Garrett D. Morgan ’08 was quite a precocious toddler. According to his mother, he became a bibliophile at the age of two, frequently going to bed with books under his pillow. Clearly it paid off, and today Morgan is a true Renaissance man.
“You never know how smart your child is, but most people who meet him say he’s the most intelligent person they’ve ever met,” says his mother, Rebecca S. Morgan. A rare breed at Harvard, he can serenade you on the piano, make a short film about Beanie Babies, and write you a sonnet—all in a day’s work.
As the publisher of the Harvard Advocate, Morgan is largely responsible for producing the literary magazine.
“Being on the fiction board really gave me the opportunity to not be given books that had been handed down through the canon, but short stories written by students that might be terrible and might be wonderful,” says Morgan. “I’m much more in touch with myself because of that.”
As a transfer from the film program in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Morgan’s college experience really has been quite a journey in self-discovery. “I felt like NYU focused so heavily on putting people in film together, and the education wasn’t liberal or diverse enough.”
Luckily, Morgan’s best high school friend and current off-campus roommate, outgoing Undergraduate Council President Ryan A. Petersen ’08, was waiting for him when he got here.
But his Tisch roots never really left him. And with a cinematographer father, an exposure to filmmaking was part of his upbringing. A history and literature concentrator, Morgan is currently studying film, writing a thesis about collective memory and postwar national consciousness in France through cinema. This past summer he traveled to the French National Archives to perform the necessary research.
“I think film has a much broader social impact in much subtler ways than might seem apparent,” he said.
With a screenplay co-written with a friend from NYU all ready to go, Morgan hopes to head to Hollywood after graduation and bring his passion for film to fruition.
One of his friends from the Advocate, Marta M. Figlerowicz ’09, can attest to his breadth of knowledge: “He has an astonishingly wide range of interests. You can strike up a conversation with him about deconstruction or about 3-D Disney movies.”
Keep an eye out for this one...especially if you’re ever in Cannes.
