Luis Rincon Alba

Luis Rincon Alba

Ph.D. Candidate, Performance Studies Department, New York University

Luis Rincon Alba is a Colombian artist and scholar based in New York City since 2010. He has taught at the departments of Art and Public Policy and Performance Studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Performance Studies Department at New York University and a Public Humanities Fellow at Humanities NY and the Urban Democracy Lab. As an actor, performer, and oral narrator, he has collaborated with different artistic collectives in his home country and also in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Italy. He is also the artistic director of the collective MUSA Presents.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Linda Aristondo

Linda Aristondo

Master of Divinity student, Union Theological Seminary

Linda Aristondo is a Latina bilingual woman of color and attorney championing the needs of vulnerable populations. Her field of interest is collaborating with nonprofit service organizations dedicated to serving the legally disenfranchised, including vulnerable undocumented immigrants and refugees. Linda was among the first-generation of students of color from extremely poor communities admitted to the most selective colleges, and subsequently to law school. Linda was in the forefront of the generation of women of color educated to lead their communities into the national consciousness as equal members of the professional class. Linda, a Harvard educated attorney, was an Encore Public Service Fellow; CORO Foundation’s Hispanic Women Leadership Fellow and garnered an ABA CLEO Fellowship. She is currently a Master of Divinity student at Union Theological Seminary.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Kamal Badhey

Kamal Badhey

Kamal Badhey (she/her) is a photographer, artist-educator and independent curriculum designer of South Asian ancestry with an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MS in Museum Education from Bank Street College. She is a member of the Urban Photographers Association and South Asian Women’s Creative Collective. Her work intersects with diaspora, using photography, oral storytelling, and family history to stitch together stories. It follows the Telugu saying, ’Katha kanchiki, manam intiki’, ‘The story goes far far away, and now we are back in our homes’. Her project Portals and Passageways, exhibited internationally traces her jeweler ancestor and great great grandfather Annam Rathnaiah from unknown origins to a former British colonial bazaar in Secunderabad, India. Kamal brings two decades of experience collaborating with youth and adults in public schools, transitional housing, community centers, civic engagement, and universities. She was a Lewis Hine Documentary Fellow and a Claremont Documentary Fellow.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Noni Carter

Noni Carter

PhD Candidate, Department of French and Romance Philology, Columbia University

Noni Carter is a historical and speculative fiction author. She has published work in RSA Journal, Kweli Journal (forthcoming August 2019), and is the author of the YA historical fiction novel, Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster, 2010), winner of the Parent’s Choice Gold award. She is a 2016 graduate of Voices of Our Nation and the recipient of the 2019 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for her work-in-progress novel Womb Talk. 

Noni is currently finishing a PhD in French and Francophone studies with a focus on memory, gender, and slavery in the literary traditions of the Black diaspora, specifically the French Caribbean. She works as editorial assistant with Small Axe Journal and as rapporteur for Columbia’s Cultural Memory Seminar. She served as a 2018-2019 grad fellow for the Institute on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She has a forthcoming essay in volume 2 of theComparative Literary History of Modern Slavery book project.

Working Group Affiliation

Transnational Black Feminisms
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Luca A Castro Figari

Luca A Castro Figari

Masters Student in Performance Studies, New York University

Luca A Castro Figari is a performance and cultural theorist, organizer, survivor and healer, and multimedia artist specializing in behavioral, ideological, and intimacy control structures. They've received awards in poetry and creative writing, perform and play-write professionally, are recording their first album, publish film and social criticism, and were Peruvian National Champion in Tae-Kwon-Do. Zadie Smith personally selected them for her months-long master class, making them the only participant who doesn't speak English as their first language, and they're currently working with the Red Cross on a play. They've received scholarships to study in Paris, New York, Abu Dhabi, and to share their work in London. They're completing a Masters in Performance Studies at New York University.

Social Engagement Project Affiliation

Zip Code Memory Project

Gabriel Carle

Gabriel Carle

Ph.D. candidate, Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures, NYU

Gabriel Carle (San Juan, 1993) completed a B.A. in Escritura Creativa at Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University. Their creative and academic research interests center on issues of Queerness, Indigeneity, and Blackness in Caribbean literature and activism. They have won literary prizes at UPR-RP and University of Houston. In 2018, they published their first short story collection, Mala leche. They are currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at NYU.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Jordan Corine Cruz

Jordan Corine Cruz

Interdisciplinary Artist, Bronx, New York

Jordan Corine Cruz (b. 1993) is a Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, video, and sound. Using traditional materials, imagery, and layered sound as cultural signifiers, Cruz creates interactive spaces and objects that focus on the intersections between self-identification, labor, gender, and displacement. Her work considers how communities of color utilize nostalgia to create strategies for survival. Cruz’s practice centers on cultural archives ranging from family lore, Puerto Rican traditional practices, and block culture. 

Cruz received a BFA in Photography and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been shown in Haul Gallery, SoMad Studio, La Mama Galleria, and SVA Chelsea Gallery. Cruz was granted the BRIO award by the Bronx Council on the Arts in 2020. Additionally, she has organized and hosted a panel talk focusing on Latinx Women Photographers in collaboration with El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Cruz lives and works in The Bronx, New York.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Bárbara Pérez Curiel

Bárbara Pérez Curiel

Ph.D. student, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University

Bárbara Pérez Curiel is a Ph.D. student at New York University's Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She holds a Master's degree in Modern Languages (Spanish) from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor's degree in Modern Languages (German) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her current research interests revolve around contemporary Mexican and Central American literature, cinema, and journalism. In the last five years, she has worked as an editor, journalist, and translator for Mexican and international media outlets and publishing houses.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton

Mia Cecily Florin-Sefton

Ph.D. candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture; with a focus on how narratives of succession mediate and explicate the shifting relationship between biological and economic theories of heredity and inheritance. She is also currently at work on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I. She is a contributing writer for the medical humanities journal: Synapsis and was previously the Graduate Fellow for Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University.

Working Group Affiliations

Queer Aqui

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Alo Gorozpe

Alo Gorozpe

Artist, Curator, and Community Organizer

Alo Gorozpe is an artist, curator and community organizer. Born in Mexico City, Alo has a bachelor in Architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana (México City) and an MFA in Performance Arts from Brooklyn College. Alo´s most recent artistic and curatorial work presents itself as a series of communal performances in public spaces. As part of his community-driven process, Alo proposes the design and production of his performances as community building activities that lead up to shared transformative experiences. As a public performance designer and curator, Alo has collaborated with a diverse array of artists, institutions and communities both in Mexico and New York City. For more information on his work visit: www.alonsogorozpe.com

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Kristin Hankins

Kristin Hankins

Ph.D. candidate, American Studies, Yale University

Kristin Hankins is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale University. She holds a B.A. in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and previously worked as a program, project, and exhibition coordinator at a non-profit public art organization. Her research and teaching interests include urban history and geography, ethnography, public humanities, and visual culture.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

María José Contreras Lorenzini

María José Contreras Lorenzini

Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Universidad Católica de Chile

María Jose Contreras Lorenzini is a Chilean performance artist and scholar. She holds a Ph.D from Università di Bologna and is Associate Professor at the Theater School at Universidad Católica de Chile. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. Using a wide range of formats, from massive public interventions to intimate actions of resistance, Contreras creatively explores the relation between the body and memory. Her work presented throughout the Americas and Europe include theatre productions, site specific performances, durational performances and urban interventions. In the context of the commemoration of the state coup in Chile she convened “#quererNOver”, an urban intervention that involved 1200 people lying in the streets of Santiago to commemorate the more than 1200 detenidos desaparecidos. Some of her recent performances include: "Suelo", which took place in Plaza Italia in Santiago and affronted the relation between surveillance and human rights, and “Aquí” that consisted in the embodied marking of places where women were assassinated in the first months of the dictatorship.

 She has published chapters in international volumes such as Múltiplos Olhares Sobre Processos Descoloniais nas Artes Cênicas (Brasil, 2018), Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times (Palgrave, 2017), Frontières & dictatures. Images, regards (L’Harmattan, 2016). She has recently served as co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press 2019). She is one of 70 international artists featured in The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader (Routledge 2020).

Working Group Affiliations

Women Mobilizing Memory

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Nancy Ko

Nancy Ko

Ph.D. student, History, Columbia University

Nancy Ko is a scholar of race, capital, and migration working at the intersection of Jewish and Middle East Studies. A Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Columbia University, her present research traces the consequences of the emergence of Sephardic identity politics in the global Middle East. Nancy holds an MPhil at the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a B.A. from Harvard University, where she was a founding organizer of the Open Hillel movement. She now teaches topics in history and philosophy at Columbia and Harvard, and proudly organizes with Student Workers of Columbia. Nancy is a recipient of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She can be heard in conversation with recent authors in History and Critical Theory over at the New Books Network.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Leah Kogen-Elimeliah

Leah Kogen-Elimeliah

MFA candidate, City College of New York

Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a poet, essayist, short story and nonfiction writer from Moscow, currently living in New York City. She is an MFA candidate at City College of New York, is the Founder and Director of WordShedNYC Reading Series and an Editorial Associate for Fiction literary magazine. Leah has collaborated on various art/poetry projects with Benjamin Briones Ballet Company, independent choreographers and dancers as well as videographers experimenting with multimedia and poetry. She's had her work featured on The Red Stage organized by Creative Time, The NYC Poetry Festival and The Higher Ground Arts Festival. Her writing focuses on immigration, identity, language, sexuality and culture. Leah lives in Manhattan with her husband and their children.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Aya Labanieh

Aya Labanieh

Ph.D. candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University

Aya Labanieh is a Ph.D. candidate in the English and Comparative Literature Department, where she works on imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in 20th and 21st century Middle Eastern literature and politics. Her broader interests include conspiratorial thinking within a global digital context, and how conspiracy theories function as alternate histories, heretical discourses, popular critiques, epistemic injuries, and modern enchantments. Aya is an instructor of record for writing composition at Columbia University, a Public Humanities Fellow with the Heyman Center's ZIP Code Memory Project, a Lead Teaching Fellow with the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the Assistant Editor at the Journal of Arabic Literature. Her writing has appeared in the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, Politics/Letters quarterly, and Aeon magazine. Before coming to Columbia, she received three B.A. degrees (with honors) in Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and French Literature from the University of California, Irvine.

Working Group Affiliations

Motherhood and Technology

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Guilherme Estermann Meyer

Ph.D. candidate, Department of English, New York University and SSHRC

I’m a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in the Department of English at New York University. My dissertation project deals with prophetic utopianism, which is a mode of utopianism that engages in prophetic denunciation-annunciation as a means to sustain revolutionary praxis. I turn to the work of Paulo Freire to theorize this mode of utopianism as one that took shape in the context of the development of liberation theology in Latin America and to explore the continued relevance of a prophetic-utopian impulse in practices of artists and social movements in Brazil from the 1970s to the present. I’m a co-chair of the Marxism working group in the Department of English and an organizer in the union for graduate workers at NYU, GSOC-UAW Local 2110.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Isin Önol

Işın Önol

Curator, Educator, and Writer - New York, NY

Işın Önol is a curator and writer based in New York. She has been working as an independent curator (predominantly in the USA, Austria and Turkey) since 2009. Before that, she led the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul as its director and curator. (2006-2009). Her curatorial research focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and a lecturer at Montclair State University, Department of Art & Design. Önol co-founded and directs the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey. Her recent exhibitions include Thinking Food Futures (New York), Women Mobilizing Memory (Istanbul, Vienna, New York, Madrid), and When Home Won’t Let You Stay (Vienna). She curated the International Sinop Biennial in 2012 and 2014. She has produced more than 50 exhibitions internationally, and published on the intersection of social justice and art. Önol holds an MFA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, a MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Isin Önol has been elected to the Board of Directors of Roberto Cimetta Fund for the period 2018-2021 and 2021-2024. https://isinonol.com/

Working Group Affiliation

Women Mobilizing Memory

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Amanda Parmer

Amanda Parmer

Ph.D. student, Media, Culture and Communications, New York University

Amanda Parmer is a doctoral student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University and an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program. In 2014 she inaugurated parmer — a space for exhibitions, programming and writing that focuses on queer, feminist strategies and post-colonial analysis. From 2018-2019 she worked as the Director of Programs at Independent Curators International and previously served as the inaugural Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. 

She has presented exhibitions, programs, and events for e-flux; the New School; the New Museum; The New York Armory and Volta Shows; The Kitchen; as well as Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn and Berlin. She has held residencies with the Danish Arts Council International Research Programme in Copenhagen and Møn, the Abrons Art Center in New York as well as the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Høvikodden, Norway. 

She is a contributing writer for Art in America, art&education, Artforum and BOMB. She has also taught as a lecturer at The New School and Rhode Island School of Design.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

Laura Salvatore

Laura Salvatore

Creative Writing MFA student, The City College of New York

Laura Salvatore is a poet, currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at The City College of New York, where she will be completing her thesis this fall. She studied Art History and English at Southern Connecticut State University. Laura currently works at Sotheby’s Institute of Art as part of the Global Online division. Her poetry has been published in Pith journal, Angel City Review, and Apricity Magazine, amongst others.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project

George Emilio Sanchez

George Emilio Sanchez

Performance Artist and Activist

George Emilio Sanchez is a writer, performance artist and social activist living and working on the ancestral homelands of the Lenapehoking, or Land of the Lenape, today known as Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York. Most recently he premiered XIV at Dixon Place in New York City in 2019. He recently was named the Keith Haring Fellow by the MacDowell in New Hampshire, and he is a Social Practice artist-in-residence at Abrons Arts Center in New York City. He teaches at the City University of New York’s College of Staten Island and is the Performance Director for Emergenyc, a program that explores the intersection between arts and activism. Following the premiere of his latest work In the Court of the Conqueror at Abrons Arts Center in March 2022, the piece will be presented at Su Teatro in Denver, Co. and the Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College.

Working Group Affiliations

Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project