Louise Harpman
Louise Harpman is a Professor of architecture, urban design, and sustainability at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an associated faculty member of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is a founding director of Global Design NYU and openEARTHstudio, two design and ecology-oriented working groups within Gallatin. Through her private practice, Louise Harpman__PROJECTS, she leads or joins design and research teams that focus on net zero energy buildings, micro unit dwellings, and urban streetscapes. Harpman is the co-author (with Scott Specht) of Coffee Lids (Princeton Architectural Press) and co-author (with Peder Anker, Mitchell Joachim) of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel). She is a member of the Board of Directors of Open House New York and an associate member of the American Institute of Architects.
Eugenia Kisin
Eugenia Kisin, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of art and society at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her research and teaching on Indigenous contemporary art foregrounds decolonization and environmental justice in the United States and Canada. Kisin’s forthcoming book, Aesthetics of Repair, considers art’s role in contexts of reparation and transitional justice. A visual anthropologist by training, she is editor of film and exhibition reviews at Visual Anthropology Review, and teaches interdisciplinary “slow looking” methods in art history and cultural anthropology. She is co-director of A Museum for Future Fossils, a transnational field school for curating and education on environmental issues in collaboration with community knowledge holders. Kisin is a co-director of WetLab, an art-science collective and curatorial laboratory.
Karen Holmberg
Karen Holmberg, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of environmental science at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She is a volcanologist and archaeologist interested in the creative conveyance of environmental knowledge and narratives of deep time, prehistory, and modern science. She is the Principal Investigator of a transdisciplinary project in Patagonia, working with massive coastline transformations due to glacial retreat, sea-level rise, and volcanic eruptions. She is on the Board of Directors for The Chaiten Site Museum in Chile. Her fieldwork near Naples, Italy, is on physics-based prediction of volcanic unrest and the use of the arts to convey scientific conception of risk. She is co-director of the New York Virtual Volcano Observatory on Governors Island. Holmberg is a Research Scientist and co-director of WetLab, an art-science collective and curatorial laboratory.
KC Trommer
Poet and essayist KC Trommer, MFA, is the author of the award-winning poetry collection We Call Them Beautiful, (Diode Editions, 2019) and The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the bi-monthly Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights. A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been awarded grants and fellowships from the the Academy of American Poets, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Center for Book Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Queens Council on the Arts, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Prague Summer Program. In 2021, she is poet in residence through Works on Water on Governors Island and was a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist-in-residence on Governors Island through LMCC’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program. Since 2018, she has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein to create a song cycle based on poems from her first collection. She is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.
Samuel G. White, FAIA
Samuel White, a great-grandson of Stanford White, is a consulting partner at PBDW Architects in New York City. As a practicing architect with an extensive portfolio of preservation and adaptive reuse projects as well as a deep interest in American residential architecture, he brings a unique perspective to the discussion of Stanford White’s designs. A Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a National Academician, he is a trustee of Green-Wood Cemetery and the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, a member of the Advisory Council of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and chair of the Committee to Save Gould Memorial Library, the most significant surviving institutional building by Stanford White. From 2000 to 2012 he was an adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University. He is the author of Stanford White in Detail (Monacelli Press); The Houses of McKim, Mead & White (Rizzoli); McKim, Mead & White: The Masterworks (Rizzoli); Stanford White: Architect; and Nice House (Monacelli Press).
Daniel Kaufman
Daniel Kaufman is the Co-Founder and a Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) whose goal is to bring together linguists with immigrant and Indigenous communities in NYC who speak endangered languages. He obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell University in 2010 with a specialization in the Austronesian languages of island Southeast Asia. Kaufman is an Assistant Professor at Queens College and also co-edits Oceanic Linguistics, a journal devoted to the study of the indigenous languages of the Oceanic region and Island Southeast Asia.
Ross Perlin
Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. He is a Co-Director of the Endangered Language Alliance, where for the last 7 years he has overseen research projects focused on mapmaking, documentation, policy, and public programming for urban linguistic diversity. Himalayan languages are a focus — for his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Bern, Ross created a trilingual dictionary, a corpus of recordings, and a descriptive grammar of Trung, an endangered language of southwest China, based on three years of fieldwork. He has also written on language, culture, and politics for The New York Times, The Guardian, and Harper’s. His book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little the Brave New Economy (Verso), focuses on unpaid work and youth economics. He teaches linguistics at Columbia University.
Marifer Sanchez
Marifer Sanchez is a rising senior at the New York Harbor School. At school, most of her time is spent in the marine biology lab researching polyethylene degradation by bacterial strains. Her research has led to 1st and 2nd place victories at the annual NYHS Marine Biology Symposium. She is student council president and has fought hard to amplify student voices. Marifer plans to enroll in a 4 year college where she will major in public health.
Merritt Birnbaum
Merritt Birnbaum is the Executive Director of The Friends of Governors Island.
Sarah Krautheim
Sarah Krautheim is the Vice President for Public Affairs at The Trust for Governors Island.
openEARTHstudio
openEARTHstudio is an initiative of three faculty members—Louise Harpman, Karen Holmberg, Eugenia Kisin—at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. openEARTHstudio engages scholars, students, artists and activists dedicated to using their practices to address the current climate crisis. openEARTHstudio believes that many forms of public engagement, such as installations, films, and performance, can stimulate a more robust and informed public discourse about the precarity of our shared planet.
Gallatin WetLab
Gallatin WetLab is an initiative of two faculty members—Karen Holmberg and Eugenia Kisin—at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. The website introduces the WetLab this way: “Coastal cities, due to the very real threat of sea-level rise, are at the heart of many ecological crises and environmental justice movements. As we grapple with uneven vulnerabilities and resilience in our communities, art-science collaborations are emerging as a leading framework for imagining different kinds of political and ecological relationships in our changing world. The Gallatin WetLab is a new initiative for experimental public-facing teaching and learning across the environmental arts and sciences.”
Endangered Language Alliance
Founded in 2010, the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) is a non-profit dedicated to documenting and supporting linguistic diversity and endangered languages in New York City and beyond. ELA’s unique network of researchers, activists, and students documents the speech, stories, and songs of immigrant, refugee, and diaspora communities, bringing it to a wider audience. ELA’s work has been recognized by The New York Times, the BBC, NPR, CNN, and The New Yorker. Their interactive map of New York City’s languages is here: ELA Interactive Language Map
On Governors Island, the Endangered Language Alliance is hosting a hybrid residency/event/exhibit space featuring two exhibits: The Migration Codex by Cinthya Santos-Briones, and Mother Tongues: Endangered Languages in NYC and Beyond by Yuri Marder in collaboration with ELA, with videography by Donnetta Bishop-Johnson.
Works on Water / WOWHAUS
The Works on Water Studio Residency provides an incubator space for diverse investigations of water in the urban environment. Works on Water, in partnership with Underwater New York, has brought together scientists, policy-makers, and visual, performance-based and literary artists working on, in and with the water since 2018. Through open studios, performances, monthly conversations, and other exhibitions of work in progress, WoW has invited institutions, organizations, and the public into a dialogue about the emerging field of Water Art.
Harvestworks Art and Technology Program on Governors Island
Harvestworks Art and Technology Program on Governors Island is centered on art works created at the intersection of art and technology. It includes artists open studios, exhibitions of digital media art, public workshops and performances in our educational research facility in Nolan Park. Our goal is to provide exhibition opportunities to electronic media artists and also to educate the public about how artists use new and emerging technology for artistic expression.
Founded as a not-for-profit organization by artists in 1977, Harvestworks’ mission is to support the creation and presentation of art works achieved through the use of new and evolving technologies. We create an environment where artists can make work inspired and achieved by electronic media; provide a public context for the appreciation of new art; and bring together innovative practitioners from all branches of the arts collaborating in the use of electronic media. We assist with commissions and residencies, production services, education and information programs, and the presentation and distribution of their work.
NY Virtual Volcano Observatory
The New York Virtual Volcano Observatory on Governors Island recreates the experience of exploring a volcano within New York City. The Observatory seeks to make the experience of exploration accessible to a broad audience, to engage visitors of all ages in the excitement of geology, and to share the surprisingly important role New York City has played in volcano science. The mission of the organization is to promote collaboration between NYC-based scientists and artists, featuring real and virtual interactions with volcanic geology.