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.
Emily Verla Bovino
(York College)
Emily Verla Bovino, PhD, is an art historian, artist, and art writer. She is Assistant Professor at York College CUNY in Jamaica, Queens where she is Coordinator of the Art History program. Her research focuses on public art as social practice; the lecture as format in contemporary art; and intersections between contemporary art, architecture, and urbanism. Her current projects focus on art and environmental justice, including stewardship of York College’s public art (1978–1994), critical experiments with AI image generation, and pollution burden in Southeast Queens. She has been hosted at SOMA (Mexico City), Fieldwork: Marfa (Texas) and FUTURA (Czech Republic) and has collaborated with soundpocket (Hong Kong), Speculative Place (Hong Kong/New York) and the Gulf Labor Coalition (New York). Her work has been presented by M+ (Hong Kong), Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), & Now Festival of New Writing (San Diego), Robert Walser Zentrum (Bern), and Viafarini (Milan), among others.
Alyssa Kitt Hanley
(The Graduate Center)
Alyssa Kitt Hanley is a creative powerhouse of burlesque and a critical thinker of striptease culture. Beginning her career in Australia in 2007, she has been at the forefront of shaping the Neo-burlesque revival as an award-winning performer (Burlesque Hall of Fame competitor 2017, 2022), teacher, journalist, dramaturg, producer (Mx Burlesque Australia), and Director of the Australian Burlesque Museum. Currently undertaking her PhD in theatre and performance at City University New York’s Graduate Center, her research focuses on the politics of neo-burlesque, erotic performance, disability and dance. She is a proud “Disa-burly-teaser,” cancer survivor, and beauty activist championing facial difference. Hanley is a Disibilibabe community leader and regularly speaks as a public scholar and panelist on disability and performance (Segal World Voices Festival, Dance Studies Association “Crip Moves” 2025). In 2025 she was the Disabilitease Festival headliner.
Photograph by Samantha Otero
Amirtha Kidambi
(Brooklyn College)
"Amirtha Kidambi is heavily invested in decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical” (NPR, 2024). As an artist spanning free jazz, punk, noise, electroacoustic, and South Asian devotional music, Kidambi crafts subversive sounds challenging hegemony. Based in Lenapehoking-Brooklyn, Kidambi is an improviser, composer, organizer, and scholar focused on critical intervention in collaboration with potent musicians including Luke Stewart, Mary Halvorson, Darius Jones, and William Parker. She is also the composer for the anticolonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri. Leading the protest ensemble Elder Ones, her work garners critical acclaim and tours internationally. Kidambi has received grants and residencies from Roulette, Mid Atlantic Arts, NYFA, FCA, EMPAC, Asian Cultural Council, and Jerome Foundation. Kidambi is a Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. As an activist-scholar working on decolonial and diaspora studies in music, she is published in Routledge, Sound American, and NYT and works with several artist-organizer collectives such as Musicians Against Police Brutality and South Asian Artists in Diaspora.
Anne Davis Mulford
(Queens College)
Anne Davis Mulford is a ceramic artist, writer, and educator whose provocative sculpture, performance, and installations have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is included in public and private collections and featured in Lesbian Art in America by Harmony Hammond. She holds an MFA in Ceramics and Critical Theory from UNLV and has long been active in teaching, fundraising, political activism, and community organizing. In the late 1990s, her Las Vegas column An Audience with Princess Anne gained a devoted following and marked her as a cultural Influencer before the rise of social media. She currently teaches at Queens College in New York. Her debut documentary, Going Santa Fe, uses personal history to illuminate hidden queer narratives in mid-century Santa Fe. The feature-length film is set for completion in 2026.
Sunisa Nuonsy
(Brooklyn College, The City College of New York)
Sunisa Nuonsy is a “Refugee Baby” and educator of Lao descent with more than 10 years of experience working in NYC public schools, focusing on multilingual education and racialized immigrant students. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, she considers herself part of the 1.5 generation of immigrants to the United States. Her lived experiences as a racialized and minoritized immigrant and multilingual learner permeate her personal and professional work; she is currently a doctoral candidate, pursuing a PhD in Urban Education at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She teaches at Brooklyn College and City College and is also the founder of LAOboratory, a collective that centers and affirms Lao diaspora womxn’s experiences. Nuonsy enjoys plants, restaurants, beaches, and fitness in her free time.
Shokran Rahiminezhad
(The Graduate Center)
Shokran Rahiminezhad is a PhD candidate in the Environmental Psychology program in the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His thesis is on Geographies of the 2018 Armenian Revolution, and the domain of his scholarship includes social movements, urban political geography, memory, identity, public spaces, and everyday life. He holds a master’s degree in social studies and comes from an urban planning and design background, and has worked in different cities as a professional planner for seven years. He is an adjunct lecturer at the Urban Policy and Planning department in Hunter College, City University of New York. Alongside his academic work, Rahiminezhad has published short stories and poetry — under a pseudonym — using words to hold open spaces that were closed to him at home.
Constanza Salazar
(Hunter College)
Constanza Salazar, Ph.D., is a Canadian art historian, writer, and educator based in New York City. Her work centers on the histories and theories of pioneering artists and activists reimagining new media technologies in creative and political ways. She has presented papers internationally on art and technology. She has published in Momus, Internet Histories, and Afterimage, among others, and is currently working on her first book project titled Poetics of Resistance: How Contemporary Art Reimagines The Future of Digital Technologies. Salazar serves as a board member for the New Media Caucus, a non-profit organization that promotes diversity and inclusivity in new media. She received her Bachelors in Fine Arts and Philosophy at the University of Waterloo, her Masters in Art History at the University of Guelph, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She teaches at Hunter College in the Film and Media Studies Department.
Aniko Szucs
(Queens College)
Dr. Aniko Szucs is an Assistant Professor of Theater Studies and Dramaturgy at Queens College. Her research focuses on Central and East European political theater, feminist protest movements, and performances, and the genealogy and critique of state surveillance. She earned a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University. Her book project Gestures of Radical Care: The Affect and Aesthetics of Political Resistance in Hungary explores contemporary protest performances and resistance movements. Dr. Szucs has published in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes on Central and Eastern European political performance and has served as a resident and production dramaturg in theaters across the U.S. and Hungary. Her curatorial work on political theater, feminist performance, and the intersection of hospitality and performance has been showcased at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, Yale University, and in Performance Research.
Photograph by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project
Dannielle Tegeder
(Lehman College)
Dannielle Tegeder is a visual artist and professor at Lehman College whose work is influenced by architecture and abstraction. Over the past 25 years, she has expanded her practice to include installation, sound, performance, and collaboration. In 2020, Tegeder co-founded feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost with artist and educator Sharmistha Ray. Named after Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint, the collective fuses contemporary art with modern spirituality through divination and ritual and recovers feminist histories through artistic production, experimental pedagogy, and community activations. Their work includes paintings, surrealist games, installations, workshops, artist books, and the Abstract Futures Tarot, now in its third edition. In 2022, they launched a roving art school that’s reached over 8,000 people. In 2025, they unveiled a 600-square-foot glass mosaic mural at Grand Central Station, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design. Exhibitions include The Guggenheim, MASP, Marlborough Gallery, and The Aldrich Museum. Hilma’s Ghost has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and more.
Ania Upstill
(John Jay College)
Ania Upstill (they/them) is a queer and trans performer, educator, theatre maker and clown. A graduate of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, much of their work is transdisciplinary, including the forms of theater, clown, circus and music. Upstill frequently creates work under their company Butch Mermaid Productions, where their mission is to make queer joy irresistible and contagious, envisioning a world where all queer people experience joy and belonging. Their work with Butch Mermaid includes Antonio!, a new punk pirate musical about Shakespeare’s queerest character; Too Much Hair, a musical cabaret about gender euphoria; Into the Bush, a queer circus-theatre project; and Transhumance, Upstill’s solo clown show about the experience of being transgender, which was performed at the Kennedy Center in June 2024 for Pride Month (now removed from the Kennedy Center website because, politics). Upstill holds a Masters degree in Applied Theater from the City University of New York and as a Joker for Theater of the Oppressed NYC, a professional teaching artist, and an Applied Theater maker, they are deeply interested in how to use theater forms and techniques to help people engage their curiosity, develop deeper understanding, and make meaning of the world around them.
Mariano Wainsztein
(Hunter College, LaGuardia Community College)
Mariano Wainsztein is a filmmaker, musician, and educator based in New York City. His work has screened and played at arthouse venues and international film festivals, including Anthology Film Archives, Cinema Village, the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, NewFilmmakers NY, Free Speech TV, and the Korea Human Rights Film Festival. Inspired by the artistic and social legacies of Italian Neorealism and Third Cinema, his documentary Chamber Music: Sound in the Rooms, is currently being filmed with the participation of inpatients undergoing rehabilitation. The project highlights the role of musical expression in helping individuals recover from substance use disorders. He is also working on Dog-Eating Cat-Ladies, a satirical mockumentary that follows a group of flamboyant outsiders involved in the kidnapping and trafficking of pets as culinary commodities. The film is a tribute to the fictional character of Divine, as portrayed in Jean Genet’s novel Our Lady of the Flowers, and John Waters’ film Multiple Maniacs. Wainsztein holds an MFA from Hunter College and teaches Film and Media Studies at both Hunter College and LaGuardia Community College. His work has received grants from Franklin Furnace, LABA: Laboratory for Jewish Culture, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.
Jing Wang
(LaGuardia Community College, College of Staten Island)
Jing Wang is a New York-based immigrant filmmaker, media artist, and activist whose work amplifies the voices of immigrant communities through organizing and documentary storytelling. Grounded in her own experiences, Wang’s films blend art and activism to reveal the struggles, resilience, and dignity of immigrant workers often silenced by mainstream media and American society. Her feature-length documentary Ride with Delivery Workers follows NYC’s immigrant delivery workers through the e-bike legalization campaign, the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. Wang’s films have screened at the Museum of the Moving Image, the Museum of the City of New York, Rooftop Films, and WNYC’s Greene Space, and have been featured in The New York Times and Gothamist. She is a member of A-Doc and the Brooklyn Film Collective, holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and has taught media arts across CUNY campuses, and currently, she teaches at CSI and LaGuardia.
STUDENT FELLOWS
Student Fellows are graduate students with a serious art practice, matriculated at any CUNY campus (often but not always from MFA programs), who are working to develop an independent project at the intersection of art and social justice.
Lucía Cozzi
(Hunter College)
Lucía Cozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher. Her new media objects and collective experiences explore how we become with technology. A member of Mil Mundos (2019–2025), she started doblespiral in 2020. She has exhibited in public spaces, galleries, and museums, and is currently pursuing an MFA at Hunter College.
Cassandra Cronin
(The Graduate Center)
Cassandra is a multi-disciplinary artist, farmer, and anthropologist, interested in agrarian commoning projects and post-capitalist futures. Her land-based art practices include sustainable film photography (developing film with plants), natural dying and quilting, block printing, and more. Through her work she aims to foster slowness, collaboration, and political imagination.
Ashley Ding
(Brooklyn College)
Ashley Ding is a filmmaker, production designer, and visual artist whose work centers diasporic women’s experiences through a critical, comedic, and sometimes absurdist lens. Ding is currently pursuing her MFA at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema.
Dorothea Gloria
(Brooklyn College)
Dorothea Gloria is a Filipino NYC-based performance artist, actor, and producer. Her work explores ritual, immigration, and collective memory through devised theater and community-driven performance. She creates spaces where stories, movement, and healing converge; often blurring the line between audience and performer.
Anisa Hodzic
(Hunter College)
Anisa Hodzic is a New York-based audio-visual artist, educator, and founder of DXHESVA Collective, currently pursuing her MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College. Rooted in her Bosniak heritage and personal experience, her practice examines themes of intergenerational trauma, memory, spirit, and identity.
Regan Loggans
(The Graduate Center)
Regan (they/themme/elle) is an artist, curator, and educator based in Lenapehoking on the ancestral lands of the Munsee-Lenape of Manahatta and so-called Brooklyn. They have a multifaceted practice, one which focuses on the intersection of social justice and textile arts. Textiles are the artistic labor of the private sphere inhabited by women, femmes, queers, the poor, migrants, and people of color. And the intention of their work is to invite marginalized folx to reconsider and renegotiate their investment in ongoing settler colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and diasporic identities through the communal engagement of textile arts.
Image by Helen Lin
Kathleen Ma
(Queens College)
Kathleen Ma is a writer, translator, and organizer. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College and is interested in contemporary Chinese literature, speculative fiction, and a poetics that maps the emotional terrain of industry and labor. She works as a labor union researcher.
Dara Ojugbele
(The Graduate Center)
Oluwadara (Dara) Ojugbele is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker born and raised in New York. Spurred by a genuine, critical, and inquiring approach to self- and communal reflection, her creative practice centers on free-flow narrative building, ancestry, symbolism, and explorations of cultural heritage and ecologies. Ojugbele holds a BFA from Hunter College and is currently pursuing a master’s in Social and Environmental Justice Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Jay Reinier
(Brooklyn College)
Jay Reinier (they) creates multimedia performances and interactive art that blends approaches from composition, concrete and sound poetry, and software design. Their work explores questions surrounding the way software shapes our values and creativity, the more-than-human grief of climate collapse, and speculative posthuman subjectivities.
Monica Rocha
(Hunter College)
Monica Rocha is an audiovisual and performance artist based in Brooklyn. Working through TV studio productions and live performances with cast and crew, she interrogates assumed relationships between body, truth, consent, and media production. She’s interested in generating narrative and non-narrative scripts through collaborative movement, sound, and experimental forms of writing. She has performed at Harvestworks, Dada Bar, Roulette, and Artists Space.
Emma Ruskay-Kidd
(Hunter College)
Emma Ruskay-Kidd (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and graduate student at the Silberman School of Social Work. Her background in education, socially-engaged art, and gender and sexuality studies, guides her practice exploring themes of care, embodiment, and intergenerational meaning-making. Ruskay-Kidd uses storytelling, play, and vulnerability to enable connection and transformation.
Ezra Undag
(City College of New York)
Ezra Undag is a cultural worker and Urban Sustainability graduate student at CCNY. He co-leads the Kumukutikutitap Project, an arts-based research initiative exploring the environmental, economic, and cultural dimensions of Capiz shell harvesting in the Philippines. His work bridges environmental research, public art, policy, and climate justice.
