Kamal Badhey
Fellow, Urban Studies, University of London
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.
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
PhD Candidate, 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 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
Jordan Corine Cruz
Fellow, Photography, School of Visual Arts
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.
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
María José Contreras Lorenzini
Fellow, 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.
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
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project
George Emilio Sanchez
Fellow, Social Practice Artist, Abrons Arts Center
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.
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
Carina del Valle Schorske
Doctoral Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
Carina del Valle Schorske is a poet, translator, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. She is broadly interested in the history of psychoanalysis and other forms of psychic inquiry among artists and intellectuals of color in the Americas (Harlem, Mexico City, the Caribbean). She is currently at work on a project about Pamela Colman Smith, a turn-of-the-century Jamaican folklorist and the illustrator of the world's most widely used tarot deck.
Carina del Valle Schorske
Doctoral Candidate, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
photo credit: Mara Corsino, 2021
Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator with roots in Washington Heights. Her personal essays and cultural criticism have appeared in many venues including The Believer, Bookforum, The Common, the New Yorker online, and the New York Times Magazine, where she is a Contributing Writer. She won Gulf Coast's 2016 Prize for her translations of the Puerto Rican poet Marigloria Palma, and co-edited the bilingual anthology Puerto Rico en mi corazón to raise funds for hurricane relief. Her forthcoming book, The Other Island, was recently honored with the Whiting Foundation's Creative Nonfiction Grant. As a doctoral candidate in the English & Comparative Literature department, her research focuses on women's performance in the Americas from Zora Neale Hurston through Ana Mendieta. Find out more at www.carinadelvalleschorske.com.
Working Group Affiliations
Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Social Engagement Project