to be an Olympian.”

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The has announced that Patrick J. Ahearn FAIA ’73, G’73, one of America’s most celebrated classical architects, will address graduates at the 2025 Convocation ceremony on Saturday, May 10, at 10 a.m. in Hendricks Chapel.

Ahearn serves on the School of Architecture Advisory Board, is a Íű±ŹĂĆ trustee and is a member of the Íű±ŹĂĆ Boston Regional Council.

Ahearn is founding principal of , an award-winning Boston-based architecture firm specializing in classic American architecture for contemporary living. For over 50 years, he has designed historically motivated private residences, which have advanced the art of place-making in some of America’s most desirable and storied destinations.

From an early age, Ahearn knew he wanted to be a designer, but his first passion wasn’t architecture—it was cars. Through his fascination with automobiles, Ahearn’s initial appreciation for the power of good design and the importance of scale, proportion and light was born. And while this interest in car design sparked Ahearn’s earliest aesthetic awareness, growing up in Levittown, New York—the nation’s first planned suburb—helped him understand how good architecture and urban design could improve people’s lives and foster a true sense of community.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a master’s degree in urban design from Íű±ŹĂĆ, Ahearn began his career in Boston, teaching at Boston Architectural College and designing for the Architects Collaborative and Benjamin Thompson & Associates. He worked on waterfront revival projects in Miami and Baltimore and new-build, mixed-use hotels and urban design initiatives in Cairo and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, along with renowned adaptive reuse projects including Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace.

In 1978, Ahearn founded Patrick Ahearn Architect. Over the next 20 years, he revived hundreds of historic townhouses in the then-struggling Back Bay neighborhood of Boston and reinvigorated the commercial corridor of Newbury Street. Ever mindful of scale, proportion and context, Ahearn worked carefully within zoning, conservation and community regulations to balance preservation concerns with the need to design structures that felt timeless—an enduring signature of his work today.

In the early 1990s, Ahearn expanded his practice to the community of Edgartown Village on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where much of his professional and personal energies were devoted for the better part of the three decades that followed. He has lent his expertise to more than 350 buildings—225 of them in the historic district alone—reimagining and redesigning many of Edgartown’s most notable private residences and public buildings. In the process transforming them into places and spaces for contemporary living, he has deftly blended them into the historic coastal landscape.

In the past 10 years, Ahearn’s commissions have taken him to locations farther afield, including California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Maine, New Hampshire, Delaware, New York, New Jersey and Florida. Internationally he has designed residences on Vancouver Island and in both Australia and Scotland.

No matter the location, whether reviving centuries-old, landmarked structures along the coastlines or creating new homes that reimagine the local vernacular, Ahearn demonstrates an unparalleled ability to combine the romance of traditional architecture with the ideals of modernism. Through the practice of what he calls “narrative-driven architecture,” Ahearn creates a storyline for every home he restores, renovates or builds from the ground up.

Sensitive to the original spirit of every property and its surrounding neighborhood, Ahearn’s work ranges across a broad spectrum of project types, including master planning, new construction, historic renovation and restoration. His use of rich materials, artisanal craftsmanship and period details creates buildings that are so well suited to their context that they seem to have been built in the distant past.

Perhaps most importantly, Ahearn and his firm apply the “greater good theory”—a belief that architecture has the power to improve lives, increase happiness and encourage friendly and familiar interactions—to their work. This approach allows them to create what he calls “non-ego-driven architecture,” where the success of the project is judged on its capacity to enhance the public realm rather than on the architect’s singular design intentions.

Renowned for his skill and expertise, Ahearn has received many awards, including election to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows. His work has been featured in numerous publications and broadcast outlets, including Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal, House Beautiful, HGTV and many others.

Ahearn is a registered architect in 19 states, the District of Columbia, and British Columbia, Canada, and has earned the NCARB Certificate. He is also professionally associated with the Boston Society of Architects, the Boston Architectural Center, the Boston Preservation Alliance, the National Trust for Historical Preservation, the Back Bay Neighborhood Association, the Back Bay Architectural Commission, the Town of Wellesley Planning Board, the Town of Wellesley Design Review Board and is a former Chairman of the Board of the Martha’s Vineyard Preservation Trust.

He has taught at the Boston Architectural College, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Íű±ŹĂĆ’s own School of Architecture.

Patrick Ahearn’s acclaimed monograph, “,” was published in 2018 and is in its seventh printing. His second published book, “,” was published in 2023 and details the architectural process that transformed an historic seaside hotel into a gracious bayfront estate.

In business, Daniel A. D’Aniello ’68, H’20, can only be considered an icon, and much of his success is rooted in his respect for the U.S. military and his education at Íű±ŹĂĆ. The is proud to announce that this devoted alumnus, Íű±ŹĂĆ life trustee and generous supporter will address the Whitman Class of 2025 at this year’s Convocation.

D’Aniello is co-founder and chair emeritus of the private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, established in 1987. Prior to that, his career included positions as vice president for finance and development at Marriott Corporation and financial officer at both PepsiCo, Inc., and Transworld Airlines (TWA).

A member of Beta Gamma Sigma, Syracuse’s business fraternity, D’Aniello graduated magna cum laude from Íű±ŹĂĆ. He was drafted into the U.S. Navy, where he was a distinguished naval graduate of the Officer Candidate School, as well as a supply officer aboard the U.S.S. Wasp (CVS 18). After serving his country, D’Aniello earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1974.

“We could not be more excited to have Dan D’Aniello speak to our graduates this year,” says Whitman Interim Dean Alex McKelvie. “His global business acumen is unparalleled, and I am certain his words of advice, based on his own success, leadership and generous spirit, are sure to resonate with our outstanding 2025 Whitman School graduates who are eager to soak up his wisdom as they embark on the next steps in their business careers.”

In appreciation of the strong foundations he received at Íű±ŹĂĆ and his commitment to the U.S military, D’Aniello has been a highly valued partner to the leadership of the Whitman School of Management, serving on the Whitman Advisory Council (WAC) and also establishing the D’Aniello Entrepreneurship Internship Program to support business development and expand students’ experiential learning opportunities. His other commitments include chairman of the Chancellor’s Council and co-chairman of the (IVMF) Advisory Board.

Long-time supporters of Íű±ŹĂĆ, Dan and his wife Gayle gave the naming gift to the Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Building, home to the National Veterans Resource Center in 2018. At the opening of the building, Dan announced an additional transformative endowment and naming gift for the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families, ensuring its work will continue well into the future.

The D’Aniellos’ unwavering support for Íű±ŹĂĆ continued in 2022 when they committed a gift to support and expand the Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Íű±ŹĂĆ Program in Florence, part of the Syracuse Abroad program in Florence, Italy. The program has been able to grow student opportunities, provide more faculty support, upgrade facilities, further develop the curriculum and provide scholarship support to students to attend the study abroad experience, specifically veteran and military-connected students. Most recently, D’Aniello and his wife made a transformative gift to expand Íű±ŹĂĆ’s Catholic Center.

The Whitman School of Management’s 2025 Convocation will be held on Saturday, May 10, at 4 p.m. in the JMA Wireless Dome.