Three earn 2025 Alumni Award of Distinction

Pablo Durana ’02

In 2004, as a Burch Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Pablo Durana embarked on a four-month, 2,700-mile bicycle journey through western China with his sister. Together, they explored and documented the lives of the region’s 56 minority populations. Reflecting on the experience, Durana said, “The passion for travel and storytelling exploded, and I never looked back.”

That formative journey deepened his love for exploration and human connection—and launched his lifelong career in filmmaking and storytelling.

A Colombian-born, Canadian-raised, and California-based Emmy Award–winning cinematographer and director, Durana is passionate about documentary filmmaking and advocacy through storytelling. As an endurance athlete, he brings extensive experience filming and operating in extreme environments. He believes deeply in film’s power to educate, inspire, and drive change around pressing global issues, particularly environmental and cultural preservation.

His career, spanning over two decades, has taken him across the seven continents, covering everything from the first-ever Afghan women’s mountaineering expedition, hippos in Colombia, drug wars and human trafficking in Mexico, the regenerative wool movement in the United States, first ascent mountaineering in Antarctica, and ivory poaching in Africa.

Durana has collaborated on several films with Sean and Andrea Nix Fine (Change Content), including Inocente, a 2013 Oscar-winning documentary short about a homeless, undocumented immigrant artist, and Life According to Sam, an Emmy-winning, Oscar-shortlisted feature about a teenager living with progeria, a rare genetic disorder that causes accelerated aging in children. He recently completed his directorial debut feature documentary No Legs, All Heart about André Kajlich, the first double amputee to compete in the grueling, 3,000-mile Race Across America.

Ruth E. Harlow ’79

Working with a small band of colleagues, Ruth Harlow was a pioneering gay rights lawyer from the late 1980s through the early 2000s—a time when almost every legal question affecting lesbians and gay men, or people with HIV, involved a case of first impression. Harlow crafted novel arguments for dozens of high-impact cases to establish new rights and expand American society’s understanding of her community.

At the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal, Harlow fought against government censorship of AIDS education materials, efforts to remove children from lesbian mothers, schools and universities’ punishment of gay students’ First Amendment activities, and hospital emergency rooms’ refusal to treat people with AIDS. She represented a lawyer who was fired by the State of Georgia after learning of the lawyer’s plans to hold a private, religious same-sex marriage ceremony with her partner; served as co-counsel in the Supreme Court for James Dale, an Eagle Scout expelled for being gay; and was among the lawyers who repeatedly challenged the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.

In 2003, the National Law Journal named Harlow “Lawyer of the Year” for her role as lead counsel in Lawrence v. Texas, a case in which the U.S. Supreme Court remarkably admitted it had made grievous errors in considering the same gay rights question 17 years before. The Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision established a new constitutional liberty for all consenting adults and struck down the many state criminal laws against gay sexual intimacy that had been used for decades to justify all sorts of anti-gay discrimination. Lawrence became a critical building block for Supreme Court decisions recognizing marriage equality.

Later in her career, Harlow litigated at large commercial firms and then returned to the ACLU to fight for reproductive rights. Now, in a welcome break from the adversarial world of litigation, Harlow represents the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development to close multimillion-dollar real estate transactions that expand the city’s affordable housing. Harlow attended Stanford University and Yale Law School. She lives with her spouse and son in New York City and Millerton, New York.

John Marks ’61

John Marks has spent decades addressing some of the world’s most critical global challenges through Search for Common Ground, the organization he founded in 1982 to promote cooperation and resolve societal differences. Over time, Marks and his wife, Susan Collin Marks, built the nonprofit into the world’s largest peacebuilding nongovernmental organization (NGO), with 600 staff members and offices in 36 countries. Recognizing media’s power to reach millions, he also founded Common Ground Productions, which produced more than 400 episodes of dramatic TV in 20 countries. Marks refers to these as “soap opera for social change.” Marks stepped down as president of Search for Common Ground in 2014. In 2018, his work for the NGO was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Marks is the author of From Vision to Action: Remaking the World Through Social Entrepreneurship (2024). Part memoir, part guide, the book explains what it means to be a social entrepreneur and how readers can create positive change in society by adopting 11 principles, including “Start from Vision,” “Keep Showing Up,” and “Make Yesable Propositions.” Currently, he is co-founder and senior advisor of the Pro Bono Litigation Corps. This newly launched program, under the aegis of Lawyers for Good Government, provides experienced, unaffiliated attorneys with the infrastructure and support they need to serve as primary counsel or co-counsel on high-impact constitutional litigation.

Along with being a best-selling, award-winning author, Marks is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, a Skoll Awardee in Social Entrepreneurship, and an Ashoka Senior Fellow. A graduate of Cornell University, he was also a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. In 2010, the U.N.’s University of Peace awarded him an honorary PhD.

Marks has been a generous presence on campus, sharing his insights and reflections during several visits. At one such event, he was invited to reflect on non sibi and the lasting impact of his Andover education. “When I left, it wasn’t just that I felt I could make a difference,” he said. “I felt I should make a difference.”