Bio
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 studies documentary filmmaking with a focus on critical disaster studies and urban labor crises. 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. She is currently working on films about app-based food delivery bikers in NYC, the Kansas City Tenants Union, and Occupy Sandy, an anarchist-led mutual aid network that operated in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. As a Gallatin Global Fellow in Urban Practice, Micaela is working with the Pratt Center to develop a short documentary series about EnergyFit NYC, a program that retrofits energy efficiency systems in homes owned by low- and middle-income New Yorkers with the goal of increasing energy efficiency, reducing costs, and making energy retrofitting more accessible for homeowners.
The Gallatin Global Fellowship in Urban Practice provides funding of up to $5,000 and support for 6-10 advanced BA and MA students to pursue extended, community-engaged, practice-based research projects in partnership with urban social justice organizations.
Mission Statement
This documentary project, produced with the Pratt Institute and in collaboration with the EnergyFit NYC program, seeks to reveal the process of retrofitting homes for energy efficiency. The project hopes to spotlight the implications of place, race, and class for homeownership and utilities in New York City. Within a broader narrative of socially constructed vulnerability to disasters in an era of worsening climate change, this project aims to show the sometimes-bureaucratic yet vital process of residents upgrading their home energy systems.
Project Summary
The Pratt Center for Community Development enlisted my help in constructing a 3-5 minute video that contextualized the importance of home energy retrofits within a broader scope of history, political economy, and social systems. As the Pratt Center embarks on a new iteration of EnergyFit, their energy retrofitting and home repair program that focuses on helping low- and medium-income homeowner in Central Brooklyn to repair their homes and make their homes energy efficient, they were seeking to communicate to homeowners why these processes matter. Throughout the summer, I interviewed two Pratt Center employees, two Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation employees, two Cypress Hills homeowners, and one executive at IMPACCT Brooklyn. I spent time shooting b-roll in Central Brooklyn as well. I then worked to edit all of this material into a 5 minute short film that the Pratt Center can use in its communication materials with homeowners, policymakers, NGOs, funders, and the general public.
