Students

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2024 fellows

Carlene Hunte-Nelson

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

A native of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Carlene transferred to NYU Gallatin from CUNY BMCC, where she majored in Small Business Entrepreneurship. She contributed to the BMCC community as a supplementary instructor, student mentor, and advocated for students as President of the Student Government. Carlene apprenticed for a year with the Equity Swaps team at JPMorgan Chase, and recently completed the 2023 cohort of New Leadership New York through the Center for Women in Government and Civil Society. She is currently the Policy Intern with the Deputy Mayor for Housing, Economic Development and Workforce at New York City Hall. At Gallatin, Carlene’s studies public policy, politics and the Caribbean region, and has undertaken research into the social impact of Micro-mobility technologies. As a Gallatin Guide Scholar, Carlene hopes to take her first steps towards creating a research center focused on human rights and economic sustainability issues confronting Caribbean nations.

Em Ingram

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

I am a non-binary, environmentally and politically focused student from the Bay Area, California. I’m in my junior year at New York University, pursuing a Bachelor of Arts at Gallatin. In my individualized and interdisciplinary school at NYU, I’ve designed my studies around exploring anthropogenic climate change and narratives of divorce between humans and nature. I’m a staff reporter for the alternative NYU news radio show The Rundown at WNYU 89.1 FM and a staff member of NYU Gallatin’s Embodied Magazine. I also have work featured in the Fall 2023 Gallatin ST(E)AM Zine. My passions for social justice, writing, the arts, and fashion drive the wide variety of topics I cover journalistically. While most of my formal training is in written and audio storytelling, I have always been interested in photography and video production, creating content for my personal social media accounts.

Sajini Kodituwakku

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

Sajini Kodituwakku is a junior in Gallatin, where her concentration focuses on ways to bring awareness to social issues, conflicts in human rights, and social policies. Through combining an individualized study across the social sciences, with coursework in media, culture, and communication, she is working to produce various media texts that can be used to advocate and educate about social problems. Currently, her passion for community activism and social change has led her to become involved in the Petey Greene Program at NYU, where she helped host a book drive aimed at bringing educational resources to incarcerated people. She also serves as the President of the Social Justice Art Project, an organization centered on artistic advocacy. As she continues her studies, she is planning to further develop her concentration by partaking in hands-on work with community-based organizations.

Abigayle Larrier

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

I am a third-year at The Gallatin School of Individualized Study studying history and sociology and concentrating in American Hegemony. I currently work in a 7th grade humanities classroom and tutor two 10th graders with the non-profit organization Publicolor. I love to cook, read, spend time with my friends and family. I am honored to be a Gallatin Global Fellow with the Urban Democracy Lab.

Katie Nash

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

Katie Nash is a Gallatin student studying the intersects of Public Policy, Labor Studies, and Ethics. An avid writer, she focuses on exploring the impact of 20th century history and political thought on 21st praxis in both her academic work and plays. She enjoys researching the emerging green-labor coalition and ultimately strives to pursue a PhD focused on comparative US/UK Labor Studies. She is a Richie Jackson LGBTQ+ Service Fellow at GMHC and a member of Gallatin’s Americas Scholars Honors Program. Additionally, she was a Research Intern with the United Farm Workers, a Research Assistant at Anglia Ruskin University’s Veterans and Families Institute on a project working to prevent and understand military sexual violence, and a Global Equity Fellow at NYU London where she researched the city’s Latino community. In her free time, she can be found searching for cheap theater tickets and cheering on her beloved Los Angeles Kings and Dodgers.

Joy Robinson

Gallatin School of Individualized Study Class of 2025

Joy Robinson (they/she) is a lifelong student of urban design, of the land we occupy, and of the food that nourishes us. Currently, she embodies this through her studies at NYU Gallatin, concentrating on urban studies and food systems analysis. A student of ecology turned city nerd, Joy focuses on the interplay between food access and community collectivizing, namely resource sharing and advocacy through community gardens and other urban growing spaces. Her time spent in gardens deeply informs her academic, professional, and personal pursuits and intends to continue exploring gardens as a center of resistance and means of self-determination, alongside their role in establishing equitable urban food networks. She holds participatory action and trust-first methodologies close in her research practice. Joy can be found biking along Cortelyou Ave in Flatbush and is currently dipping her toe into urban foraging, with mixed success.

Phia Teller

Wagner Graduate School of Public Service Class of 2025

Phia Teller is a junior at New York University studying Public Policy and Data Science. She is interested in creating effective, compassionate policy to combat food insecurity and homelessness. Her most recent position was as a Student Director at Harvard Square Homeless Shelter during summer 2023. She has interned and volunteered at various non-profit organizations, including Artists in Exile Workshop, Emmaus House, Earth Celebrations, Reading Partners, and City Meals on Wheels.

Valerie Vargas

Silver School of Social Work Class of 2025

Valerie is a first-generation Mexican-American student majoring in Social Work and Public Policy with a minor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health studies at New York University. She enjoys working with youth and children through mentorship and guidance roles including a College and Career Lab Advisor and Summer Program Assistant at Harlem Children’s Zone. Studying away in Madrid and working as an English language tutor for teens, she has interests in equity globally and language accessibility impacts in the United States. With this in mind, she plans to pursue research in Spanish language accessibility and the challenges specifically associated with Latino communities and language assimilation.

Aaliyah Weathers

Graduate School of Arts & Science Class of 2025

Aaliyah Weathers is a first year graduate student in the Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement program. She has over five years of experience throughout the entertainment industry primarily working in film & television, music, and live events. She is now a multidisciplinary creative and educator with a focus on social progress. She explores mediums including creative & nonfiction writing, visual art, museum curation, archival work, and documentary & narrative filmmaking. Broadly her research interests span topics at the intersection of Africana studies, women & gender studies, the arts, and social justice.

2023 fellows

Ama Akoto

Ama Akoto is a Black feminist student studying anthropology at NYU Gallatin. Born and raised in Washington, DC, Ama holds a deep-seated love for Chocolate City and the communities within. She is also an auntie, sister, friend, and avid reader. Ama pursues her academic interests with the hope of continuing to fight against unjust systems and prioritizing the narratives of communities facing inequality and injustice.

Ama’s academic research has focused on marginalized and minority populations in urban spaces, with a particular focus on African Americans in Washington, DC. Her experience as someone who recognizes inequity at home and beyond informs her research about and relationships with at-risk communities by stressing the importance of an empathetic, comprehensive, and people-based approach. Through her personal, academic, and professional endeavors, Ama centralizes family and community in her efforts to analyze and decry social injustice and disparity.

Manal Bawazir

Manal is a master of Urban Planning student at NYU Wagner, specializing in Urban Analytics. Her approaches to urban planning are informed by her lived experiences growing up in Jeddah and moving to New York City for her studies. Living in different yet similarly complex urban landscapes has honed her interdisciplinary methodology. She is interested in questions about place, belonging, and community, and wants to use her research skills to help advance place-based and grassroots methods of planning and community empowerment. Manal is a member of the Paterson Mapping Project (PMP), a collective of researchers, activists, and students whose work seeks to collect and democratize data on housing and policing. Her main work with the collective involves researching and employing counter-narratives to inform community-centered practices in Paterson, New Jersey. As of 2023, Manal has been working on a comparable research project on the city of Jeddah.

Nathan Cheng

Nathan is a current student at Gallatin concentrating in global economics and environmental science with a focus on urban sustainability. He is most interested in how conglomerates can balance profit making with environmental preservation on a small scale, specifically within communities that bear the cost of company development. As a Fellow, he will investigate the ways in which urban economies, environments, and societies are interconnected via local involvement in the community.

Sophia George

My name is Sophia, and I am a first-year grad student in the EX: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement Master’s program at New York University. I am a 2023 Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice. I am interested in studying homelessness, affordable housing, space, and place through a sociological lens. During my undergraduate career, I worked as a research assistant with a local CBO, Neighbors in Need, to better understand the barriers to housing the homeless. My work with Neighbors in Need motivated me to continue studying how this vulnerable population is impacted daily and the community-based changes made to protect those facing displacement. Having taken an urban sociology and a public humanities course this year, my coursework has focused on the different uses of space, community-based efforts, and local policy practices which is what attracted me to the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco). I am excited to work with them this summer in the hopes of expanding my understanding of community-based efforts for those facing displacement.

Soph Moore

Soph Moore is interested in the way that identity is constructed in the United States in urban spaces, particularly in regards to racially ambiguous ethnic minorities and their relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Her current research focuses on Armenian American communities, especially descendents of the Western Armenian diaspora. Her work investigates how their stories of shared histories and futures inform their identities and shape their relationship to trauma, privilege, and the “homeland.” She is currently engaged in an ethnographic project connecting interviews with Armenians from both Yerevan and New York City. In the NYU Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement (XE) department, her methodology has centered around qualitative sociology. Soph received her bachelor’s from UC Berkeley where she majored in English Literature and Gender and Women’s Studies.

Mychal Pagan

Mychal Pagan is an award winning artist-scholar, creative writer, and community-based researcher who utilizes ethnography, oral history, and photojournalism to inform his documentary filmmaking practice. Mychal is passionate about bringing the power of storytelling back to his community for those who are too often unable to harness the power of their own narratives. He was awarded grants by the Urban Humanities Research Fund to co-produce, co-direct and co-edit two pieces — a short documentary series about the financial costs of incarceration as well as another short documentary about carcerality, debt, and car ownership. Mychal has also curated media projects that shed light on post-release experiences for organizations such as the Thrive For Life Prison Project and the Prison Education Program. Mychal’s work has been published in outlets such as The Gallatin Review, Confluence, Fire in the Lake, Missives, and The New York Times. His photo essay “Public Transit” was showcased at NYU School of Law’s gallery. Mychal is currently studying visual sociology, narrative design, and filmmaking at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where he is a member of the Dean’s Honor Society. Mychal’s ultimate goal is to become an renowned scholar and documentary filmmaker known for research-driven storytelling and impact across BIPOC communities.

Dee Perry

Dee Perry (she/they) is a first-year graduate student in Steinhardt’s Environmental Conservation Education MA program. She spent ten years as an informal science educator in the Bay Area, California. There, they developed professional learning structures while leading a team of equity-focused early career educators. It was a joy. With that experience, she brings both the practice and theory of critical pedagogy to everything she does. A student once again, their research focuses on democratic community education toward climate change justice and resilience in cities and their neighborhoods. She continues to develop her knowledge of ecology, social science, critical theory, and urban studies. They also love all kinds of related media, especially climate fiction and science fiction; they will talk to you about Octavia Butler all day. With her service dog at the lead, she continues to explore her new home of Los Sures, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Anthony Phillips

Anthony Phillips is an educator, advocate, and scholar. His interests are in gender, race, sexuality and social justice. As an undergraduate, he majored in sociology at Amherst College to understand the social factors affecting people of color. As a mellons mays undergraduate fellow, he constructed a capstone project to combat inequality. Following undergrad, he was a teacher, diversity instructor, and manager of the black students union in Litchfield CT. He taught and developed his own curriculum with a concentration on African American history. He also served as a liaison between students and faculty in order to meet the needs of students of color on a predominantly white campus. As he engaged with his students and curriculum, he developed an even stronger interest in the study of blackness. For Anthony, the interdisciplinary nature and malleability of blackness has the condition of possibility to transform society.

2022 fellows

Micaela Suminski 

Micaela Suminski is a first-year graduate student at Gallatin, the Graduate Assistant of STAC, and a proud member of UAW Local 2110. At Gallatin, she is studying the intersection of Critical Disaster Studies with place-based documentary storytelling. Micaela holds a BA in Urban Studies, a minor in African and African American Studies, and honors in Education from Stanford University. Prior to Gallatin, Micaela worked for 4 years in Washington, D.C., where her side projects included hosting bar trivia every Tuesday night, religiously watching Sixers games, and starting an independent city planning publication called Place magazine. Her favorite filmmakers are Bong Joon Ho and Agnès Varda, and her favorite band is the Grateful Dead, whom she most often listens to while biking around the city on her old blue Ross steel frame road bike.

Tsamara Alatas

Tsamara Amany Alatas is a young Indonesian politician who previously served as Vice-Chairwoman of the Indonesian Solidarity Party (2017-2021). As a 19-year-old student, Tsamara argued in front of Indonesia’s constitutional court for fairness and equality for independent political candidates. In 2019, Tsamara ran for parliament as the youngest legislative candidate and received second most votes in Jakarta electoral district. Tsamara is now pursuing her Master’s degree in urban affairs at NYU Gallatin. Her primary academic interests are in uncovering the concept of urban modernity and the possibility to resist such a notion.

Luke Walsh

Luke Walsh (he/him) is a first-year Master of Urban Planning candidate at NYU Wagner with the intent to specialize in Urban Analytics. Originally from Pennsylvania, Luke attended the College of the Holy Cross where he received a B.A. in History with a minor in Writing. He is particularly interested in utilizing data analysis to tackle pressing urban issues such as displacement, socioeconomic inequity, tenant advocacy and zoning law, which is present in his work for NYU Wagner’s school newspaper, the Wagner Planner. Following undergrad, he served as a teacher in East Harlem, NY where he taught 10th and 12th grade History. While teaching, he developed a passion for urban planning as he witnessed the educational and housing inequities his students faced during the COVID-19 Pandemic. This summer, he is excited to work with the Kansas City Tenants Union, a group of organizers working on social housing proposals in Kansas City.

Christine Thomas 

Christine is a graduate student at Gallatin pursuing a concentration in Participatory Documentary Journalism. While serving in the Republic of Guinea with the Peace Corps as a maternal and child health educator, she first witnessed the influential nature of creative media in conveying harsh realities and advocating for their alteration. She hopes to continue to hone her ability to visually capture and share the narratives of those affected by injustice, and use these skills to pursue advocacy-focused work for a global social justice or human rights focused organization one day. This summer, she will be working with Housing Justice for All to deconstruct and transform damaging media narratives around the housing crisis through a documentary-focused research project. 

Graciela Blandon

Graciela Blandon is a Senior at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Studies designing a concentration entitled “Class Struggle and Cultural Development.” She is interested in culture as an intervening force in class dynamics, especially along international borders and within diaspora communities. Previously, Graciela has organized with environmental and electoral community groups in her hometown of El Paso, TX, and has extended her work overseas with the Andalusian Association for Human Rights as a 2021 Gallatin Global fellow in Human Rights. As a Gallatin Global fellow in Urban Practice, she is excited to expand on her previous experiences and explore how urban residents navigate their social worlds. She is extremely grateful for the opportunity to further globalize her studies and add another dimension to her academic interests.

Angel Suero

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Rohan Lalla

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Claudia Azalde 

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Marina Carlstroem

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Michelle Lucero

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Eleni Retta

2021 fellows

Najah Aldridge

Born and raised in Queens, New York, Najah Aldridge is a rising senior at NYU’s College of Arts and Science. She is currently majoring in global public health and sociology with minors in dance and Spanish. Focusing on these fields, she aspires to create her own grassroots organization that promotes access to dance for all afro descendants. Across campus, she holds mentorship and executive positions in the Academic Achievement Program, Womxn of Excellence Strength and Tenacity, Afroseke, and NYU’s Black Women’s Health Collective. This year, she has been awarded for her services at Bridging the Gap for Our Youth and Ede Youth where she assisted the non profit organizations in providing resources for marginalized youth. Her collective experience in social research at NYU Steinhardt’s RISE lab and Instituto de Efectividad Clinica y Sanitaria in Argentina prepares her for the summer ahead as a fellow at The Clemente. There she will highlight the ways in which The Clemente effectively intertwines the arts and public health measures to cultivate, present, and preserve Puerto Rican / Latinx culture, in hopes to create a similar institution of her own.

Lau Guzmán

Lau is a junior at NYU Gallatin. She graduated from an international high school in Bogotá, Colombia in 2017, spent a year backpacking, and lived to tread the creaky Gallatin floorboards. Her concentration in political fictions studies how stories from literature, journalism, and pop culture dramatize, reflect, contradict, re-imagine, and undermine contemporary political ideas. Additionally, she is hoping to earn a minor in journalism and eventually hopes to make a living as a writer. Lau works as a communications assistant at Gallatin’s Office of Communications and served on the editorial boards of  the Literacy Review, the Gallatin Review, and Confluence.Through a grant from Gallatin’s Undergraduate Research Fund, Lau started Proyecto Venenco in the summer of 2019 whose aim was to compile, edit, translate, and post the stories of Venezuelan migrants living in Colombia online. Outside of Gallatin, Lau serves as the Communications Director for CIFC and as a staff writer for NYU Local where she writes everything from hard news to unhinged blogs. This summer, Lau is excited to be working with The Loisaida Center and hopes to learn more about the role of media in cultural preservation. 

Nosheen Hossain

Nosheen Hossain is a junior at Gallatin. Her concentration revolves around the fields of public policy and urban studies. Through her concentration, she’s most interested in looking at K-12 public education as infrastructure, and wants to explore how it can be used to build resilient networks and mobilize communities within the urban environment. Throughout the past two years, she’s worked in a third grade classroom at Ella Baker Elementary School through the NYU America Reads program. This experience sparked her interest in education and its relationship to the urban environment. During her sophomore year she continued her involvement in education by volunteering at a local primary school during a semester at NYU Prague. Currently, she is working as a student trainee at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. She is excited to be working with the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation this summer. She hopes to gain a better grasp of how housing and education programs interact with the urban environment of the south Bronx.

 Xixi Jiang

Xixi Jiang is a senior at Gallatin. Her concentration considers “legibility” of the city and the sociopolitical implications of visual and structural clarity, drawing primarily from fields of urban studies and comparative sociology. She has conducted research projects in New York and Beijing, both of which explore the ideologies of spaces and people’s collective ability to change their living environments. She is also interested in translation studies and hopes to develop her own translation projects between Chinese and English in the near future. Right now, she is the executive editor of Compass, Gallatin’s interdisciplinary research journal and a member of DCA (Dancer-Choreographer Alliance). Xixi is thrilled by the opportunity to work with Right To The City Alliance as a fellow in the upcoming summer. She hopes to contribute her labor to a cause dear to her heart and learn about organizing and advocacy first-hand from local community leaders.

Maggie Moss

Maggie Moss (she/they) is a first-year student at NYU Wagner, pursuing a Master’s of Urban Planning. She intends to specialize in urban analytics and to use her education to advocate for socioeconomic equality in urban space. At NYU, she is on the executive board of the Wagner Consulting Group and currently works as a graduate assistant to the Office of Student Services. After graduating from George Washington University with a B.S. in geology, Moss worked at a criminal defense law firm in Manhattan for two years. Her experience in law paired with her public service education allows her to work at the nexus of legal and professional advocacy. Moss volunteers her time as the Director of the Out for Undergrad Marketing Conference, which helps high-achieving LGBTQ+ students reach their full potential and promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across multiple industries. This summer, she is excited to work with ALIGN, an alliance of community and labor organizations united for a just and sustainable New York. 

Ama Sarpomaa

Ama is a sophomore at Gallatin studying politics, immigration, and media. Her studies explore the psychological impacts of politics and law on formerly colonized people, with a special emphasis on the African region. Germane to her concentration is the analysis of how immigrants navigate their subjectivity on lands that continually commodify their very existence. As a first-generation immigrant herself, she has seen first-hand the mental toll immigration and identity politics can have on a person’s psyche. During the pandemic, she co-managed an experimental community, The Garlic Project, with the goal of increasing public interaction on the website and social media platforms. This summer, she is excited to work with African Communities Together, and hopes to aid in the organization’s plight to enrich the lives of Africans both in the U.S and abroad. 

Mira Silveira

Mira Silveira is a third year student at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study. Her concentration focuses on prison policy and justice by looking at the social and cultural impacts of the prison industrial complex on politics and society, and how they may shape the future of punishment in the United States. She is also pursuing a minor in social and public policy through the NYU Wagner School. In the past, she has worked for Senator Gillibrand’s New York office as a casework intern, as an organizing fellow for the North Carolina Democratic Party, and in other positions pertaining to voter rights and advocacy. Her interests include learning more about community organizing, mutual aid, food and housing justice, decolonization, and sustainability. She can be found exploring New York City via Citi Bike or on foot, enjoying green spaces, learning how to use her film camera, and collaging. Silveira is looking forward to working with the Pratt Center for Community Development this summer.

Costanza Tremante

Costanza Tremante is a Master of Urban Planning candidate at NYU Wagner, specializing in international development planning. Costanza is originally from Venezuela and has lived in Miami most of her life. As an undergraduate, she studied sustainability and the built environment with minors in both urban planning and innovation. As an urban planning student, she is interested in neighborhoods, equity, and immigration. Her past research has focused on leveraging the effects of gentrification, especially for low-income communities, and to encourage discussions around rapid urban change and displacement. She currently works as a Graduate Assistant at the NYU Migration Network. As a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice, she will be working with Paisaje Transversal, an urban planning office in Madrid that emphasizes community engagement and develops innovative and transformative urban projects.

2020 fellows

Alina Sloan

Alina Sloan is currently a junior at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her concentration focuses on the social dimensions of environmental issues as well as climate narratives, primarily drawing upon the disciplines of environmental studies, sociology, urban studies, and the arts; additionally, Alina is pursuing a minor in Mandarin. Her more specific academic interests include how art, design, and literature influence and are influenced by our views towards the environment; how information concerning climate change is disseminated and discussed within various communities; how relationships between the environment, the state, and the people are manifested, particularly within urban settings; and how environmental issues can serve as a vehicle for establishing greater social and political change. Alina is also an artist and recently had one of her works that problematizes the relationship between socioeconomic and racial inequality within NYC displayed at the West Bund Art Center’s “FutureLab” exhibit in Shanghai as well as the Shanghai Maker Carnival. Outside of school, she also enjoys spending time playing guitar and bass in a band. This summer, Alina is excited to have the opportunity to be a fellow at ALIGN, an organization that works towards achieving economic, environmental, and racial justice in New York.

Lia Warner

Lia Warner is a junior at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her concentration focuses on United States labor history in the 20 and 21st centuries; critical urban studies, particularly of New York and Shanghai; and gender and radical history of modern China. She is also completing a minor degree in Chinese Language and is a member of the Dean’s Honor Society. Lia hopes to contribute to working-class movements through both scholarship and organizing. She has been involved with activist and community groups both on and off-campus, including the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), Asian American Political Activism Coalition (AAPAC), the NYU Urban Democracy Lab, and CAAAV. She currently works at the Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives where she conducts her own research and assists others. The most pressing research questions for Lia deal with the ways in which workers respond to and make sense of crises. In Summer 2020, Lia is looking forward to working with Cooperation Jackson, a radical community organization working towards Black self-determination through social and economic solidarity and environmental sustainability. She is thrilled and honored by this opportunity to support and learn from the Jackson community. 

Zina Karas

Sophie Jones

Sophie Jones is a Gallatin student studying Power Structures in the Anthropocene, with a minor in Environmental Studies. Sophie’s studies focus on the Anthropocene as an end time and how anarchism can be used to prolong life for all species. She has spent her extracurricular time organizing with various groups such as Extinction Rebellion, MACC, Sunrise, and most recently The V,OID, a group she co-organized to creatively reframe the narrative of the climate crisis—the only way to prevent climate catastrophe is through intentional, autonomous, empowering communities while creating accessible, democratized, environmental education. Sophie lived at Earthaven Ecovillage last summer where she gained perspective on permaculture, food production, natural building, renewable energy, climate activism, honest communication, mindfulness, and alternative governance structures. Additionally, Sophie is Stephen Duncombe’s research assistant working on artistic activism projects. Currently, Sophie is executing her own research focusing on how anarchism is being used in an effort to create new social living systems amidst COVID-19. She will spend her summer working with The Clemente, a Puerto Rican/Latinx institution working to cultivate, present, and preserve their culture. She hopes to contribute to and learn from community-centered artistic activism and preservation at The Clemente, particularly work around environmental-related destruction.

Kayla Merriweather

Kayla Merriweather is a junior at New York University in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, concentrating in History, Politics and Spanish through a Black Feminist Lens. On campus, she is a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholar, the Co-President for the Black Student Union, and the Chair of the Student Government Assembly’s Student Success Committee. She also serves as a Resident Assistant in the Broome Street Residential College. Passionate about social justice, advocacy, and public service, Kayla plans to attend law school after graduation with hopes to become a lawyer and eventual politician.

 Katherine Rivard

Katherine Rivard is a Master of Urban Planning candidate at NYU Wagner. As an undergraduate, Katherine studied Culture and Politics at Georgetown University. She recently moved to Brooklyn from Washington, D.C. where she worked as a Communications Specialist for the National Park Foundation. In this role, she supported the Find Your Park/Encuentra Tu Parque campaign, which aims to welcome people of all backgrounds to visit their national parks. As an urban planning student, she is interested in the role of media and communications in city planning and community participation. She currently works as a graduate research assistant at the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. 

2019 Fellows

Christopher Polack

Christopher Polack is a Master’s of Urban Planning student at NYU Wagner, specializing in Urban Analytics. He received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2018 from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His past research has focused on the leveraging of digital interactive tools and collaborative community mapping spaces to encourage civic discussions around rapid urban change and displacement. He currently works as a graduate Research Assistant at the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. This summer, he will be working with Right To The City – a national alliance of racial, economic, and environmental justice organizations – researching rent control policy and working to document the efforts and initiatives of the alliance’s core member organizations across the country.

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei is a third year student at Gallatin, studying Ecological Anthropology. She is the author behind “New Art for Archaeologists” at Embodied Magazine, where she comments on emerging climate change arts. She hopes to keep writing and researching her way through the Anthropocene.

Maria Jesus Mora

Maria Jesus Mora is a junior studying Sociology and History in the College of the Arts and Science. Last summer she interned in Mexico’s National Council to Prevent Discrimination in the division of Public Policy concerning Afro-Mexican rights. She was exposed to efforts to create collaborations between different governmental branches and civil society in order to sensitize the nation through mass campaigning about this largely politically and socially invisible population. She also volunteered as a research assistant for an NYU Sociology graduate student, whose dissertation focuses on the social factors behind the segregated high school system in New York City. This summer she will be working for a cooperative of Latin American migrant women in Madrid (SEDOAC) who are trying to combat labor discrimination. More specifically, they are trying to gain equal access to Spain’s social security and dignify paid domestic work. She is very excited to work alongside SEDOAC to promote consciousness about the vulnerability that these women face due to their disenfranchisement, ethnicity, and immigration status.

Jakiyah Bradley

Jakiyah Bradley is a rising senior at Gallatin studying Urban Policy and Social Change, with a minor in Social & Public Policy. Her studies focus on policies around education, housing, justice reform, and the inevitable intersection of the three in the lives of racial minorities living in cities. For the past two summers, she has interned with The Legal Aid Society and The Bronx Defenders, respectively, where she advocated on the behalf of clients in civil cases. Jakiyah will be a fellow at Each One Teach One (EOTO) e.V. in Berlin, Germany this summer. There, she will work on EOTO’s community-based education and empowerment projects, including researching the history of African immigrant communities in the Berlin-Wedding neighborhood.

David Puente

David Puente is a Master’s candidate in Urban Studies, Tourism Management and Global Policy at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His research focuses on how urbanization and travel trends are transforming the landscape of human settlement in the 21^st-century, with significant implications for living conditions, leisure, the environment, development policy and social justice. He expects to use his experience working with the community-based organization Imagina Madrid, to better understand a bottom-up approach that promotes urban sustainability, social justice and citizen participation. Puente is an Emmy award-winning network news journalist and communications specialist who speaks English, Spanish, French and studies Arabic. He has received community service awards from his previous employers, Disney and Time Warner, for his work with public school students in Newark, New Jersey.

2018 Fellows

Sarah Aita

Sarah is a Master’s student in urban planning at Wagner, specializing in housing and economic development. She received her Bachelor’s degree in architecture in 2016 from Ain Shams University in Cairo and continues to work in architecture and urban development. Her research work focuses on inequality, gentrification, and the politics of space in the context of design and governance. Sarah will be working with the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation (WHEDco) to establish a community needs assessment for a current rezoning plan in the Bronx.

Vaclav Masek

Vaclav Masek is a Guatemalan graduate student at NYU’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS). In 2017, Vaclav completed his undergraduate degree also at NYU, where he pursued a triple-major in Sociology, Spanish, and Global Liberal Studies with a concentration in Politics, Rights, and Development. He is currently working on his Master’s project, which focuses on Guatemala’s multiparty system after its return to democracy after a 36-year armed conflict. Understanding that the Guatemalan armed conflict also ignited a sustained mass migration to the United States, Vaclav expects to use his experiences in Madrid with Servicio Doméstico Activo (SEDOAC) to understand the nuances of transatlantic migration. Additionally, he hopes to explore how Latin American migrants in Madrid challenge local governments for more representation in the legal realm.

Stephanie Rountree

Stephanie Rountree is a rising junior at Gallatin studying technology and justice, particularly examining questions around ethics of design, decolonization of digital interaction, and how organizers use digital presence to draw attention to offline efforts. In the past, she has shown commitment to infusing social justice into tech as an intern at DoSomething.org, a tech nonprofit that connects over 5 million young people with volunteer and civic action opportunities, and a national volunteer for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary campaign, and will be continuing this work at the Right to the City Alliance in Brooklyn. There, her primary focus will be collaborating with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project to create dynamic geographic visualizations of RTC’s eviction data using ArcGIS, with an ultimate goal of being able to predict evictions over 5 years, identify motivations behind housing trends, and humanize statistics by integrating the stories of those affected by gentrification into the final product. 

Jesse Bernhart

Jesse Bernhart is a rising Senior at Gallatin studying a Humanities Based Approach to Environmental Studies, with a special emphasis on Environmental Justice, with a minor in Spanish. Her area of concentration is focused on the way climate change disproportionately impacts underrepresented communities of the world. Jesse’s extracurricular activities are centered around her involvement as Events Director for NYU’s Women and Youth Supporting Each Other (WYSE,) where she provides mental health, empowerment, and sexual education resources to middle school girls around the city. This summer, Jesse is working with the Loisaida Center, a Latinx cultural preservation center that focuses on retaining the Lower East Side’s cultural integrity and Latinx background. She will be working primarily with the Loisaida Center’s current artist residents who are involved in a project dealing with the local community gardens, recounting their history, their impact as social sites, and the ways that they are being threatened both indirectly and head-on.

Dylan Garcia

Dylan Garcia is a Junior at Gallatin studying Sociology and Urban Sustainability. He is focused on studying how cities function efficiently and can work as sustainable and healthy communities. He is an Education Coordinator at the Office of Sustainability at NYU, where he works on the EcoReps peer to peer environmental education program, and has worked in the past for The NYC Park Department Sustainable Facilities Division, and for the NRDC. For the Fellowship, Dylan is working with the Loisaida Center, a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural center that focuses on cultural placemaking and placekeeping. Over the summer, Dylan is helping Loisaida with a number of the many projects in the works. The center is working on building a “maker spac”e to serve the community and provide useful tools and technology as a way to help members of the community in job training and artistic endeavors. The center is also in need of collateral reports on some of their recent and current projects including the Loisaida Festival and the artist residencies. Dylan will also be continuing work at NYU’s Office of Sustainability this summer.

Siobhan Allen

Siobhan Allen is a senior at Gallatin who is studying the intersection of the Spanish language, culture, and politics in Spain and Latin America. For the fellowship through Urban Democracy Lab, Siobhan is working with SEDOAC (Servicio Doméstico Activo) in Madrid, Spain, to help them with their online presence and international outreach. In New York, Siobhan has worked with DWU (Domestic Workers United), an American organization with a similar founding and focus. Her work focuses on the colonial roots and cultural differences in Spain and the United States that lead to different problems and solutions for domestic workers, as well as the impact outside influences can have on grassroots organizations.

Kate Philipson

Kate Philipson is a graduate student in NYU’s Archives and Public History MA Program. She works in the Media Preservation Unit of the NYU Library’s Barbara Goldsmith Conservation and Preservation Department, and is passionate about archival and information access, as well as working with communities to collect and preserve underrepresented histories. As a fellow at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center in Humboldt Park, Chicago, Kate is helping to formulate an archive for long-term preservation of materials within the organization’s rich history, and materials documenting the collective history of the Puerto Rican community in the surrounding neighborhoods. The PRCC is a 45-year-old hub of Puerto Rican anti-colonial activism and community building in Humboldt Park, and this foundational archive will anchor a larger public history initiative with plans to include an oral history program, educational partnerships, research and outreach efforts, public events, and the training of local community archivists.

Mariyamou Drammeh

Mariyamou Drammeh is a fourth-year student at NYU studying sociology and minoring in social public policy. Her interest in advocating for marginalized communities of color has led to her work with grassroots social justice-based organizations, particularly those focused on anti-poverty and women’s rights. She has also served as a facilitator for NYU’s Peer Impact Program, engaging in education and outreach around diversity, inclusion and social justice. Mariyamou plans to continue her work in the space of advocacy and social justice as she pursues a Master’s in Public Administration through the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. As a fellow with African Communities Together, Mariyamou will focus on collecting demographic data of the African immigrant community in NYC as well as oral histories of community members, in an effort to elevate the stories and existence of a vibrant community.

2017 fellows

Victoria Carter

Victoria Carter is a first year Masters candidate at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. She moved to New York from London last September, where she spent several years working as a digital and innovation consultant. During that time she began to consider how design and innovation could be used as tools for sustainable social change.  As a GGFUP, she is working with El Patio Maravillas. El Patio is an organization that has occupied various sites in Madrid, building community centers in these unoccupied sites and actively campaigning for affordable housing and anti-gentrification. In parallel to her work with El Patio, she is researching her Masters thesis, which focuses on participatory design and social innovation in Madrid.

Jonathan Marty

Jonathan Marty is a rising Junior at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he is pursuing a concentration in Urban Studies. As a GGFUP, he is working in Humboldt Park, Chicago with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. His interests range from housing rights and gentrification to the politics of public transit and other civic amenities. He is also interested in the processes of architectural design and urban planning, and how the two shape the urban environment in distinctive manners.
 
 

Sophie Maes

Sophie Maes is a fourth-year student at NYU Gallatin studying Urban Problem Solving and Sustainable Design. Growing up in coastal Santa Barbara, California, an ethos of environmental responsibility was instilled in her from early on. As a college student, experiences in New York City and Buenos Aires have informed her perspective on urban life—its many wonders and challenges. She is eager to explore the intersection of sustainable design practices and social justice. As a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice, she is spending the summer in Madrid working with Paisaje Transversal, an urban design office that emphasizes community engagement and democratic participation in their initiatives.

Bremda Acosta

Bremda Acosta is a rising senior at New York University in the College of Arts and Science majoring in Sociology and Global Public Health with a minor in Spanish. She was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York City at the age of 12. She has found her niche in sociology. The sociological imagination has helped her make sense of her positionality as a woman, a Hispanic immigrant and a first generation college student. More specifically, she is drawn to sociological research because she occupies spaces that have systematically excluded people like herself in the past. This summer, Bremda is working with Latin American migrant women who are domestic workers in Madrid and who have come together to learn about their rights, visibilize their community and to empower themselves. They created an organization called “Servicio Domestico Activo” (SEDOAC– Active Domestic Service) that organizes workshops, festivals and meetings to get more women in this informal labor sector involved in their work.

Imani Edwards

Imani is a second-year Gallatin graduate student studying Cultural Preservation through Storytelling. She creates projects and writes stories in order to highlight the cultures and histories of marginalized communities. In the past, she has produced projects within the urban education, healthcare, and university sectors to fill voids in cultural representation. This list includes the “Blackness” Project at the Churchill School and Center, Continuing the Conversation: Black Women Activism in Flint booklet with Diplomat Pharmacy, and the “Self-Care Take Care” Black Women Social at NYU. As a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice, Imani will be working with community partner City Lore to create stories that contribute to their mission to preserve marginalized culture.

Rachel Stern

Rachel Stern is going into her third year at Gallatin with a concentration in Environmental Studies and Human Rights, particularly interest in Indigenous land rights and environmental practices, food justice and climate change adaptation.This summer, she is working in Oakland, California with Rooted in Resilience, an environmental justice and climate resilience organization. In her work with them, she will be developing their communications strategy for existing and new initiatives, as well as conducting research on environmental communications and developing a training program around environmental and community-based organization communications for externs and other organizations. In the future, she wants to continue her studies in the field of environmental justice and human rights, and work to involve and learn from communities when it comes to environmental problems and solutions. She believes that an approach rooted and designed around community is crucial rather than a top-down approach which can marginalize communities and infringe on human and environmental rights.

Anamika Jain

Currently a senior in Gallatin, Anamika is developing a concentration in human rights and minoring in gender and sexuality. She is particularly invested in studying the intersection of human rights and urban development. Having previously done “right to the city” work in Brazil as a Gallatin Global Human Rights Fellow, she is continuing this work over the summer at the Right to the City Alliance in New York. At Right to the City, she will primarily be doing research for a paper about alternative housing models and community control, as well as helping organize some major upcoming events. As a human rights activist and scholar, she is incredibly excited to spend this summer as a part of mass-based, bottom-up formation led by people of color, immigrants, and working class communities that has been at the forefront of the struggles against gentrification, displacement and police terror in US cities.

Arielle Hersh

Arielle Hersh is a rising junior at Gallatin studying Urban Development, Policy, and History, and is a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice in New York City with WHEDco this summer. She has just completed the Liberal Studies Core Program and spent her first year studying away in Washington, DC. Academically, Arielle is interested in sustainable community development, affordable housing, and interdisciplinary urban practice. In collaboration with WHEDco, she will be working on community development along Southern Boulevard in the Crotona Park East neighborhood of the South Bronx, specifically helping to create a Commercial District Needs Assessment (CDNA) for the corridor. During the past year, she completed an independent research project on Via Verde, a sustainable affordable housing complex in the South Bronx, and volunteered with the Lowline. Arielle will also be working with the Van Alen Institute this summer.

Sara Nuta

Sara Nuta is a rising senior at NYU. She is concentrating in journalism/media criticism and metropolitan studies at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Despite growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, she has always been fascinated by cities—from urban planning to public policy to subway maps. She is interested in the ways in which a city’s identity is defined by its arts and culture, with a particular emphasis on music.  As the daughter of immigrants, she has always been curious to learn more about the interaction between immigration, urban demographics, and local politics. This summer, she wil develop a better understanding of Albanian, Yemeni, and Bangladeshi musicians and artists in the South Bronx—which spaces they occupy, what kinds of performances they put on, and how their music impacts the community’s sense of place. She will be doing research in the South Bronx with The Bronx Music Heritage Foundation.

2016 fellows

Emily Bellor

Emily Bellor is an intersectional feminist poet-activist and a B.A. candidate concentrating in the history and practice of artistic activism at the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her art and activism focus on the (de)construction of gender and authority and the exploration and celebration of queer identity. Her mediums of choice include writing, theater, and performance. She is working with CAA to bolster publicity, social media presence, and outreach for the Center and for Actipedia.
 
 

Sarah Halford

Sarah Halford graduated with honors from the New School University, where she earned a BA in theater and politics. At Gallatin, she has narrowed her focus to the study of art in activism and works closely with the Center for Artistic Activism as a research fellow. In 2016, she was awarded the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Urban Practice from the Urban Democracy Lab and was sent to Berlin, Germany, to conduct research on artistic activism and its practitioners’ metrics of success and failure. She is currently working on a podcast miniseries called Creative Affect: The Podcast for her Master’s thesis, which combines much of the field research, theory, and critical analysis that she has collected during her time at Gallatin.

Ivy Olesen

Ivy Olesen is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2017). For the fellowship, Ivy worked with The Schwules Museum*, an LGBT archive and museum in Berlin. Her research centered around the queer history and landscape of Schoenberg – the historically gay district in which the SMU* is situated. She created and led Queer Art walks out of the museum into the neighborhood, and back again. Through collaborative and ephemeral multimedia art projects, participants wove connections between their present perspectives and lives with the historical and art historical past of the SMU* and Schoenberg. These walks were queer in content as well as form, both based off of her research, and an extension of it, constituting a series of unconventional, verbal and visual interviews.

Chloe Grey Smith

Chloe Grey Smith is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2017), studying artistic activism and urban spatial studies. Her artistic and academic work focuses on using mapmaking to represent urban ecologies, histories and futures. Chloe spent her fellowship in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working for both the Center for Artistic Activism and the Argentinian Photojournalists’ Association (ARGRA). In Buenos Aires she attended queer activist events, conducted interviews and studio visits with queer and Indigenous artistic activists, and helped digitize archives of photos from the Falklands War (La Guerra Malvinas). She collected her photos, observations, and audio recordings, along with a hand-drawn map, into a searchable archival website called Porteñomanteau. Chloe’s fellowship work serves as both a survey of the intersections between artistic activism and archivism in Argentina, and an individual reflection on the pitfalls and beauties of being a foreign cultural researcher.

2015 fellows

Taylor Brock

Taylor Brock is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2016) studying social justice and art activism. Her studies focus on oppressive power relations and the ability of art to be a viable tool for consciousness raising, empowerment, and subversion. For the fellowship, Taylor worked with The Laundromat Project, a New York-­based nonprofit that works to nurture creativity within its three flagship communities, Harlem, Bed­Stuy, and Hunts Point/Longwood. Through the LP, Taylor was connected with the Kelly Street Community Garden in the Bronx. On Kelly Street she researched how a shared history and the use of arts and culture can foster powerful and resilient communities within an urban environment. Her research culminated in a WordPress site that documents many of her findings and experiences.

Maria Fernanda Cepeda

Maria Fernanda Cepeda is a Master’s candidate at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University (as of Spring 2016). She has a B.A. in Anthropology from the National University of Colombia and five years’ experience working with citizenship culture, social justice, women’s rights, multicultural studies, and community work. Her overall research focuses on domestic work, Latin American migrant women, and the intersections between social sciences, theatre, and politics for social change. As a fellow, Maria worked in Madrid with the grassroots organization SEDOAC around issues of domestic work, migration, and narratives of leadership experienced by Latin American migrant women. Her final project, a web page for SEDOAC was called “Domestic Workers in Spain, A Laboratory Project for Urban Democracy.”

Robert Clinton

Robert Clinton is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2016) with a concentration in urban agriculture and a minor in Sustainable Urban Environments through the Tandon School of Engineering. Throughout his undergraduate career, Robert has sought to enrich his understanding of environmentalism, development, politics, and sociology in municipalities. His project for the Gallatin Global Fellowship in Urban Practice explored the intersections of religion, environmentalism, and national identity as expressed in the sustainability practices of ethnic Germans and Turkish Muslim migrants in Berlin. Robert’s research has been synthesized into a WordPress site that begins to investigate whether the Christian undertones of German environmentalism, an integral component of internal and external conceptions of Germanity, impede outsiders’ participation, thus preventing their full integration into Deutschland.

Erin Johnson

Erin Johnson earned her Master’s degree in January 2016 from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. At Gallatin, Erin studied urban agriculture and community development with coursework covering urban economic development, community organizing, sustainable food systems, environmental justice, community advocacy and public health. Erin’s thesis research centered on the strategies and programming of urban farms in low-income neighborhoods in New York and their community development efficacy. She also serves as a volunteer coordinator with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy and is an active member of a community garden. As a fellow, Erin spent the summer of 2015 in Madrid working with Paisaje Transversal, a collective of architects that specializes in developing innovative and transformative urban projects.

2014 fellows

Sophie Lasoff

Sophie Lasoff is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2015) studying the intersections of environmental and social justice, specifically through the lens of the climate crisis. She is actively engaged in student organizing, leading her to found the fossil fuel divestment campaign at NYU. As a Global Fellow in Urban Practice, she studied the relationship between community and climate resiliency at UPROSE, a local environmental justice organization in Brooklyn. Through an ethnographic study of their Climate Justice and Community Resiliency Center, she explored how UPROSE is providing a space for genuine, active participatory citizenship, and how the development of “social infrastructure” can be considered a climate adaptation and mitigation measure. Her research has culminated in an interactive video project that illustrates how the Center could be used as a grassroots model for climate resiliency.

Idan Sasson

Idan Sasson is a senior at Gallatin (as of Spring 2015) studying Sustainable Development and minoring in Environmental Studies. His academic interests include political economy, urban development, environmental discourse, and theories of social change. While in Berlin, Idan focused on the development of open green space as an indicator of public urban development priorities. The research was focused on Tempelhof Field, an airport turned public park, which was most recently a space of contestation between urban developers and a widespread public resistance movement. Idan argues that the master plan proposed by the city represents an entrenched neoliberal development agenda. The successful resistance to the city’s master plan manifested itself in a public referendum, demonstrating that a majority of Berliners wished to put an end to top-down development projects. Idan hopes to create a short documentary using footage of the space, interviews, and photos from his time in Berlin.

Henry Topper

Henry Topper is a senior in Gallatin (as of Spring 2015) studying Urban Studies and Philosophy. He is particularly interested in gentrification, the meaning of authenticity, and New York history. For the Global Fellowship in Urban Practice, Henry worked at an urban garden in Berlin and researched the emergence of “bottom-up” green spaces in the city. For his final project, he will create a digital storytelling narrative about his experience at the garden and its relationship to the burgeoning international population in Berlin.