David Xu Borgonjon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His dissertation examines racialization and accumulation in the modern Chinese media of Indonesia. His Public Humanities project, Alternative Chinese School, in collaboration with artist and educator Mel Liu, is a pilot course in Mandarin-language learning for adult heritage speakers with a curricular emphasis on social justice.

Paola Cossermelli Messina is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in the early stages of her dissertation exploring music and diaspora in and between Lebanon and Brazil. She holds a B.A. in Music and Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School, with a specialization in sound. Her Master's thesis on the oral histories of Iranian women musicians was awarded a Middle East Studies Association's Graduate Student Paper Prize in 2016. Her most recent thesis and project, an experimental ethnography on a jukebox in a lesbian bar, was presented at Harvard's 2021 Graduate Music Forum.

A sound designer and audio engineer by trade, she has worked in film and podcasts, and for the past 5 years has produced and edited the Arab Studies Institute's podcast الوضع. She teaches audio workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and, prior to pursuing her PhD, was the Project Manager for CUNY-Creative Arts Team's program Sound Thinking NYC, a free summer intensive for NYC high schoolers interested in careers in music production and audio engineering.

She has been a Mason Endowed Fellow (2020-21), and was awarded the 2021-22 Public Humanities Radio Play Fellowship by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. As a Radio Play fellow, she contributes her audio engineering and sound design experience to the No Place / La Makan project, a platform for Palestinian playwrights.

Andrei Guadarrama is a P.h.D. candidate in History at Columbia University. His research focuses on the political economy of urban infrastructure and the reproduction of inequality in modern cities. Andrei is interested in public humanities projects that address mobilities and housing justice.

His project, Mobilities and the City, will be an exhibition at the Museum of Mexico City. It will show the ways in which modern transportation has shaped urban space and daily lives. It will showcase, moreover, how Mexico City’s residents experience mobilities. Transportation is quickly reorganizing around discussions on inequality, congestion, health, and climate change. Then it is crucial to ruminate about the history of tramways and bicycles, buses and automobiles, subway, light trains, and horses in the twentieth century to spark discussions about the future. Questions that will drive the exhibition include: How did we build a city characterized by both automobile-dependency and the availability of several forms of transportation? How have transport accidents and violence influenced the ways we use public space? How could we recast transportation to address urban inequality and environmental challenges? What have been people’s responses and solutions to problems associated with daily mobilities?

Mobilities and the City will receive support from the Historical Archive of Mexico City, the National Archive, the Museum/Archive of Photography, and other public archives in Mexico City.

Bing Quek is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Education at Teachers College. Her research interests include ethics, feminist theory, issues of care and social reproduction, teacher well-being, and education policy. For her dissertation, she analyzes the caring experiences of U.S. public school teachers through an ethics of care so as to argue for wider and collective responsibility towards attending to the needs of teachers. Before TC, she was a high school teacher and facilitated professional development workshops for educators and school leaders in Singapore. She holds a BA in Biochemistry from Cambridge University.

As a Public Humanities fellow, Bing is undertaking a philosophically informed empirical project that partners Arts & Minds–a not-for-profit organization that brings persons with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) and their caregivers into museum spaces. Using ethnographic research methods and a framework anchored in the theories of care ethics and aesthetics, her project seeks to elucidate the moral and aesthetic significance of art-based experiences in promoting the flourishing of caregiving relationships.

A student in Columbia University’s Oral History Masters program, Bridget Bartolini is an oral historian and socially engaged artist who uses story-sharing to strengthen community connections. Inspired by her love for New York City, her belief in the power of storytelling as a tool for social justice, and her frustration with the lack of cultural programming in areas like her home neighborhood in Queens, Bridget launched the Five Boro Story Project in 2013 to produce storytelling events that bring New Yorkers together through sharing true stories and art inspired by our neighborhoods. Her creative process involves working with community members, organizers, activists, and artists to collaboratively create tributes to the people and places that make up our homes.

With her project, titled 34th Avenue Oral History, Bridget is diving deeper into storytelling and oral history work that builds community on the neighborhood level. The 34th Avenue Open Street closes to vehicular traffic each morning, allowing local residents to jog, stroll, ride bikes, and socialize while maintaining physical distance, without fear of cars. The Open Street is also the site of a battle over the future of urban streets. 34th Avenue Oral History is documenting the story of this remarkable street as it unfolds, through the stories of community members who have reshaped their lives around the Open Street. The project website holds multimodal portraits that combine written word, audio, and photography to tell the story of 34th Avenue, the story of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the story of a neighborhood. Bridget is also organizing free public events on 34th Avenue that facilitate dialogue, strengthen community, and engage the public with the archive.

Bridget's local/community partners in this project are Queens Memory, 34th Avenue Open Streets Coalition, and photographer Patrick Chang.

Linda Aristondo is a 2nd year Masters of Divinity student at Union Theological Seminary at Columbia. She is a fiercely proud Latina New Yorker and Harvard-educated attorney involved in restorative legal work. Her contribution to the Zip Code Memory Project uplifts justice for the brown and black bodies that perished due to systemic racism. Linda believes that the deceased should be publicly and appropriately acknowledged with nuanced complexity, sensitivity, and kindness, attentive to the individuals' memories.

Currently, Linda holds two fellowships that demonstrate her engagement work in public forums. The Pandemic and Religion In the Digital Place Fellowship is a multimedia project on religion during the COVID-19 pandemic used to curate a diversity of media-rich spaces. The Virus, Violence, and Narrative Fellowship captures marginalized persons' narratives and their response to the injustices experienced through COVID-19 and expressed through Harlem's Black Lives Matter movement. The video and photographic project will be displayed publicly in local worship houses, community centers, and university forums at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary, among other spaces.

Mia Florin-Sefton is a PhD candidate and University Writing instructor at Columbia University, where she works on 20th and 21st literatures and culture, with a particular interest in social reproduction theory and feminist science studies. Her dissertation examines how narratives of genealogical succession offer opportunities for examining and historicizing the relationships between legal, economic and scientific accounts of inheritance, hereditary and property.

Mia's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Literature and Medicine and Modernism/Modernity Print +, and she is a regular writer for the medical humanities journal Synapsis. Mia is proud to be working on the Zip Code Memory project during the 2021-22 academic year.

Margaret Banks is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She studies coming-of-age narratives of Black girls to explore their transgression and modes of being in an anti-Black world. Prior to doctoral study she taught middle school humanities, and currently teaches high school humanities courses through Columbia’s Double Discovery Center. As a teacher, she seeks to connect the world-making strategies she encounters in her literary research to the strategies Black girls already generate and use in their everyday lives. She holds a BA in English from Amherst College and a MA in Education from Stanford Graduate School of Education.

Her public humanities project, the “Unbecoming Me Summer Camp,” is a program for Black girls to unravel and (re)imagine constructions of Black girlhood thorough creative practice. Emulating literary characters like Sula and Nel from Toni Morrison’s Sula, the campers will use artistic media to explore transgressive girlhood in community with one another.

Tehya is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and currently works with the New York State Psychiatric Institute in the Division of Behavioral Health Services and Policy Research. She completed her Master of Public Health degree within the Population and Family Health Department, with a certificate in Population Mental Health. She is most passionate about addressing mental health inequities and promoting holistic wellness in communities of color both domestically and abroad.

In an effort to raise awareness about health inequities, Tehya has developed the "DNA" (Diaspora Named and Archived) program. DNA is a storytelling project that will guide high schoolers as they interview older family members about their social and medical history, eventually developing visual and audio archival material. DNA’s primary goal is to facilitate intergenerational communication of familial medical history in Black and Latino/x groups that traditionally lack this valuable information. DNA also aims to promote the archival material on social media platforms to encourage others to engage in similar conversations within their families.

Before attending Columbia University, Tehya worked with a number of non-profit organizations in New York City to address community-level needs and support social entrepreneurship. Tehya graduated cum laude from Kenyon College with a major in Psychology, a minor in Neuroscience, and a focus in public health and research.

Julián Sánchez González is a researcher and essayist currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Columbia University. His research focuses on the relationship between artistic and spiritual practices in the modern and contemporary eras, particularly in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Previously, Sánchez pursued an MA in Art History at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, a double BA in History and Political Science at the Universidad de los Andes, and served as Coordinator of the Education Department at the Museos del Banco de la República in Bogotá. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, and the Fundación Colfuturo. His writing has been published by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Oxford Art Online, the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, the Universidad Tres de Febrero, and Artsy, among others.

As a SOF/Heyman Center Public Humanities Graduate Student Fellow, Julián is looking forward to working on a project that researches and renders visible the underlying, connective threads of selected Amerindian, Neo-pagan, and Afro-Diasporic spiritualities practiced in northern Manhattan. Following Gloria Anzaldúa's widespread usage of the term "Spiritual Activism," this initiative seeks to engage with the material and non-material cultures of these spiritual systems, in order to gain a deeper understanding of their contributions to social and community growth at the local level. In stressing the nature-based and polytheistic cosmogonies of their practitioners, this project aims to foreground the importance of environmental sustainability, gender and sexual parity, and racial justice operating at the root of these traditionally marginalized beliefs. The result from this year-long endeavor will attempt to create a community-based, interspiritual public conversation as an agora for collective healing and learning.

Amanda Martin-Hardin is a History Ph.D. student studying how race and racism impact access to the outdoors in the 20th century United States. More specifically, she researches how many U.S. outdoor landscapes became known as predominantly white spaces, as well as how people of color resisted their exclusion from these spaces. For more information on her scholarly work, you can visit Amanda’s website.

Her public humanities project, Everyday Environmentalism, is a podcast that tells past and present stories about "urban nature" in New York City. Amanda and her co-hosts interview current activists in tandem with environmental historians to produce a long history of the ways ordinary New Yorkers have experienced the urban outdoors and created more sustainable relationships with their environment.

Everyday Environmentalism interrogates questions like: Who do we consider an environmentalist? Can urban spaces be sites of environmental activism? Is it true that the environmental movement has historically been mostly white and wealthy? Who are the animal inhabitants of New York City? How can we forge more sustainable relationships with the environment in our own neighborhoods and communities?

Kevin Windhauser is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, writing on the relationship between Renaissance literature and the development of library systems in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in Philology and Journal of Prison Education and Research. His project, Building Research Libraries in New York Prisons, aims to partner with prison education programs and academic libraries to increase the availability of textbooks, academic reference texts, critical anthologies, and select core texts in historiography, literary criticism, and other humanities disciplines in prisons where humanities courses were being offered. While the number of humanities and arts courses offered in New York prisons has ballooned over the last decade, prison libraries have not kept pace with the needs of a growing number of incarcerated students. Current programs for prison library development have done an admirable job of providing incarcerated individuals with valuable reading material, but they have not focused on developing academic resources. This lack of resources is more than an inconvenience--it threatens to limit the humanities and social science course offerings that prison education can provide. Further, this project engages potential book donors ranging from academic presses to independent bookstores to faculty groups, and thereby expands public awareness of humanities teaching in New York prisons and builds public support. By establishing sustainable academic library resources in New York's prisons, this project hopes to create the infrastructure necessary to support advanced prison teaching for decades to come.