Meet the Team

Evelyn McDonnell

Professor of Journalism/Faculty Director of MAJS 

Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and faculty director of the Media, Arts & a Just Society initiative. She has been writing about culture and society for more than 25 years. She is the author of five books: The World According to Joan Didion, Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways; Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll; Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork; and Rent by Jonathan Larson. She coedited the anthologies Women Who Rock: From Bessie to Beyonce. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap and Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, and her work is included in several anthologies. She has been the editorial director of www.MOLI.com, pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at SF Weekly. Since 2016 she has been the editor for the Music Matters series published by University of Texas Press.

Evelyn’s writing on music, poetry, architecture, theater, and culture has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Us, Billboard, Vibe, Interview, Black Book, and Option. For Random Lengths News, she writes Bodies of Water, a series of articles about people’s relationship to oceans, lakes, and rivers. She codirected the Grrrls on Film festivals at LMU and the conference Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1998. Her Billboard obituary of Aretha Franklin won first place for obituaries in the 2019 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and first place in the Southern California Journalism Awards for entertainment news or feature. Her 2004 Herald expose of hip-hop cops, written with Nicole White, was awarded first place for enterprise reporting by the South Florida Black Journalists Association and second place in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine State Awards. In 2013 she was inducted into the Beloit Memorial High School Hall of Fame.

Evelyn earned her Master’s in Specialized Journalism, the Arts, from USC, where she received an Annenberg Fellowship and was made a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and her BA in American Studies at Brown University. She lives in San Pedro, California, with her husband, son, cats, and a fantastic view of the ocean.

 

Carol Costello

Special Advisor and Ambassador at LMU

Carol Costello is an award-winning journalist and former anchor and correspondent at CNN and HLN. Her distinguished career as a local, regional, and national broadcaster spans three decades, covering a broad range of world leaders, events, and politics. Costello serves as special advisor and ambassador at LMU and teaches a broadcast journalism course in LMU’s Journalism Department. She also hosts “I Hate Your Generation,” a podcast series exploring the generational divide.

In 2001, Costello joined CNN as an anchor on “Headline News.” From 2002 to 2009, she anchored  “Daybreak,” the network’s former early morning news program. And from 2012 to 2018 she anchored “Newsroom.”  She also sub-anchored and was a political reporter for “The Situation Room.”  Costello contributed to CNN.com Opinion from 2015-2017.  In 2018, she hosted HLN's "Across America with Carol Costello."

Before joining CNN, Costello worked at WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., where she was an anchor and investigative reporter for five years. Prior to that, she spent three years at WBAL-TV in Baltimore. She began her career as a weekend anchor and reporter for WAKR-TV in Akron, Ohio, then moved to WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio, to serve as the station's principal weeknight anchor. Costello earned a degree in journalism from Kent State University in Ohio.

 

Vraj Patel

Graduate Assistant