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.
Nora Almeida
Nora Almeida is a librarian, writer, performance artist, and environmental activist. She is an Associate Professor in the Library Department at the New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive where she helps organize educational programs, media-making events, exhibitions, and more. In 2019-2020, she was a co-curator of “Like the Waters We Rise,” a two-part exhibition at Interference Archive and the Nathan Cummings Foundation about the history of the climate justice movement which explored the ways that other social justice struggles have shaped contemporary conceptions of environmental justice. She was also co-curator of past exhibitions including: “Agitate! Educate! Organize! Agitprop into the 21st Century” and “We Are All in This Together.” She currently convenes the education working group and has coordinated class visits to Interference Archive for the past four years. Nora is also involved in environmental, land use, education, and labor activism in New York City and has organized protests, public events, and street performances across the city. She is a printmaker and often organizes public media making events to create materials for use in street demonstrations. As part of her work she has collaborated with: Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir, the Environmental Performance Agency, Decolonize This Place, the Next Epoch Seed Library, Mobile Print Power, Shoestring Press, The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, Extinction Rebellion, East River Action, Voice of Gowanus, and others. She writes about critical pedagogy, social justice, performance, neoliberalism, and place. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with the archivist and educator Jen Hoyer, was published in July 2021 by Litwin Books. For SPCUNY, Nora will coordinate a series of facilitated ecological and artistic encounters in Gowanus and collaboratively develop a Land Use Intervention Library that explores and documents the concept of urban transformation through the subversive use of public land.
Betty Yu
Betty Yu is a multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in NYC to Chinese immigrant parents. Ms. Yu integrates documentary film, new media platforms, and community-infused approaches into her practice, and she is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing. Ms. Yu has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships from the Laundromat Project, A Blade of Grass, International Studio & Curatorial Program, Intercultural Leadership Institute, Skidmore‘s Documentary Storytellers’ Institute, KODA Lab, Asian American Arts Alliance, En Foco, China Residencies, Flux Factory and Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Tribeca Film Festival‘s Interactive Showcase, the 2019 BRIC Biennial; Old Stone House, and Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. In 2018 she had a solo exhibition at Open Source Gallery in New York. In 2017 Ms. Yu won the Aronson Journalism for Social Justice Award for her film "Three Tours" about U.S. veterans returning home from war in Iraq, and their journey to overcome PTSD. She holds a BFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a One-Year Certificate from International Center Photography New Media Narratives program. Ms. Yu teaches video, social practice, art and activism at Pratt Institute, Hunter College, and The New School, in addition she has over 20 years of community, media justice, and labor organizing work. In the Fall 2020, Betty had her curatorial debut as she presented Imagining De-Gentrified Futures, an exhibition that featured artists of color, activists and others along with her own work at Apex Art in Tribeca, NYC. Betty sits on the boards of Third World Newsreel and Working Films; and on the advisory board of More Art. Her SPCUNY project “We Were Here: Unmasking Yellow Peril" is a public participatory multimedia storytelling project featuring outdoor projections, a geo-located audio walking tour and website inviting Asian-Americans to collectively re-assert, reclaim, and reimagine our narratives rooted in community resilience against white supremacy and anti-Asian xenophobia. It traces today’s anti-Asian violence back to the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.
Eto Otitigbe
Eto Otitigbe is interested in recovering buried narratives and giving form to the unseen. He is a polymedia artist whose interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, performance, installation, and public art. Otitigbe’s public works includes temporary installations in Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY) and Randall’s Island Park (New York, NY). His current public commissions include: Peaceful Journey (Mt. Vernon, NY, 2022); Cascode (Philadelphia, PA); Emanativ (Harlem, NY); Passing Point (Alexandria, VA). He was a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at UVA (Charlottesville, VA) where he contributed to the creative expression on the memorial’s exterior surface.
Otitigbe’s work has been in solo and group exhibitions that include 2013 Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, organized by the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill; Abandoned Orchestra, Sound Sculpture installation and performance with Zane Rodulfo, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Golden Hour, Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, GA, curated by Oshun D. Layne; and Bronx: Africa, Longwood Gallery, Bronx, NY, curated by Atim Oton and Leronn P. Brooks.
Otitigbe’s fellowships and awards include the CEC Artslink Project Award for travel and cultural projects in Egypt and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art where he explored the intersection of Urhobo language and historical objects.
His curatorial projects include directing the es ORO Gallery in Jersey City, NJ (2007-09) and co-curating, alongside Amanda Kerdahi, the Topophilia Exhibition in Nees, Denmark (2017) as part of the ET4U Meetings Festival in Denmark.
He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Art Department at Brooklyn College. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an M.S. in Product Design from Stanford University (M.S.) and an MFA in Creative Practice from the University of Plymouth. Emantiv, Eto’s SPCUNY project, focuses on transforming wave energy into cultural action.
Nerve Macaspac
Dr. Nerve V. Macaspac is a political geographer and filmmaker. He is an Assistant Professor of Geography at The City University of New York (CUNY) where he is Faculty at the Department of Political Science and Global Affairs at The College of Staten Island (CSI) and Graduate Faculty at the Earth and Environmental Sciences Doctoral Program at The Graduate Center. He teaches courses in Urban Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He also runs GeospatialCSI, a curricular initiative that aims to build a space and community among students to produce creative, collaborative and public-facing Urban Geography-centered inquiry and research. As a Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow Dr. Macaspac is collaborating with Kuya, a Queens-based rapper and musician, in producing a short film reflecting upon the daily work of working-class Filipino families in making New York City their home through constant multi-generational work of creative place-making, familial healing, and mutual aid.
Website: nervemacaspac.com
Twitter: @DrNerveV
Marit Dewhurst
Marit Dewhurst (she/her) is the Director of Art Education and Associate Professor of Art and Museum Education at The City College of New York. She has worked as an arts educator and program coordinator in multiple arts contexts including community centers, museums, juvenile detention centers, and international development projects. Prior to joining the faculty at CCNY, she directed The Museum of Modern Art’s free studio art programs for teens. Building on her work with teen programs in museums, she co-founded and worked closely with the Museum Teen Summit, a youth-led museum advocacy group. She works with Keonna Hendrick to facilitate anti-racism workshops with museums and cultural organizations across the country. In addition to multiple journal articles and chapters, her first book, Social Justice Art: A framework for activist art pedagogy highlights how young activist artists make art to affect their communities. Her second book, Teachers Bridging Difference: Exploring identity through art describes how educators can use art to better understand themselves and their connections with people across different sociocultural identities. She studied printmaking in several community studios in Oaxaca, Mexico and is a maker of things and a facilitator of community connections. Community Print Lab, her SPCUNY project, is a space for artists, educators, and community members to come together to learn about and make prints that help us re-imagine and re-make our world into one that is more just, joyful, and community-centered.
Rosamond S. King
Rosamond S. King (www.rosamondSking.black) is a creative and critical performer, writer, and artist deeply connected to the communities and cultures of which she is a part, to history, and to a sense of play. Her performances have been presented in informal spaces and curated into venues including the VIVA! Biennial (Canada), the Center for Book Arts (NYC), and the Brooklyn Book Festival. King is the author of Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination, winner of the Caribbean Studies Association best book award, and of poetry collections All the Rage and the Lambda Award-winning Rock | Salt | Stone. She holds the rank of Professor at Brooklyn College. The goal of all of her work is to make people feel, wonder, and think, not necessarily in that order. King joins the SPCUNY cohort as a member of Assembly Required (AR), a collective of women artists of different backgrounds, based in NYC, who came together during the isolation of 2020 to share their perspectives through objects, stories, and artistic experiences. As part of AR’s new Gowanus-based project NEST, she will present a collaborative performance and interactive workshops. Photo credit: Dan Ichimoto.
Zoe Beloff
Zoe is a visual artist and filmmaker. She aims to make art that both entertains and provokes discussion. With a focus on social justice, she draws timelines between past and present to imagine a more egalitarian future. Zoe’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; include the Whitney Museum Biennale, Site Santa Fe, the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. However, she particularly enjoys working in alternative venues that are free and open to the community for events and conversations. These have included in New York City; The Coney Island Museum, Participant, Momenta and The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center. For her current SPCUNY project, “The Song of the Essential Worker" she is collaborating with her long time cinematographer and all round partner in crime, Eric Muzzy.
Midori Yamamura
Midori Yamamura, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History at the CUNY Kingsborough, specializes in global contemporary art history focusing on Asia and its diaspora. The author of Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular (MIT Press: 2015) and co-editor of Visual Representation and the Cold War: Art and Postcolonial Struggles in East and Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2021), she is currently completing a book on Japanese Contemporary Art: Emergence of the Local in the Age of Globalization. She taught art history at Hunter College, Pratt Institute, Fordham University, and lectured at the Museum of Modern Art. She has been interested in community engagement in art. She co-curated Community Day 2002 for MoMA PS1 and curated Grapefruit, Yoko Ono in 1964 (2004) that explored Ono’s early instruction pieces. She is currently organizing a community-based pedagogical exhibition, UnHomeless NYC (October 2021). For Social Practice CUNY, Yamamura will explore her idea of Urban Intervention, which is a proposal for creating a truly meaningful display of art outside the influence of big corporate money and authoritarian institutions, and reaching out to audiences from all walks of life.
Tiffany DeJaynes
Tiffany DeJaynes is an Assistant Professor of English Education at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY). She studies adolescent literacies, multimodal composing, and practitioner inquiry, often collaborating with youth to address questions of justice, civic engagement, and representation with multiple media. She co-edited Arts, Media, and Justice: Multimodal explorations with youth (with Lalitha Vasudevan) and has published her research in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, English Journal, English Teaching Practice & Critique, and e-Learning and Digital Media. Her current research involves participatory action research, art-making, and activism with Bronx youth and educators studying the lived impacts of COVID-19 on their communities.
Cynthia Tobar
Cynthia Tobar is an artist, activist-scholar, archivist and oral historian who is passionate about creating interactive, participatory stories documenting social change. She has conceptualized and worked on a number of captivating public history digital exhibits, socially-engaged art projects, and community-based archives that document social movements and student activism. A first generation Ecuadorian American born and raised in NYC, Cynthia has exhibited and published on several community-based oral history projects that have focused on social justice, student activism, and socially engaged art practices. Cynthia is the founder of Cities for People, Not for Profit, an oral history project which is documenting the effects of gentrification and displacement in Bushwick. She is a core member of Mi Casa No es Su Casa and a board member of the Bushwick Housing Independence Project. During 2020, she partnered with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) to create Nos Cuidamos, an oral history project to help document experiences and systems of mutual aid that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, Cynthia was awarded a 2021 Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant for¿Dónde puedo ir? Searching for Home, a collaborative project that will consist of a series of musical works created around recorded oral histories that capture a sense of immediacy of displacement facing local Latinx residents in Bushwick. Currently, she is working on an oral history project documenting the student-led movement of Black Lives Matter in Higher Education to examine how its members are increasing equitable spaces for Black graduate students in higher education. Cynthia is an Assistant Professor and Head of Archives at Bronx Community College, where she creates socially-engaged art programming and leads community-based archiving and storytelling projects. She is also a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, where she teaches courses on social justice in Colombia and arts activism. More about Cynthia’s work can be found at https://www.cynthiatobar.net/.
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.
Connor Henderson
Connor Henderson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, currently working and creating in New York City. Rooted in queer theory, Connor’s experimental practice focuses on interpreting society through a critical feminist lens to analyze the social constructions behind our identities. Connor teaches visual art at a public high school in Queens and currently lives in The Bronx. Connor received his BFA in Photography and B.S in Visual Arts Education from the State University of New York at New Paltz, and is currently pursuing his MFA in Social Practice at Queens College.
Cristina Ferrigno
Cristina Ferrigno is a Colombian born, Brooklyn raised artist currently based in Queens. With a BFA from MICA in 2009, she is now pursuing her MFA with a focus on Social Practice Art at Queens College. Her work tackles her personal and philosophical questions of identity, exploring the feeling of cultural “inbetween-ness” as a transnational adoptee. She uses photographic processes, archive building and community engagement to create combined media works and long term interdisciplinary projects. Her work has been featured in public programs and exhibitions at the Queens Museum, Field Projects, La Bodega Gallery, New Women’s Space and AS220.
Isiah Powell-Taylor
Isiah Powell-Taylor is a mixed media collage artist whose work centers around the reformation and celebration of the past, mainly through the use of his own personal family archive of images and trinkets. Through this archive, his work contemplates the Black Family and the relationships which shape them. The archival nature of this practice allows for Isiah to grow closer to his elders, while also interacting with aspects of his blackness he has felt segregated from for most of his life.
Rie Osogoe
Rie Osogoe is an activist artist born in Japan. Rie graduated from Tokyo’s art university (BFA) and Kyoto’s art graduate school (MFA). In 2018, after a 10-year international career as a painter and an art educator, she turned her focus to conceptual art and began working on poverty issues in Japan. Since then, she expanded her research to consider the interaction of art and poverty. Rie is currently working on a project with the members of the soup kitchen in Tokyo. Their pictures, objects and texts will form an installation titled “Listen to the voice that was never heard,” (2021). She is pursuing her MFA in Social Practice at Queens College.
A Pollicino
A Pollicino is a trans artist, activist, and educator born and raised in NY. Their current work is largely influenced by educational organizing. Recent community work includes collaboration with; Queer, Trans, and Intersex Educators (QTIE NYC), MSJC’s Trans Advocacy Committee, Stonewall Protest, and Long Island Peaceful Protest (LIPP).They are interested in exploring healthy dialog around difficult social issues and promoting positive visibility for the LGBTQIA+ community. A is currently pursuing their MFA in Social Practice at Queens College and hopes to enter a doctoral program to study trans issues.
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.
Kilusan Bautista
Kilusan Bautista is a playwright and multimedia performing artist, creator of two solo hip hop theater productions (Universal Filipino, 2010, and Transcend, 2016). Kilusan has been working with oppressed communities for over 20 years as a social justice arts educator and founder of the Universal Self Educational Program within the NYC Department of Education (2012). As an MFA candidate (2022) at the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA), CUNY Brooklyn College, Kilusan is developing a new immersive work entitled, “PXSO: PhoeniX rising in ScorpiO” to address Charge Syndrome and disability rights. Kilusan is proudly raising two beautiful daughters in the Bronx, NY.
Nicole Goodwin
GOODW.Y.N., aka Nicole Goodwin, uses her creation of art to seek out her place within the universe. Whether it is through the production of writing, poetry, body performance, digital photography, digital painting or sound art, these experiments represent her holistic search for love of self and others through artistic healing and empowerment. She recently authored Warcries, and was a 2020 Pushcart Nominee, as well as a recipient of the 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace Fund.
Pedro Cruz
Pedro Cruz is an Architectural Designer and a current M.Arch student at the Spitzer School of Architecture. Through collage, drawing, video and ethnography documentation, his design work studies socio-political, cultural and spatial relationships of migration in cities. His latest work, The Theater of the People (2021) was part of the Queens Museum exhibition, Building Culture: Architecture as an Apparatus and Social Process. Cruz is currently at work with the Fundamental team, helping build an outdoor theater for the Estación Cultural Collective in the migrant city of Tapachula, Mexico, to support the local and migrant communities and help heal cultural divides.
Quinlan Maggio
Quinlan Maggio is an artist and third-year MFA student at Hunter College in New York. Quinlan writes and makes videos and objects informed by a constant ongoing practice of performance. Quinlan has exhibited at 205 Hudson Gallery, fort gondo compound for the arts, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.
Alex Schmidt
Alex “@bodyconfidence” Schmidt is an artist, athlete, and community organizer whose NOTAFLOFigure Drawing Embodiment Sessions have been featured in Vogue, The New Yorker, and The Guardian. They are the co-founder of @dykesoccer and @fallintothegay. Their sculptures have been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Leslie Lohman Museum and Rachel Comey, and they have performed at MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, La Mama, and more. To learn more about their work and practice, go play at bodyconfidence.org.
sgp
sgp is an anti-disciplinary artist living in New York. Having performed and written under many pseudonyms*, sgp is primarily concerned with revealing connections between found objects -including systems-to conjure both real and poetic collapse. Currently, sgp is working on a piece about (student) debt and public/private partnerships by enrolling in Hunter’s MFA program. This is her final year of the ongoing project, forthcoming 2022.
*including, but not limited to: Sara Grace Powell, Kelsea Wollffllotterr, and Lee G. Rawls
