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.
Regina A. Bernard
(The School of Professional Studies)
Regina A. Bernard is a writer and Associate Professor of Sociology/Interdisciplinary Studies at The School of Professional Studies at CUNY. She holds graduate degrees in African American Studies from Columbia University and a PhD from The Graduate and University Center (CUNY) in Urban Education. She has taught Black and Latino Studies, Youth Studies, and Education, and is currently the academic director/chair of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies at SPS. Her creative work has led her to publish three books on Caribbean feminism, Black (NYC) Studies and Nuyorican Poetry. Dr. Bernard is currently working on several creative projects, including how people of color interact with nature and how such a relationship ignites both historical trauma and reimagined wellness.
Kelly M. Britt
(Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center)
Kelly M. Britt is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the Center for Brooklyn and Chair of the Museum and Cultural Organizational Studies minor (Brooklyn College). Her collaborative projects are located in urban settings and focus on gentrification, climate change, and trauma, including community-based work with the United Order of Tents Eastern District #3 — the oldest Black women’s benevolent society in the U.S. — and the Flatbush African Burial Ground Coalition. She also works with a collective of anthropologists exploring COVID-19 materiality as a response to trauma, and with the Van Cortlandt Park archaeological legacy/orphaned collection from the NYC’s LPC’s Archaeological Repository: The Nan Rothschild Research Center. Britt’s research themes are highlighted in her writing, including her latest, a co-edited volume on Archaeology and Advocacy: Urban Intersections that was published in the spring of 2023.
Marissa Gutiérrez-Vicario
(The City College of New York)
Marissa Gutiérrez-Vicario (she/her) is the Founder and Executive Director of Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE). As a committed human rights and peace-building activist, artist, educator, and advocate for youth, Gutiérrez-Vicario launched ARTE in 2013 to help young people amplify their voices and organize for human rights change in their communities through visual arts. In 2021, Gutiérrez-Vicario served as the Soros Visiting Practitioner Chair at the School of Public Policy at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Currently, she is an Artist-in-Residence at the Initiative for a Just Society at the Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University and a doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College in the Art and Art Education program. Gutiérrez-Vicario is an Adjunct Lecturer at the City College of New York in the Art Education Department.
Heng-Gil Han
(Queens College)
Heng-Gil Han is the Director of Korea Art Forum (KAF) and an exhibition maker committed to expanding art’s accessibility, disrupting inequality in the contemporary art field, and advancing transformative art’s power to achieve social and societal changes. He lectures in a graduate theoretical course. Han organized An Era of Peace, A Peaceful Land, an exhibition that was produced by KAF and internationally toured to Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario, Canada (2018); Daecheong Island Senior Center and Incheon Culture & Arts Center in South Korea (2018–2019); and Ozaneaux Artspace in New York, NY (2019). The exhibition enabled three North Korean artists to embark on a two-week journey to Beijing (2017). Han orchestrated Jamaica Flux, a community-based art project characterized by social engagement and sponsored by Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in Queens, NY (2004, 2007, 2010, 2016). He curated special exhibitions for Busan and Incheon Biennials in South Korea (2008, 2009, 2011).
Allen Hillery
(The City College of New York & Macaulay Honors College)
Allen Hillery is a data storyteller, educator, writer and researcher, and an adjunct lecturer at The City College of New York and Macaulay Honors College. Hillery has been studying the data visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois for the past six years. Du Bois’s work has inspired him to pursue projects at the intersection of data and social justice. He is the co-founder of the social media project The #DuBoisChallenge. The challenge celebrates the data visualizations of Du Bois by having participants recreate his iconic visualizations and share across Twitter. Hillery and his team have been successful in creating an online community that shares and critiques their work. In his latest project Color Therapy, Hillery plans to use coloring as a means to understand the past and reflect on the present. You can read more about the Du Bois Challenge here.
Heather Huggins
(Queensborough Community College)
Heather Huggins explores connections between the deeply personal and deeply systemic through performance. She co-creates new, devised, and applied projects. In 2018, Huggins initiated a Social Presencing Theater practice community at QCC with students and alumni. The community co-created performances, presented research, and offered public programming, exchanging locally with QCC’s Kupferberg Holocaust Center and CUNY FDIC, nationally through KCACTF’s devised theatre initiative, and internationally with the Presencing Institute, ImaginAction, and La Vaca Independiente. Huggins shared a roundtable at the international ‘Contemplation, Performing Arts, and Coexistence’ conference with Tania Alice in 2021. Their manuscript ‘The Sky and The Storm’ was published in The Journal of Performance & Mindfulness in 2023. She is a 2022–23 Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at SUNY-Binghamton and a 2021 Andrew W. Mellon Transformative Learning in the Humanities Faculty Fellow at CUNY.
Art Jones
(The City College of New York)
Art Jones works with film/video, sculpture, and expanded media. Jones’s work often utilizes mainstream and social media as raw material to be sampled, remixed, and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working within a particular genre or mode, Jones’s practice seeks to reveal and reorient how information is transmitted and received. Jones is a native New Yorker and lives in the Bronx, New York.
Jason Michael Leggett
(Kingsborough Community College)
Jason Michael Leggett is an Associate Professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department. He teaches Constitutional Law, the U.S. Judiciary, and Environmental Law and Politics. His work focuses on rights consciousness among marginalized communities. He is most interested in how these individuals think about legality in everyday practice against injustice. He draws upon experience in political organizing and community activism to co-create educational opportunities that provide alternative visions of the future toward more equitable social relations. This research has addressed climate change inaction, systemic racism, reproductive rights, migration, and homelessness.
Kara Lynch
(Hunter College)
Kara Lynch, a time-based artist, lives in exilio in the Bronx. Her art practice is re-memory, vision, and movement. It manifests as poetics, process, and conjures autonomy for Black and Indigenous people across Diaspora. Through low-fi, collective practice, and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time and space. lynch’s practice is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered — Black, Queer and Feminist. lynch is the anchor artist for INVISIBLE an episodic, multi-site installations excavating the terror and resilient beauty of Black-Indigenous experiences, and co-editor of ‘We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions’ an edited volume of Black Speculation, and director of ‘BlackRussians’, a feature documentary video. lynch completed the MFA in Visual Arts at the UCSD and has been a research fellow at the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, UT, Austin and the Academy of African Studies at Bayreuth University in Germany. lynch is an emerit@ Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College, a 2020–23 Tulsa Artist Fellow, host of Blues U, a bi-weekly radio show on radiocoyote.org, a principled artist with GalleryOfTheStreets, and a co-shaper of Black Flight Experiments.
Jackelyn Mariano, Esq.
(Hunter College)
Jackelyn Mariano, Esq., is a Filipina American activist, lawyer, and educator from Queens, New York. She is an adjunct professor at Hunter College’s Asian American Studies Program. She served briefly as an adjunct professor at the CUNY School of Law’s Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) clinic, representing communities targeted by government agencies under the guise of national security and counterterrorism. She earned a BA from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, majoring in “Immigrant Community Organizing.” As a Hunter student, she was a member of the Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter (CRAASH). She earned her JD from CUNY School of Law. Currently, Mariano works with the Mission to End Modern Slavery (MEMS), a nonprofit organization that seeks to build a survivor-led movement to end human trafficking. Mariano channels her rage into her Pinoy punk band Material Support, a project inspired by national liberation movements.
Tommy Mintz
(Kingsborough Community College)
Tommy Mintz is an artist whose work draws upon the aesthetics and concepts of street photography, collage, mapping, and digital culture. Most recently, he is working with iterations of the “Automated Digital Photo Collage,” a program he wrote that analyzes sequential images for differences and generates a time-lapse collage. Mintz is an Associate Professor of Photography in the Art Department at CUNY Kingsborough Community College. Mintz graduated from Hunter College High School (1994), Sarah Lawrence College (BA 1999) and CUNY Queens College (MFA 2005). Mintz is an active member of the DigiAna Studio Group, Techspressionsim, and The Institute for Wishful Thinking. In April 2022, Mintz co-curated, with Midori Yamamura, Maureen Connor, Rob Robinson and Jason Leggett, the exhibition UnHomeless NYC and accompanying series of events at the Kingsborough Art Museum. For this SPCUNY project, Mintz and the co-curators will remount the UnHomeless NYC exhibition and host a series of events at Hudson Guild Gallery on West 26th Street in February– April 2024.
Emily Raboteau
(The City College of New York)
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her books include Searching for Zion (winner of an American Book Award) and Lessons for Survival, forthcoming in spring, 2024. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s essays have recently appeared and been anthologized in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, Best American Science Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and elsewhere. Her distinctions include an inaugural Climate Narratives Prize from Arizona State University, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York Chapter, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and Yaddo. She’s a professor of creative writing in the English Department at the City College of New York, and lives in the Bronx.
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga
(Hunter College)
Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born to immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. The ways that disparity and power manifest themselves in our lives are consistent threads in Zúñiga’s work. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of monetization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Zúñiga maintains a research-based practice that combines hand-made with emerging technologies to present content in a manner that may generate interaction and discussion among participants. Zúñiga’s work has been exhibited at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the New York Hall of Science, the Museum of the Moving Image.
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.
Eugenie Chao
Eugenie Chao is a ceramicist and educator. Her work investigates human interaction and relationship with objects. Inspired by her experiences as a music teacher, she is currently creating an immersive musical experience by building a range of instruments out of clay. Learn more: www.eugeniechao.com.
Brandon King
Brandon King is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer from the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hampton Roads VA. king creates installations exploring African Diasporic identities, honoring his ancestors’ stories through archival and found materials, sound collages, painting, film, and other forms. For more than twenty years, king has contributed his expertise to community-led organizations driving social transformation. He is a member of the NYC-based artists collective PTP and serves as the Assistant Director for the Korea Art Forum.
Natalie Raskin
Natalie Raskin is a painter, bookmaker, writer, and educator raised and living in Brooklyn, New York. She builds worlds out of queerness, loneliness, and alternative selves. Across mediums, storytelling functions in mapping feelings and finding places of belonging for strange and awkward dreams. Raskin has been working in socio-emotional education settings in New York since 2019, and develops individualized writing experiments with students to support them in building autonomy with language. She is currently interested in participatory reading, exploring the ways in which art books can be community-facing as a tool for learning.
V Tineo
V Tineo (V), a versatile artist from New York with roots in the Dominican Republic, expresses through painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installations. Themes of home, family, body, and society thread their work, creating powerful narratives. Currently pursuing a master‘s at Queen College, V’s art captivates with diverse forms and meaningful concepts.
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.
Hümeyra “Hümy” Çelik
(Hunter College)
Hümy Çelik is a Turkish documentary artist and creative producer whose work is socially engaged and inspired by her experience as an undocumented immigrant living in the U.S.. She tells complex stories from immigrant communities while building empathy and raising awareness through unique, engaging narratives.
Julie Chen
(Brooklyn College)
Julie Chen is an MFA student in Poetry who is interested in deepening her research-based practice around labor and writing technologies, and developing a community-driven approach to poetic performance. Chen currently works in fundraising to support tenant organizing.
Chris Colón
(The Graduate Center)
Chris Colón is a visual artist and scholar-activist from Brooklyn, NY. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center. His auto-ethnographic, arts-based research rethinks what education is and how to make sense of the world around us.
OD Enobabor
(The Graduate Center)
OD Enobabor is an Itsekiri Texan devoted to anti-colonial Black placemaking. She is a migrant justice advocate, emerging documentary filmmaker, and the curator of the platform "Africa Is Everywhere." Her practice centers on community development and radical archives of African Diaspora to the generation of visual and sonic performance. As a Ph.D. candidate at CUNY in Earth and Environmental Sciences, she works through and in between Black Geographies — particularly in Sao Paulo and New York — and Black radical autonomous organizing and mobilities via cultural practice as a means to survey and sustain political resistance. For SPCUNY, she will be working on expanding her short documentary narrative, Black Crates — a visual mixtape dedicated to Black life in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Angela Chi-Chi Glass
(Baruch College)
Angela Chi-Chi Glass plays and teaches piano. She is dedicated to the task of analyzing and deconstructing the lingering patriarchal systems still found within music pedagogy. She is the founder and runs a private music studio in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, performs music in Spanish and Quechua, and is inspired by the exchange of cultural ideas from the Global South. Glass is humbled before Pachamama — Quechua for Mother Earth — and humbly embraces any opportunity to be her steward and advocate. She is pursuing her Master’s degree in Arts Administration at the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College.
Janggo Mahmud
(Hunter College)
Janggo Mahmud is a creative community organizer impassioned to create an ecofeminist, anti-racist future with her heart that is born and raised in New York City. Her work is firmly rooted in her community and she is galvanized by the healing power of art within advocacy efforts and movement work. She is working towards her degree in The Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter.
Jah Elyse Sayers
(The Graduate Center)
Jah Elyse Sayers (they/them) directs their creative energy toward liberatory placemaking through research, writing, teaching, and building. You can find their writing in Wagadu, BRICLab Essays, The Trophallaxis Study Group, Deem, and Society & Space.
Leanne Tory-Murphy
(Brooklyn College)
Leanne Tory-Murphy is a writer and organizer who has worked across the fields of labor, immigrant rights, and sexual harm prevention. She is currently completing an MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College, and works on communications for the Starbucks Workers United union campaign.
