Louise Harpman
Louise Harpman is Associate Professor at NYU Gallatin and the founder and principal of Louise Harpman__PROJECTS, a firm that focuses on architectural design, design research, and urban design. Before founding PROJECTS, she was a principal for 20 years in the architecture and design firm Specht Harpman, which received multiple Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects. The firm’s designs were featured at the Museum of Modern Art, the Municipal Art Society, the Van Alen Institute, and in gallery shows in the US and UK. Harpman has taught at the Yale School of Architecture, the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Architecture and Planning. She also teaches graduate courses in urban design at the Wagner School where she is an associated faculty member.
Michael Ryan
Michael Ryan graduated from NYU Gallatin in 2014 with a concentration in “The Politics and Design of Public Space”. Since then Michael has managed public events and community engagement for The Municipal Art Society of New York, a 125 year-old civic organization that fights for a more livable New York through urban planning, design and historic preservation. Currently, Michael manages global partnerships for the TEDx program at TED, the nonprofit media organization famous for TED Talks. This past summer, he was featured in The New York Times for organizing an annual community walk celebrating historic gay bars and also traveled with The National Trust for Historic Preservation to help preserve historic Route 66. For more about old buildings and gay bars follow @michaeljamesryan.
Rebecca Amato
Rebecca Amato is Associate Director of the Urban Democracy Lab and a historian whose work focuses on the intersections between cities, space, place, and memory. She holds a PhD in United States History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is adapting her dissertation research into a manuscript that examines the layered relationships between heritage preservation and neighborhood change. She has been a staff member and consultant at a variety of history institutions in New York, including the Brooklyn Historical Society, the American Social History Project, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Her writing has appeared in Radical History Review, City Courant, Cineaste, and New York magazine.
Meredith L. Theeman
Meredith L. Theeman is a social scientist with a Ph.D. in Environmental Psychology. Her research and teaching interests include psychology, public health, epidemiology, mental health, place and behavior, light exposure, and health narratives. Currently, she is working with and presenting data on seasonally-related mood and behavior change. As a higher education administrator, she is interested in instructional technology and institutional research.
A.B. Huber
A. B. Huber’s teaching and research interests include critical theory, aesthetics and politics, and the literature and visual culture of modernity. Much of her current work is focused on the force and form of critique in times of war. She is revising a manuscript that focuses on archival materials from the US Strategic Bombing Survey of 1945. This project considers how the American tactical and political use of terror against civilians in Japan and Germany—where “shock and awe” was first named and tested—raises a number of timely questions about fear and the rhetorical deployment of “security” in US politics and policies. She is also at work on a commissioned piece on violence and the visual with the artist Mary Walling Blackburn: “Thinking through Images,” which will appear in Triple Canopy. Huber taught and took part in the Radical Citizenship Tutorials on Angel Island in San Francisco and Governors Island in New York in the summer of 2010. In the fall of 2010, she was at the University of California Berkeley on a Mellon Fellowship in Critical Theory.
Joshua Shirkey
Joshua Shirkey is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art. He received his A.B. in Fine Arts from Harvard University, and is completing his Ph.D. at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. His dissertation, “Moving Pictures: Art and Dance in New York, 1959-1979” examines the historical and conceptual relationships between visual art and dance practices in the 1960s. His research and teaching interests include performance, aesthetic philosophy, feminist and queer theory, art markets and globalization, and censorship. He previously served as an academic adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences, and has taught art history courses in CAS, Steinhardt, and at SUNY Purchase. Prior to NYU, he was assistant curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was a critical studies fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Michael Dinwiddie
Michael D. Dinwiddie (GAL BA ’80, TSOA MFA ’83)’s teaching interests include cultural studies, African American theater history, dramatic writing, filmmaking and ragtime music. A dramatist whose works have been produced in New York, regional, and educational theater, he has been playwright-in-residence at Michigan State University and St. Louis University and taught writing courses at the College of New Rochelle, Florida A&M University, SUNY Stony Brook, California State University at San Bernardino, and Universidad de Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He spent a year at Touchstone Pictures as a Walt Disney Fellow and worked as a staff writer on ABC-TV’s Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper. He was awarded a 1995 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting. Professor Dinwiddie received a 2005 NYU Distinguished Teaching Award in recognition that one of NYU’s primary institutional priorities, along with research, is exceptional teaching inside and outside of the classroom setting. In 2015, he was awarded a team-teaching grant from NYU Humanities Initiative for the course Movements for Justice and Rights: Let Them Lead the Way. His course offerings include Migration and American Culture; Dramatizing History I and II; Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip-Hop; James Reese Europe and American Music; Sissle, Blake and the Minstrel Tradition; Guerrilla Screenwriting; Motown Matrix: Race, Gender and Class Identity in “The Sound of Young America;” and the study-abroad course Buenos Aires: In and of the City. For the fall 2015 semester, he is teaching the course “Cultural Memory and Resistance” at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Amanda Davis
Amanda Davis has overseen the survey and documentation initiatives for the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project since its founding in 2015. In this role, she also authored the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Caffe Cino, the pioneering 1960s Off-Off-Broadway and gay theater venue. At the 2017 National Trust for Historic Preservation conference in Chicago, she spoke on two panels about the importance of recognizing LGBT history and the ways in which new technology can help connect the public with underrepresented histories. In 2018, she was named to the National Trust’s inaugural “40 Under 40: People Saving Places” list in recognition of her work to help tell America’s full history. Previously, Amanda served as the Director of Preservation and Research at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, an architectural historian/preservation planner at Architectural Resources Group in Los Angeles, and a researcher/surveyor at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. Of Jewish and Colombian ancestries, she holds a BA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia and an MS in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.
Brennan O’Rourke
Brennan O’Rourke is a trans-femme, queer, theatre practitioner, poet, costume designer and arts educator fascinated by theatre and its relationship to communities’ histories and memories in efforts to imagine justice. Recently, Brennan was a performing arts producer for the Gallatin Arts Festival and co-created the Gallatin Mental Health Arts Festival. Brennan’s poetry, which explores sexual violence and queerness, was performed at the Nasty Women Unite Fest 2018 and recently published in Jejune Magazine. They spoke at the Gallatin Senior Symposium about embodied memory and social activism. Brennan is pursuing an MA in Applied Theatre at CUNY SPS.
Urban Democracy Lab
Founded in January of 2014, the Urban Democracy Lab is an initiative of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University whose objective is to provide a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures. As a “lab,” we invite experimentation, provisional conclusions, and fresh approaches to entrenched urban problems. To ensure broad thinking, we welcome partnerships that bridge traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries.