Contributors
Rebecca Amato is the Associate Director of the Urban Democracy Lab and Associate Faculty at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. Her research and writing focus on the intersections between cities, space, place, and memory, and have appeared in Radical History Review, City Courant, and New York magazine, as well as exhibits throughout the city. She has been a staff member and consultant at a variety of history institutions in New York, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the American Social History Project, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York. She holds a PhD in United States History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is an urbanist, curator, and artist pioneering public arts and urban research for community engagement, and is author of Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area ( University of Iowa Press, 2019). She teaches urban studies and public art at The New School and is principal of the design and research studio Buscada. She was the 2017 Post-doctoral Fellow in Visual Culture at the International Center of Photography and holds a PhD in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her recent public art and dialogue project, Intersection| Prospect Heights, in partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library, engaged thousands of New Yorkers in talking about displacement and development, and she regularly consults with cultural organizations on community and art engagements and strategic visioning. Her creative practice has been shown at institutions including MIT, the Brooklyn Public Library, the Center for Architecture, the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, and Tate Britain. Her work on cities, culture and photography has appeared in journals including Visual Studies, Urban Omnibus, Space and Culture, Society & Space, Radical History Review, and Buildings & Landscapes.
Molly Garfinkel directs City Lore’s Place Matters program, a wide-ranging public history and advocacy initiative working with communities across the five boroughs. Her work includes research and publishing, cultural resource management, exhibition curation, public programming, and education. She is particularly interested in building traditions, theories of cultural landscapes, and histories of urban planning and activism. Garfinkel holds a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia.
Allison Guess is a Ph.D. student in Earth and Environmental Sciences (Human Geography) at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research seeks to explain the phenomena of “Black Land” and Black people’s relationships to land in the Western Hemisphere using historical geography. Allison is currently a Communications Fellow at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, a Writing Fellow at Macaulay Honors College at Lehman and a Teaching Assistant at Barnard College in Harlem. She is a member of the Black/Land Project, an interview-based project that seeks to record and analyze Black people’s various relationships to land in the United States. Some of Allison’s scholarly work can be found published in the edited volume titled Deterritorializing/Reterritorializing: Critical Geography of Educational Reform (2017), American Quarterly (2016), Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education; Society (2014), Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2014). Allison earned a BA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a BA in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.
Walis Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work documents the urban landscape through ethnographic film, oral history, and artist walking practices. She holds a BA in History from Williams College, an MFA from Hunter College and has taught at Parsons School of Design.
Prithi Kanakamedala is an Assistant Professor of History at Bronx Community College CUNY. Her research interests include nineteenth-century free Black communities in Brooklyn and New York, race and citizenship in the early republic, and the history of New York City. As a public historian she has worked for a number of cultural institutions including Danspace Project, Place Matters, Brooklyn Historical Society, Weeksville Heritage Center, and Irondale Ensemble Project. Prithi holds a Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and is originally from Liverpool, England.
Samip Mallick is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), the only organization that digitally documents, preserves, and shares stories of South Asian Americans. Working at the intersection of technology and storytelling, Mallick has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois. He was previously the Director of the Ranganathan Center for Digital Information at the University of Chicago Library.
Yvette Ramírez is a Queens-based arts administrator, oral-historian, and archivist-in-training. She is inspired by the power of community-centered archives to further explore the complexities of “home,” memory and diaspora – in particular the Andean experience. Ramírez holds a BA from Hunter College in Romance Languages and Political Science where she studied past and present social movements in Latin America. She has worked as an educator at The Noguchi Museum and has organized via community-based organizations such as Make The Road NY and New Immigrant Community Empowerment. Until recently, she was the Program Coordinator at The Laundromat Project.
Hatuey Ramos-Fermín is an artist and cultural producer. He is the co-founder of meta local collaborative, a Bronx-based artist collective, and Boogie Down Rides, a bicycling and art project celebrating cycling in the Bronx. He has organized projects and made presentations at a security guard training school (in tribute to Fashion Moda), community centers, churches, restaurants, laundromats, as well as galleries and museums. He has mentored young adults at the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, where he also served as Curator of Education. Ramos-Fermín has also participated in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Art’s Shift Residency, and The Laundromat Project’s Create Change Public Artist Residency. He received his BA from the University of Puerto Rico and his MFA from St. Joost Art and Design Academy. Currently Hatuey is Director of Programs and Community Engagement at The Laundromat Project.
Maggie Schreiner is an archivist and public historian, working at the intersection of archives, social justice, and community engagement. Currently, Maggie is the Archivist at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Maggie has previously held positions at New York University, and at Queens Memory, where she facilitated local history events at branch libraries across Queens, NY. Maggie is the volunteer coordinator at Interference Archive, an all-volunteer grassroots archive of social movement ephemera, and a core member of Librarians and Archivists with Palestine. Maggie holds an MA in Archives and Public History from New York University and a BA in Central and Eastern European Studies from McGill University.
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is an Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library of the City University of New York. She is a Coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Board member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, and Advisory Board member to a GALE LGBTQ archival database. Shawn’s focus is telling the stories of Black lesbian through oral histories, archiving, and the blurred lines of fiction. She presented her work on archiving Black lesbians as Keynote to the International LGBTQ ALMS (Archivists, Librarians, Museum Curators, & Special Libraries) Conference. Shawn has a BS in Queer Women’s Studies from CUNY, an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction, and an MLS with a focus on Archiving and Records Management, both from Queens College. Her current project is curating the narrative of the Salsa Soul Sisters, the first Black lesbian organization in the country, through a zine and traveling exhibit with the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Lesbian Herstory Archives, and members of Salsa Soul.
Sady Sullivan is an oral historian with over a decade of experience building community-engaging oral history projects, revitalizing interest in legacy oral history collections, and establishing digital strategies for oral history as an outreach tools for libraries, archives, museums, and movement building. She was Curator for the Columbia Center for Oral History Archives at Columbia University, 2014-2016; and Director of Oral History at Brooklyn Historical Society, 2006-2014. Sady revitalized a dormant oral history program at Brooklyn Historical Society, and created Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations, an award-winning oral history project, racial justice dialogue series, and digital humanities site exploring mixed-heritage identity. Sady holds a BA from Wellesley College and an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU.