Louise Harpman
New York University
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 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, 2018) and co-author (with Peder Anker, Mitchell Joachim) of Global Design: Elsewhere Envisioned (Prestel, 2014). She is a member of the Board of Directors of Open House New York and an Associate of the American Institute of Architects.
Carolina Salguero
Executive Director, PortSide New York
Carolina Salguero is the Founder and Executive Director of PortSide New York, which she founded in 2005 after a distinguished career as an international photojournalist and author. PortSide is an educational and advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the health of New York City’s working waterfront while also serving as a “living lab for better urban waterways.”
Ben Kubany
New York University
Ben Kubany is a Senior at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His concentration combines architecture and development studies, positing social and environmental justice as a central tenet of economic development and urban resilience. Ben is an Undergraduate Research Assistant at NYU Gallatin’s Urban Democracy Lab, where he focuses on community land stewardship, private development, and social housing. Ben worked previously at the Center for an Urban Future (CUF), a NYC based economic policy think tank, where he focused on workforce development, public space, and New York City’s post-pandemic recovery. Prior to working at CUF, Ben was an intern on the Urban Planning team at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Karen Holmberg
New York University
Karen Holmberg, Ph.D., teaches environmental science at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and is a founding director of openEARTHstudio. 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 with the Campi Flegrei volcano in southern Italy combines physics-based prediction of volcanic unrest and drama in a collaborative “Theatre of Urgency” to convey scientific conception of risk. She is co-director of the New York Virtual Volcano Observatory on Governors Island. Holmberg is the Scientific Director of WetLab, an art-science living laboratory and teaching gallery sponsored by NYU Gallatin.
Victoria Rosner
New York University
Victoria Rosner is the Dean of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her scholarship focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century English literature, with a special interest in modernism across diverse forms of cultural production, especially literature, architecture, and design. Her most recent book is Machines for Living: Modernism and Domestic Life (Oxford University Press, 2020). She is also the author of Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2005), and has edited two volumes, The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (Columbia University Press, 2012; with Geraldine Pratt). She is a founding co-editor of the web-based archive Pioneering Women of American Architecture, a project that recovers the histories of US women architects born before 1940. Beginning in 2018, Rosner also co-directed Frontline Nurses: Leaders in Pandemic Response, an oral history project on the role of nurses and midwives in pandemic outbreaks.
Alicia Degener
Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition
Alicia Degener is a practicing artist who currently serves as President of the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, BWAC, is a non-profit, artist-run organization that supports Brooklyn artists with studio and exhibition space. BWAC’s mission is to assist emerging artists in advancing their careers and to present contemporary art in an easily accessible format.
Ben Bischoff
MADE
Ben Bischoff is the Principal of MADE, a practice that integrates architecture, design, fabrication, and construction. Bischoff is a registered architect and contractor in New York. He co-founded MADE in 2002 and this year marks the firm’s 20th anniversary in the William Beard and Robinson Stores.
Tim Gilman-Sevcik
RETI Center BlueCity
Tim Gilman-Sevcik, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the RETI Center, a nonprofit organization whose programs prioritize environmental justice and innovative design for coastal communities. Gilman-Sevcik is an interdisciplinary artist, creative director, educator, and communications professional who also teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Andrea Parker
Executive Director, Gowanus Canal Conservancy
Andrea Parker is the Executive Director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy where she has been instrumental in developing innovative initiatives including the Salt Lot, the Gowanus Tree Network, and the Gowanus Lowlands Master Plan. Trained as a landscape architect, Parker also teaches at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York.
Arvind Sindhwani
Director of Land Use & Community Advocate
Council Member Lincoln Restler, District 33
Arvind Sindhwani is the Director of Land Use & Community Advocate for New York City Council member Lincoln Restler (District 33). He is an urban planner specializing in zoning, land use, and housing policy, with a keen interest in tackling the city’s housing affordability crisis. Sindhwani holds a Master of Urban Planning degree from New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Owen Foote
Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club
Owen Foote is a founding member of the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club. Trained as an architect and urban planner, for over two decades, he has advocated for shoreline and waterway use and cleanup of Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.
Eymund Diegel
Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club
Eymund Diegel is an urban planner, ecologist, and mapmaker. With extensive watershed planning experience, he worked on New York City’s Stormwater Management Bluebelt Plan, Flood Mitigation and Watershed Plans mapping historical wetlands, streams, and landscape changes. As a GIS expert with a special interest in historic map georeferencing (that is, the “rubber stretching” of old maps to match current conditions), he produces maps that track historic landscape changes including “ghost streams” and Lenni-Lenape footpaths.
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.”
The Urban Democracy Lab (UDL) at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study promotes critical, creative, just, and sustainable forms of urbanism primarily through practice-based research. UDL’s work focuses on new forms of urban democracy, whether in governance, activism, self-management, or creative production.
UDL sponsors student fellowships and maintains an active roster of visiting scholars from around the globe. Central to the mission of the UDL is its active connection to community partners and organizations that help shape the work and to whom the Urban Democracy Lab remains accountable.