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.
Coline Chevrin
(The Graduate Center, CUNY and Hunter College)
Coline Chevrin is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Geography at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Graduate Center and an Adjunct Professor at the Geography Department at Hunter College. After a Master’s Degree in Territorial Policies for Sustainable Development, Chevrin specialized in territorial and development studies. She was an Assistant Professor and Researcher at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina from 2013 to 2017. Her research focuses on the impact of the soybean extractivist model on the restructuring of the city of Rosario, Argentina. She analyzes how the extractive frontier is materialized in the different spaces of the city, how communities organize to resist enclosure and displacement and to secure space to create beautiful lives. She is particularly interested in Latin American situated knowledge, decolonial praxis, Global South, and feminist geographies. Chevrin has been experimenting with visualizing her research through alternative methods and has incorporated working with artists as part of her practice.
Rafael De Balanzo Joue
(Queens College)
Rafael De Balanzo Joue has a Ph.D. in Sustainability Science, a background as an architect and designer, and the founder of the Urban Resilience Thinking Design Initiatives. The main area of De Balanzo Joue’s professional and scholarly interest is positioned within habitat and communities’ resilience with a particular focus on urban sustainability and the resilience thinking approach. He is currently a part-time faculty at Queens College, Pratt Institute, and EINA School of Design and Art at The Autonomous University of Barcelona. He recently received the 2021–23 Research Project Grant from Russell Sage Foundation. He has also collaborated with the Municipal Art Society of New York, and was the recipient of the 2019 Colombia Fulbright Grant Chair for Resilience at Del Tolima University, Ibague, Colombia. He has recently published peer-reviewed articles for Ecology and Society, Sustainability MDPI, and La Murad, Southern Journal of Research in Art, and Design.
Glenn Goldberg
(Queens College)
Glenn Goldberg was born in the Bronx and attended public schools and public university in New York City. Interested in the potential of objects to be enlivened, affective, and transmitters of ideas and spirit, his practice is rooted in adventure, language, love, analysis, and gifting. He works as a member of various collaborative structures both with individuals and groups. His collaborations have included co-written/co-fabricated books, performance, video, teams, drawing partnerships, and public outdoor projects. Recently he has collaborated on Snowdrift projects where discussion, writing, recording, and public parades have taken place. Other ongoing projects include The Welcome Center in Bushwick, a book and object project with an artist collaborator at The Experimental Print Workshop at Lafayette College, a curatorial project at Clearsky Willard in Willard, New Mexico, a mural project at Loisaida Center in New York City, and a DIY outdoor skate park in Chicago.
Floor Grootenhuis
(Hunter College)
Floor Grootenhuis is a Dutch-Kenyan multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City. Her art practice deals with the body and our collective relationship to each other. Her collaborative practice focuses on listening, invitation, connection, and identity. Grootenhuis has an MFA in Social Practice from Queens College, CUNY, and was More Art Engaging Artist 2017 Fellow and part of the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program 2018–19. She has received grants from the NYC City Artist Corps, Social Practice Queens, the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, the Vilcek Foundation, and Queens Art Intervention. Her work has been exhibited in Brooklyn Public Library, the Queens Museum, the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Five Myles Gallery, and the Centre de Cultura Contemporània in Barcelona. Grootenhuis is currently an artist-in-residence at the Raper Lab in the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Hunter College Department of Biological Sciences where she partners with biologists to bring science and art closer to the public.
Alicia Grullón
(Queens College)
Alicia Grullón uses performance and self-portrait as a critique on the politics of presence—an argument for the inclusion of marginalized communities in political and social spheres. Grullón has participated in exhibitions including The 8th Floor; Bronx Museum of the Arts; BRIC House for Arts and Media; El Museo del Barrio; and Columbia University. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation; Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York; and Franklin Furnace Archives. Grullón has participated in residencies at the Hemispheric Institute for Politics and Performance at New York University; Center for Book Arts; and Bronx Museum of Arts AIM program. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artnet News, New York Times, and Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Grullón is a recipient of the 2019 Colene Brown Art Prize and the 2020–2022 Walentas fellowship at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia.
Alexandra Juhasz
(Brooklyn College)
Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY, who makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author and editor of scholarly books and documentary films including, AIDS TV (Duke University Press 1995), We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Ted Kerr, Duke University Press 2022), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Documentary (with Alisa Lebow, 2015), Really Fake (with Nishant Shah and Ganaele Langlois, Minnesota, 2021), Learning From YouTube (MIT Press, 2013), and Sisters in the Life: 25 Years of African-American Lesbian Filmmaking (with Yvonne Welbon, Duke University Press 2018). She is the producer of educational videotapes on feminist issues from AIDS to teen pregnancy as well as the feature fake documentaries The Watermelon Woman (with Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and The Owls (with Cheryl Dunye, 2010). Her writing has been featured and published in Hyperallergic, BOMB, MS Magazine, X-TRA, and Lamda Literary Review. (Photo designed by Magda Castria for the Global Initiative Doing Things with Stories.)
Ángeles Donoso Macaya
(Borough of Manhattan Community College and The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Ángeles Donoso Macaya (she/they) is an immigrant educator, researcher, and organizer from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. As a Professor at BMCC/CUNY and the Graduate Center, her research centers on Latin American photography theory and history, counter-archival production, human rights activism, documentary film, (trans)feminisms in the Southern Cone, and public humanities scholarship. She is the author of La insubordinación de la fotografía (Metales Pesados 2021) / The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship (UP Florida 2020), awarded Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture (LASA 2021) and Best Book in Recent History and Memory (LASA 2022), and co-editor of Latina/os of the East Coast: A Critical Reader (Peter Lang 2015). Since 2020, she has been the faculty lead for Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/ Knowledges/Memory, a public humanities project developed in collaboration with “La Morada”, an undocumented family-owned and operated Oaxacan restaurant in the South Bronx. As co-founder and member of the activist research collective somoslacélula, Macaya creates video-essays that respond to pressing matters, such as Matar el ojo (2020), formulated in collaboration with Chilean writer Lina Meruane. In 2020, she also collaborated with Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the video-investigation Tear Gas in Plaza de la Dignidad.
Tara Mateik
(College of Staten Island)
Tara Mateik is a multimedia performance artist, activist, and educator. In his videos, performances, and installations, Mateik creates critical reenactments that underscore historical moments of collective transformation. Mining audiovisual and pop cultural archives, he puts artifacts in dialogue with contemporary subjects, exploring the ways in which history is written on, and by, actual bodies. Mateik’s work has been supported by MacDowell, Creative Capital Foundation, and the Franklin Furnace Fund, and exhibited at museums and organizations including MoMA PS1, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, and Dixon Place. A long-time collective member of Paper Tiger Television, Mateik is currently an Associate Professor in the Media Culture Department at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Sherry Millner
(College of Staten Island)
Sherry Millner (College of Staten Island) has produced many film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and research projects, exhibited in festivals, museums, cultural centers, squats, windows, and storefronts. Her The Domestic Boobytrap detournes U.S. army manuals to manifest the vulnerability of domestic space, with blueprints and models of boobytraps placed in everyday life situations. She has produced many series of photomontages including Border Triptychs and No Respirator Included. She is co-creator of the collaborative video project State of Emergency (2003–2008) involving 15 artists in protesting U.S. invasions of the Middle East. Millner also created three anti-documentaries that re-define crime and a series of semi-autobiographical videos focusing on the relations between the nuclear family and American politics, distributed by Video Data Bank and included in two Whitney Biennials. Her satiric camouflage video, Scenes from the Micro-War (1985) was selected for the 2107 Thessaloniki Biennial. The recent video essay How Do Animals and Plants Live? was screened at the 2022 Social Justice Film Festival in Chennai, India, at the Small Axe Festival in Great Britain, and ChangeFest in Chicago. In 2008 at the Oberhausen Film Festival, she co-curated “Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers,” 10 programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. She is co-curator of Disruptive Film, a two volume DVD set of experimental short-form non-fiction political films and videos distributed by Facets.
Matthew Mottel
(Brooklyn College)
Matthew Mottel is an artist, performer, and writer who enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures, and music. Graduating from City College’s Digital Intermedia Art Practice program in 2019, Mottel builds geodesic domes as a performance architecture based on his father’s, Syeus Mottel, photojournalism of Loisaida cultural organization, CHARAS, and Buckminster Fuller. In 2021, Mottel was invited by the Moers Music Festival as an Improviser in Residence’ in Moers, Germany. His debut solo art exhibition Burnt Truth was presented at Gallery Gundula Gruber, in Vienna.
Naomi Schiller
(Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Naomi Schiller is a scholar-activist, labor organizer, filmmaker, writer, and teacher who lives in the Lower East Side of New York City. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on urban politics, climate justice, race and racism, decolonizing methodologies, visual and media anthropology, and the state. She is working on a collaborative oral history project about land-use activism, anti-displacement organizing, and urban governance in New York City. Her documentary film about food insecurity and mutual aid has screened at the Bushwick Film Festival, the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival, and the Figuera Film Festival in Barcelona, Spain. Schiller is author of Channeling the State: Community Media and Popular Politics in Venezuela (Duke University Press 2018). Her current book project explores community activism, social class, racism, governance, and urban climate adaptation in New York City.
Valerie Tevere
(College of Staten Island)
Valerie Tevere is an artist and a Professor of Media Culture at CSI/CUNY. Tevere received an MFA in photography from California Institute of the Arts, a BA in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego, and was a Studio Fellow at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Tevere and collaborator Angel Nevarez’ practice spans over twenty years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. The artists have produced multimedia works often in collaboration with musicians, radio practitioners, and city agencies. They have exhibited their work at venues such as MoMA, Creative Time, and New Museum in New York; Manifesta 8/ES; Museo Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway; Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria. They have received numerous fellowships and grants from Guggenheim, Creative Capital, Art Matters, National Endowment for the Arts, and Franklin Furnace Fund. Recent artist residencies include Artpace, San Antonio, Texas; Antenna::Spillways Residency, New Orleans, Louisiana; and Marble House Project, Dorset, Vermont.
Mary Ting
(John Jay College)
Mary Ting is a Chinese American artist, thinker, educator, writer, and gardener. Ting’s visual art, community projects, writing, and lectures comment on cultural history, trauma, and the loss of nature. Her solo exhibitions include Our Hive is Sick at UMass Amherst; Sleep of Reason Breeds Madness at Dean Project; Witch, Whore, Widow at Metaphor Contemporary Art Gallery, and Excerpts from the Dysfunctional Forest at Kentler Drawing Space. Her work was featured on Amy Brady’s Artists & Climate Change, Truthout, and Earthjustice. Ting has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Gottlieb Foundation, Lambent Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Lower Eastside Printshop, Dieu Donne Papermill, Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans, among others. Her lectures on Chinese modern history and wildlife products have been presented at the Jane Goodall Institute Nepal, UC Davis, The Explorer’s Club, among others.
Pedro Felipe Vintimilla
(City College of New York)
Pedro Felipe Vintimilla anchors his practice in art making, art education, and culture care. Born in Ecuador and based in Queens, he centers material experimentation—papermaking, weaving, and digital imagery—to reflect on identity and immigration. His work has recently been exhibited at the Queens Museum, New York, Museo de Arte de Nogales, Mexico, and Casa del Artista, Ecuador. Since 2018, he has consulted for the Ecuadorian American Cultural Center (EACC) to develop art education and cultural programs, including a video series documenting stories of Ecuadorian immigrants in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Vintimilla is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Education at City College, CUNY, and Professor of Drawing at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut. His teaching practice aims for a fruitful learning environment through sensibility, exploration, ingenuity, and collaboration, where participants are empowered to explore their strengths and gradually expand into a community of creatives.
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.
Guin Ellsworth
Guin Ellsworth has over twenty years of experience working with New York City community organizations, public schools, and museums. Her interdisciplinary practice situates individual stories of home within the complexity of the housing system. She has an M.S.Ed in Childhood Education and a B.A. in Urban Studies.
Lia Embil
Lia Embil is an artist working in painting, installation, sound, and film. Her work explores humans’ relationship to the natural world, and the potential to recreate and transform that relationship. By using ancient methods of deriving color from plants, she searches for a way to preserve what is being erased in time.
Sediq Kholdi
Sediq Kholdi is a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist and fabricator. Born in Tehran, Iran, Sediq immigrated to America during the Islamic Revolution. As an American-raised, Persian artist, he incorporates size, perception, deception, and illusion into his works. Currently, Kholdi is integrating the social practice methodology into his fire-bent steel sculptures.
Ari Wolff
Ari Wolff is an artist, writer, and educator who investigates language as a visual object. Wolff’s work explores alternate modes of reading and communication through mark-making, text, book forms, installation, and pedagogy. Over the last decade, Ari has worked with schools and community-based organizations to design interdisciplinary art and literacy projects. Ari currently serves as the Studio Director at the 14th Street Y.
Sachigusa Yasuda
Sachigusa Yasuda, a New York-based interdisciplinary artist, was born and raised in Japan. She develops projects in New York and Japan with the aim to expand the social and public values and potential of art. She started "Upcycle Uplift," a project that repurposes clothing to create new designs, to explore the issue of recycling for an alternative economy in 2021.
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.
Dahlia Bloomstone
(Hunter College)
Dahlia Bloomstone is a third-year MFA at Hunter College with a BFA from Bard College. She creates, with some political urgency and a computer, accessible video content that leads to questions investigating sex work as apocalypse, philanthropy culture, power structures, exposing private worlds, the dystopian fairytale, sexual commodification, and control. She often uses mirroring, animation, and artifice as conceptual devices. Her most recent work explores identity and personhood within sex work. Bloomstone has recently exhibited at Hauser & Wirth in NYC.
Lucy Hollier
(Brooklyn College)
Lucy Hollier is a trombonist, composer, and teacher. She is studying at Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) MFA program and is interested in exploring forms of non-exploitative and reciprocal collaborations in which artistic hierarchies predominate.
Jennifer Jones
(The Graduate Center, CUNY)
Jennifer Jones is an artist, activist, and teacher. Her multidisciplinary socially engaged art practice—which includes photography, printmaking, the internet, and performance—is based in activism and collaboration. By highlighting individual histories, Jones fosters empathy to begin the process of imagining and creating a restorative future.
Ivey Lowe
(Brooklyn College)
Ivey Lowe explores the boundaries of intimacy and investigates definitions of community across genres of theater, education, ritual gathering, and film. Crafting collaborative processes based in liberatory practices, she engages in questions around interdependence and care. She is a former Drama League Directing Fellow, a National Civic Saturday Fellow, holds a Community Leadership GC from CUNY SLU, and is a current MFA Directing Candidate and Teaching Fellow at Brooklyn College.
Erin K. McAtee
(Brooklyn College)
Erin K. McAtee is a New York-based visual artist who seeks to build community and increase access to art by using the mediums of drawing, painting, printmaking, interactive installation, and public art. She is the co-founder of artist collective ArtHouse2B, and in her current studio practice, she combines installation and performance, inviting other artists to collaborate in this endeavor. In 2020, at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, McAtee began developing her social practice in homeless shelters, youth centers, and family resource centers in the Bronx and Manhattan.
Megan Hattie Stahl
(Hunter College)
Megan Hattie Stahl is a documentary artist and educator living in Brooklyn, New York and Portland, Oregon. Employing video, audio, and new media, her work explores culture and communities past, present, physical, and virtual. In 2021, Stahl produced The Albina Soul Walk, an award-winning, historic audio tour in Portland. She is an MFA candidate in Integrated Media Arts and teaches in Hunter College’s Film and Media Department.
Tiffany Zorrilla
(City College of New York)
Tiffany Zorrilla is a Dominican interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on ceramics, painting, performance, and multimedia. Zorrilla is currently studying to receive her MFA at CUNY City College’s Digital and Interdisciplinary Arts Practice. She is a recipient of Creatives Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program. Her work centers on community-based art practices and activism.
