FACULTY FELLOWS
SPCUNY supports CUNY faculty at all levels in making public-facing work at the intersection of art and social justice. Faculty Fellows collaborate with diverse communities at CUNY campuses and throughout the city in projects that complement and inform their scholarly and pedagogic work.
Sofya Aptekar
(School of Labor and Urban Studies)
Sofya Aptekar is an immigrant scholar, educator, union organizer, and community activist who grew up and lives in south Brooklyn. She is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies at CUNY. A sociologist by training, she has taught in interdisciplinary programs, including critical ethnic and community studies. Dr. Aptekar works on public spaces such as community gardens, public libraries, farmer’s markets, and parks, with a focus on gentrification, race, and investigating alternatives to capitalism. Her scholarship draws on her community work with neighborhood-based grassroots organizations, including community gardens, mutual aid networks, and a community boathouse, as well as local and international struggles against the U.S. empire. Dr. Aptekar has published books on immigration and the U.S. military, and co-authored an activist’s guide to college debt.
Elvis Bakaitis
(The Graduate Center)
Elvis Bakaitis serves on the CUNY LGBTQ Council and as a board member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies, where they advocate for trans and gender non-conforming students across the University. As a 2022 Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria’s Transgender Archives, Bakaitis explored the philanthropic activism of Reed Erickson. Their research is additionally supported by grants from Harvard University, Duke University, Rockefeller Archive Center, and the American Library Association. Bakaitis has presented about delightfully queer topics at the National Academy for Public Administration, The Whitney Museum, Columbia University’s Seminar for Women and Society, among other venues. Elvis’ illustrations are published in Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ), Sinister Wisdom, and they are the co-founder (and current co-organizer) of the NYC Feminist Zinefest. A passionate advocate for positive aging and eldercare, Bakaitis completed a Certificate in Geriatric Care Management from the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging.
Cinthya Santos Briones
(Lehman College)
Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist, anthropologist, ethnohistorian, educator, and cultural worker of indigenous Nahua roots based in New York. Her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and collective narratives. Through a variety of non-linear media, she juxtaposes textiles, photography, archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collages, sculpture, and popular education. Cinthya holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Photography from Ithaca-Cornell University, and a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She has received fellowship and grants from the Magnum Foundation, En Foco, National Geographic Research, Wave Hill House, Mellon Foundation, BRIC, and EL Museo del Barrio, among others, and her documentary work has been published in outlets like The New York Times, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, The New Yorker, The Nation Magazine, La Jornada, to name a few.
Laetitia Soulier
Ashley Dawson
(The Graduate Center/College of Staten Island)
Ashley Dawson is an author, activist, and Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY and the College of Staten Island. Ashley works for the abolition of fossil fuels and a democratic energy transition as a member of the Public Power NY campaign and founder of the Public Power Observatory. Recently published books of his include Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024), People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons (O/R, 2020), Extreme Cities (Verso, 2017), and Extinction: A Radical History (O/R, 2016). Ashley is also the co-editor of the essay collection Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2023). This year Ashley is the Climate Justice Fellow at Culture Push, a New York-based arts organization focused on civic participation and imaginative problem-solving. Ashley is currently working on a multi-media project called “Peaker,” which aims to make NYC’s dirtiest power plants visible and, in the process, help movements shut them down.
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
(Baruch College)
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Black and Latino Studies at Baruch College. She is a cultural worker and interdisciplinary qualitative Latinx public scholar who studies contemporary processes of migration. Her current research project focuses on childhood arrival migrants to the United States. She is a researcher for Humanizing Deportation, a community-based digital storytelling project that documents the human consequences of contemporary regimes of migration and border control in the United States and Mexico. She is the director of the Playas de Tijuana mural project located at the westernmost point of the US-Mexico border and El Paso del Norte mural project located under the Santa Fe/Paso del Norte bridge in Ciudad Juárez. The murals illustrate the faces and stories of U.S. childhood arrivals and contemporary migration to the U.S. through portraiture and digital storytelling.
Christina Freeman
(Hunter College)
Christina Freeman is a conceptual artist working in performance, installation, and photography. Appropriating familiar institutions like the nomadic library, tech support event, or lemonade stand, she makes spaces for the audience to co-create with her. Her projects have been featured in Artforum, Vulture, Hyperallergic, Art F City, among others. In 2024, Freeman participated in Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and NARS Foundation’s International Residency program in Brooklyn. Her recent projects have also received support from Creative Time, Queens Museum, The Trust for Governors Island, Culture Push, National Coalition Against Censorship, Danish Arts Foundation, ABC No Rio, and NEA. She has presented projects internationally with ARoS Public, Denmark; SOMA, Mexico City; and Red House, Sofia, Bulgaria. Freeman teaches at Hunter College, CUNY for the Department of Art & Art History and the Department of Film & Media.
Tao Leigh Goffe
(Hunter College)
Tao Leigh Goffe is an Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology at Hunter College, CUNY. She joined the Department of Africana Studies after over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. This work builds on a long-standing research interest in the intersection of art, climate, race, and digital technologies. It is the basis of the Dark Laboratory, which she founded and leads as the Executive Director. Dr. Goffe graduated with an undergraduate degree in English literature at Princeton University before earning a PhD at Yale University. Dr. Goffe’s forthcoming book Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis (Doubleday, Hamish Hamilton (Penguin Books UK)), explores how 1492 was the genesis of the climate crisis. She serves on the Advisory Committee of the Boys Club of New York.
Diana Guerra
(City College of New York)
Diana Guerra is a Peruvian American lens-based artist and educator currently based in New York. Her work revolves around themes of memory, belonging, and identity (re)construction, from the perspective of a woman of color within the Latine diaspora in New York City. Guerra holds an MFA in Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice from the City College of New York and a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. Guerra’s early training in photography was at Parsons School of Design as part of the MFA Photography program. She is a 2024 AIM Bronx Museum Fellow and 2022 En Foco Photography Fellow. Her work has been featured at The Museum of the City of New York, Photoville, Mana Contemporary, The School of Visual Arts, The Clemente Cultural and Educational Center, among others. Diana is currently an Adjunct Professor at The City College of New York.
Ash Marinaccio
(Queens College)
Ash Marinaccio is a multidisciplinary documentarian and visual storyteller working in theatre, photography, and film. She is committed to storytelling highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Marinaccio is the founding artistic director of the United Nations-recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc, dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. She holds her MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and PhD in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Esther Marveta Neff
(Hunter College)
Esther Marveta Neff is the founder of PPL, a performance collective, experimental philosophy think tank, and organizational entity. PPL was a physical lab site for 7 years and the collective has made over a dozen “operas of operations,” including Embarrassed of the (W)Hole (operating manual published by Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). Neff is also responsible for PERFORMANCY FORUM, a para-capitalist platform for performance and social art praxis. Their work has been realized in visual arts, dance, and theatre contexts around the world, as well as at gas stations, public libraries, online as a meme page, and on the street. Their theoretical writing can be found in various Routledge companions, a Palgrave MacMillan handbook, and in journals and magazines including PAJ, CONTENTS, ice-hole, Journal of Art + Media Studies, and Paradigm. Neff is currently an adjunct professor at Hunter College and Marymount Manhattan, and a PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center.
Daniel T. O’Brien
(LaGuardia Community College)
Daniel T. O’Brien is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. His poetry and critical writing have appeared in the American Literary Review, Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Hot Pink Magazine, Kenyon Review, Lambda Literary, and elsewhere. In 2020 he edited the anthology Poems of Resistance, Poems of Hope, released exclusively through independent bookstores as part of the national Independent Bookstore Day campaign. He is currently the Executive Director of the Independent Publishers Caucus, director of the non-profit organization Books Across Borders, and teaches in the English department at LaGuardia Community College. His research and art practice engages liberatory poetics, queer and anarchist histories/futures, collective authorship, bilingual writing and translation, interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, and underground art movements. He is a former co-chair of the Lower Hudson Valley DSA, co-founding member of the Peekskill Equitable Housing Coalition, and active member of CUNY for Palestine and the wider movement for international liberation.
Mudiwa Pettus
(Medgar Evers College)
Mudiwa Pettus is an Assistant Professor at Medgar Evers College. She earned a PhD in English and African American & Diaspora Studies from Pennsylvania State University, and a BA in English from Claflin University. Mudiwa is a rhetorician who is particularly interested in helping preserve histories of Black expressive culture through cultural criticism and public education. Her research interests include rhetorical education, Black intellectual history, and late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African-American literature. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Rhetoric Review, College English, the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, Writers: Craft & Context, and other venues. Additionally, she is completing her first book, Against Compromise: Black Rhetorical Education in the Age of Booker T. Washington, in which she traces the development of a collective African-American rhetorical consciousness through the oratorical career of Booker T. Washington.
Jess Shane
(Hunter College)
Jess Shane is a radio producer, artist, and educator from Toronto. Her work has played at film and audio festivals internationally including DOCNYC, New Orleans Film Festival, Based on a True Story Conference, Open City Documentary Festival, and the International Features Conference. In 2023, Shane was awarded a reporting grant from the International Women’s Media Fund for her podcast Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative, distributed by Radiotopia. She is the co-founder of the audio art collective, Constellations, which produces a podcast, installations, artist multiples, and events internationally, including the Brooklyn-based performance series, wav.pool. Jess holds an MFA from Hunter College, teaches media studies at Hunter College, and sound for film at Pratt Institute.
Chloe Smolarski
(New York City College of Technology)
Chloe Smolarski is an interdisciplinary media maker, documentarian, and educator who works at the confluence of creative nonfiction, media studies, and art-based research. Smolarski’s recent work includes When Home Leaves You: Immersive Oral Histories of Climate Change and Adaptation. This piece reimagined how we experience the archive, using motion triggers and innovative sound design to interact with the featured oral histories while providing a context for the public to reflect on climate change. In 2022 she launched
Chy Sprauve
(Queensborough Community College)
Chy Sprauve is a scholar in Composition-Rhetoric from Brooklyn, New York who works as an Assistant Professor of Black, Race and Ethnic Studies in the English Department at Queensborough Community College, CUNY, where she teaches English Composition and Introduction to Black, Race and Ethnic Studies. She studies the pedagogical and political impacts of mid-20th century Black literacy movements in the Southern United States. This research is particularly significant to her, as she attended a New York City elementary and middle school that pushed Black history and culture from the periphery to the center. Chy uses ritual work and book-making to highlight the important work of literacy educators who cultivated Black agential rhetorics and focalized the communal and political lives of Black learners. One of their main research goals is to develop a monograph that explores the impact of Black political organizing on literacy education.
Danne Woo
(Queens College)
Danne Woo is an Assistant Professor in the Design BFA program at Queens College, CUNY, with over 20 years of experience combining design principles with emerging technologies. As the founder and CEO of Datavisual, Danne has pioneered innovative data visualization tools and is the Education Director for the Data Visualization Society. He has been working with Black social justice organization, Color Of Change, as a Creative Technologist Consultant since 2018 to assist with their initiatives to better the lives of Black communities in the United States. Woo’s research and creative projects, often exploring the ethical dimensions of generative AI, have been presented at prestigious forums and supported by numerous grants. At Queens College, he has developed courses that blend design principles with emerging technologies, equipping his students with the latest technical skills and industry knowledge.
STUDENT FELLOWS
Our student fellows come from the Social Practice Queens program, a unique pedagogical experiment and educational platform within the Queens College MFA that supports the integration of studio art with interdisciplinary research, community collaboration, environmental justice and critical urbanism. Each year, we offer in-state tuition grants for Queens College students to support their participation in the SPCUNY cohort.
E. Adamo
E. Adamo is an intradisciplinary artist focused on modalities of spirituality within common structures. Currently investigating systems around gambling, Adamo produces a pseudonymous newspaper, builds structural installations, holds performative events, and paints. They wish to only be considered an artist under the terms that everyone may be considered an artist.
ChrisTina Andersen
ChrisTina Andersen, a multidisciplinary artist and educator, focuses upon themes of healing and transformation exploring connections between creation with specific intention and its effects upon healing destruction caused by trauma. Reorganization of matter in new ways reclaims the discarded and redefines beauty in resilience. Andersen asks questions surrounding the intrinsic value of an idea, things, space, or a life and examines these ideas through writing, drawing, painting, and sculptural installation.
Steven Blum (SonicBlum)
Proudly born and raised in the borough of Queens, NY, SonicBlum is passionate about making art that celebrates the diverse culture of the greatest city on the planet — New York City! He loves incorporating a variety of mediums to express himself along his artistic journey.
Diana (Dee) Lachhman
Dee Lachhman is a multidisciplinary artist from Queens, New York with roots in Caribbean culture. Her work describes and portrays a diverse range of art through photography, painting, drawing, 3-D printing, ceramics, and other forms. Her main medium is sculpture such as chiseling, shaping, cutting, carving, and forming different purposes of art. Lachhman honors women of color from around the world, creating influential narratives on feminism and motherhood.
ACTIONISTS
Actionists are CUNY graduate students with a serious art practice, including MFA, Masters, and Ph.D. students, who are working to develop an independent project at the intersection of art and social justice. In addition to being an integral part of the wider SPCUNY cohort, Actionists are supported by a stipend towards the fulfillment of their project beyond the classroom.
Kendall Allison
(The Graduate Center)
Kendall Allison is a comedian, writer, and collage artist. They see humor as a political and spiritual resource that helps us ease up on each other. They study the relinquishment of white supremacy at The CUNY Graduate Center and organize toward the solidarity economy. They also work as Reckon With’s program manager.
Jessica (Jess) Bal
(The Graduate Center)
Jess Bal is a photographer, educator, and researcher pursuing a PhD in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. As a former photojournalist, she is especially interested in histories of illusion and manipulation within image-making, and for SPCUNY, she will create a project about newsroom labor organizing.
Nic Benacerraf
(The Graduate Center)
Nic Benacerraf is a director, scenic designer, and scholar of live performance. These roles are united by a passion for space-making, social healing, and highly collaborative practices. As Creative Director of Edge Effect, Benacerraf facilitates leaders from widespread disciplines into group research and collective creation towards a post-capitalist future.
Chris Harding
(The Graduate Center)
Chris Harding is a PhD at The CUNY Graduate Center. He works on the themes relating to capitalism, class, labor, and agrarian life in Palestine (1922-1948). Harding is a curator and researcher at Dar Jacir (Bethlehem, Palestine). In 2024 he published the booklet Researching Palestine at the Biennale De Venezia, as part of South West Bank, Landworks, Collective Action and Sound exhibition.
Annabelle Heckler
(The Graduate Center)
Annabelle Heckler draws comics at the intersections of queer and labor justice, uplifting solidarity as our superpower. Heckler hace investigación laboral, diseña campañas, y dibuja cómics en apoyo de movimientos populares, desde tierra indígena robada (Brooklyn, NY).
Kerosene Jones
(Brooklyn College)
Kerosene Jones is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counter-archival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for horny ghosts with unfinished business. He is the current Arts Editor of WUSSY Magazine.
Ali Motamedi
(Hunter College)
Ali Motamedi is an author, artist, and educator, exploring travel, immigration, and identity. With a PhD in civil engineering and Fine Arts studies at CUNY, he combines technical and artistic visions. Since 2014, he has taught Analytics, Visual Studies, and Creativity courses nationally and internationally.
Jaclyn Reyes
(The Graduate Center)
Jaclyn Reyes is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, cultural organizer, and PhD student in the Social Welfare program at The CUNY Graduate Center. She received her BFA in Photography from Syracuse University and earned her master’s degree in Arts in Education from Harvard University.
ingrid romero
(Hunter College)
ingrid romero is an artist, educator, and community organizer, born and raised in NYC. They have been organizing for over fifteen years, plus over a decade of facilitation, education, community arts, and youth work experience. romero has a BA in Art Education, with initial certification in Teaching Art K-12, from CCNY. She is pursuing an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College while working as an arts educator at City-As-School.
Irina Shirobokova
(The Graduate Center)
Irina Shirobokova is a feminist geographer who combines psychoanalytical theory, socially engaged art, and interdisciplinary practices. Her work is informed by a spatial justice perspective and includes collaborative and embodied methodologies. Her current work is inspired by years of work in the Arctic and explores the politics of darkness.
brynn asha walker
(Brooklyn College)
brynn asha walker is a biracial, queer, neurodivergent, disabled, trans, femme enby and transdisciplinary artist, technologist, educator, and avid learner pulling inspiration from improvisation, games, participatory performance, interactive media, mixed reality, physical computing, scenography, soundscape, writing, somatics, and embodied dramaturgy — and wildly passionate about neuroqueer spacemaking, p(art)icipatory action, and anti-oppression.
April Wen
(Brooklyn College)
April Wen grew up in NYC and makes films exploring whimsy, sensuality, and sociopolitical dynamics embedded in everyday social life and natural landscapes around the world. She is also a folk singer-songwriter, an MFA candidate in Film Directing at Brooklyn College, and a cycling enthusiast.
