Indiana University Bloomington has turned out Oscar winners, Olympic champions, a billionaire investor, and the person who edits the crossword you do at breakfast. This list covers celebrities who actually attended IU Bloomington, verified name by name, rather than people who were simply born somewhere in the state.
That distinction matters. If you are looking for Hoosiers by birth like Michael Jackson (Gary), Larry Bird (West Baden Springs), and David Letterman (Indianapolis), those live in our guide to famous people from Indiana. The two lists barely overlap. Most of the names below were not born here at all. They moved to Bloomington to study, and IU is where their careers started.
Hollywood actors and creators who went to IU
Kevin Kline: The Academy Award winner studied drama at IU before starring in Hollywood classics like A Fish Called Wanda and The Big Chill. His formative years in the university’s theatre program helped shape his legendary acting career. Kline graduated from IU Bloomington in 1970 with a degree in drama before heading to Juilliard (Britannica, 2024).
Laverne Cox: A groundbreaking actress and advocate, Laverne Cox earned widespread acclaim for her iconic role in Orange Is the New Black. Before her Emmy-nominated run, Cox spent two years at IU Bloomington before transferring to Marymount Manhattan College (Indiana University News, 2021).
Jonathan Banks: Known for playing one of television’s most memorable tough guys in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Banks traces his roots back to the IU theater department, where he studied in the late 1960s. Banks and Kline overlapped at IU in the 1960s and appeared together in a campus production of The Threepenny Opera. Banks left before finishing his degree but credits IU for his start (Indiana University Media School, 2014).
Ryan Murphy: The creative mastermind behind hit television series like Glee, American Horror Story, and Pose, Murphy first practiced his storytelling skills as a writer for the campus newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. Murphy also sang with the Singing Hoosiers show choir, a detail that reads differently once you know he created Glee (Britannica, 2024).
The IU alumni who wrote the movies, the books, and the puzzles
Some of IU’s most durable exports never stood in front of a camera. Steve Tesich, an IU graduate, wrote Breaking Away, the 1979 coming-of-age film shot on the Bloomington campus and built around IU’s Little 500 bike race. Tesich won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it (Indiana University News, 2019). Angelo Pizzo, who grew up in Bloomington and earned a political science degree from IU in 1971, went on to write and produce Hoosiers and Rudy alongside his IU friend and fraternity brother, director David Anspaugh (Indiana University Honors and Awards).
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Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games, earned her bachelor’s degree from IU in 1985, double-majoring in theater and telecommunications (Britannica, 2024). And if you have ever filled in a New York Times crossword, you owe a Hoosier: Will Shortz designed his own major at IU and graduated in 1974 with what is still the world’s only college degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles. He has edited the Times crossword since 1993 (Indiana University, Promises Fulfilled).
Lights, camera, Bloomington
IU alumni are not the only ones who put Bloomington on screen. The town itself keeps showing up in film, most famously in Breaking Away, which was written by IU grad Steve Tesich and shot right on campus. For the full rundown, see our guide to famous movies filmed in Bloomington, Indiana.
Musicians who found their sound in Bloomington
Hoagy Carmichael: The legendary jazz composer behind “Georgia on My Mind” and “Stardust” earned a bachelor’s degree from IU in 1925 and a law degree in 1926 (Indiana University Maurer School of Law). He cut “Star Dust” a year later at Gennett Records in Richmond, Indiana. Today, visitors can tour the Hoagy Carmichael Room on campus to explore his incredible musical legacy.
Joshua Bell: Joshua Bell, a Bloomington native, began studying violin at the IU School of Music at age 8 under the legendary Josef Gingold and received his Artist Diploma from IU in 1989. He later returned to the Jacobs School as faculty (Indiana University News, 2008).
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Business and sports powerhouses from IU
Mark Cuban earned a B.S. from IU’s Kelley School of Business in 1981, years before he owned an NBA team or sat on the Shark Tank panel. He spent his college years running small side hustles around Bloomington, a habit that scaled into a billion-dollar career (Indiana University News Room).
IU’s athletic roll call is just as loaded. Isiah Thomas played two seasons in Bloomington and led the Hoosiers to the 1981 NCAA championship, taking home the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award (Indiana University Athletics Hall of Fame). Swimmer Mark Spitz enrolled at IU in 1969 to train under Hoosiers coach Doc Counsilman, then won seven gold medals at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a single-Games record that stood for 36 years (Britannica, 2024).
The Miles Teller connection: a campus takeover, not a diploma
Miles Teller belongs on this page with an asterisk. He did not attend IU. He studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. But he spent years as a co-owner and the public face of The Finnish Long Drink (he and his partners sold the brand to White Claw’s parent, Mark Anthony Group, in a $325 million deal in 2026), and the company ran a bar takeover tied to Bloomington’s campus scene, which is exactly the kind of legal-drinking-age college market a young beverage company chases. There is a genuine Hoosier thread here too: Long Drink co-founder Evan Burns is a native of Jasper, Indiana. We covered how the whole thing came together in our story on Miles Teller’s Long Drink bar takeover in Bloomington.
One more IU name worth knowing
Jamie Hyneman, co-host of MythBusters, graduated from IU in 1981 with a degree in Russian linguistics, which he built through the same Individualized Major Program that produced Will Shortz (Indiana University School of Public Health, Bloomington).
