At Edward R. Murrow High School, in Midwood, Van Auken was a theatre kid, though not just a performer; she was also part of the stage crew. “I think I just liked collaboration,” she said. Her junior year, she and her younger brother participated in an evening of one-act plays; when they called home beforehand, their mother sounded upset but wouldn’t say why. “All day long we thought somebody had died,” Van Auken recalled. After the show, they found their parents in a school hallway, and learned that the family had been evicted. Van Auken was shocked; she’d had no real sense of their financial precarity. (Her father was an engineer, and her mother had for a time been a secretary in the same office.) “On the spectrum of folks who are evicted from their homes, we were on the luckier end,” she said. “My parents had friends with resources; we were never unhoused.”
Van Auken also felt lucky to be at Murrow—staff there were supportive and helped her to find grants and loans for college. Murrow’s founding principal, Saul Bruckner, was a legendary figure at the institution that he led for thirty years. A magnet school focussed on the arts, Murrow was a place that prized freedom over order and was premised on a fundamental respect for its students. In her speech accepting the O.M.E. job, Van Auken cited Bruckner’s profound influence; he had, she told the crowd, “taught generations of students that they mattered and that participation wasn’t reserved for someone else.”
Still, in her own life, sustained political engagement was slow to cohere. Back in Brooklyn after college at Emerson, she was appalled by the march toward war that followed 9/11. She went to protests and took the LSAT, but felt discouraged by the relative toothlessness of international human-rights law. Instead, in 2005, Van Auken took a job as a casting assistant at the Blue Man Group. It was a role that combined administrative tasks with the delicate business of assessing others’ abilities. Tim Aumiller, who worked with her there on and off for more than a decade, remembers her treating performers during auditions in a manner both genuinely respectful and “deftly diplomatic.” She got more comfortable with public speaking as she found herself obliged to address callback crowds of aspiring Blue Men. Also, she was extremely organized. “She was the first person who taught me Google Sheets,” Aumiller told me.
The 2008 recession brought layoffs to the Blue Man Group, and casting was among the first departments cut. Barack Obama, meanwhile, was running a Presidential campaign poised to channel the anger of the Bush years into a movement. Van Auken was interested in the candidate, but, even more than that, in the public energy coalescing around him. Through a friend, she got a paid job as a volunteer coördinator at a field office in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. “That campaign had a real, multiracial, working-class movement supporting it,” Van Auken said. “And it was mostly middle-aged women running everything.”
She learned about the mechanics of canvassing—how a campaign door-knocks its way toward a “win number,” the estimated count of likely voters required for a victory—and about the philosophy of Marshall Ganz, the veteran social-movements, civil-rights, and labor organizer who established the Obama campaign’s field strategy. Ganz’s approach hinged on the power of individual voters and volunteers. “Treating people like smart people who have agency, who can be there or not,” Van Auken said. “Asking people to step up and lead, so it’s not about me, it’s not about one person being a leader—this is all Marshall Ganz. He has this wonderful definition of leadership: you have to step into a moment of uncertainty and inspire other people to action toward a new possibility.” She returned to work at the Blue Man Group between campaigns, but, by then, she said, “I was hooked on organizing.”
Van Auken’s biography hits a series of beats common in histories of left-wing awakening in the twenty-first century. September 11th and the wars that followed were the occasion for disillusionment with the Democratic establishment; Obama’s first Presidential campaign offered a glimpse of an alternative, followed by further disillusionment. When Occupy Wall Street took off, Van Auken went to dozens of meetings but grew frustrated by the movement’s lack of structure. (“I mostly learned what not to do by trying to get involved with Occupy,” she told the Danish scholar Fabian Holt, in an interview for his 2025 book “Organize or Burn.”) She worked on a handful of causes in the years after 2008, but nothing pulled her in as the Obama campaign had until Bernie Sanders’s first Presidential run. The way he talked about the country’s problems energized her, and she could tell it was energizing other people, too.
