Organizers
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.
Louise Harpman
Louise Harpman, the Founding Director of the BIG WALK, is a Professor of Architecture, Urban Design, and Sustainability at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Harpman is also an associated faculty member at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, a faculty affiliate at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, and a member of NYU’s Faculty Advisory Committee at the Marron Institute of Urban Management. Harpman is the founder and principal of Louise Harpman__PROJECTS whose work focuses on architectural design, design research, and urban design. She also directs the zeromicro™ Applied Research Consortium.
Benjamin Goldrich
Benjamin Goldrich is the communications director of RUX Studios, a design firm and parent company that creates and grows independent brands. He works to tell the unique stories of its two in-house companies, STICKBULB and GRADUAL. STICKBULB, founded in 2012, is a modular system of LED lights made out of reclaimed wood from decommissioned water towers, demolished buildings, fallen trees, and sustainably sourced forests. GRADUAL, founded in 2018, is an alternative time-telling company that builds clocks for long-term thinkers. Prior to joining RUX Studios as a research assistant, Benjamin worked with local startups in the Washington DC area to help develop social media and marketing strategies. In the past six years, he has also volunteered and worked on local and statewide political campaigns for Democratic candidates.
Speakers and Community Participants
Rob Basch
Rob Basch is President of the Hunters Point Park Conservancy. He has lived in Long Island City since 2009. In early 2013 after Hunters Point South Park opened he responded to an article asking for volunteers for the new Hunters Point Parks Conservancy. The Conservancy was formed from the Friends of Gantry Plaza State Park which was started in 1998 and then expanded once Hunters Point South Park opened. He spent his first year managing events and programming and then was asked to take over as President at the end of 2014. Since that time we have seen the Conservancy grow from a budget of $7,500 to over $200,000. This year we will program over 170 free events and volunteers for weeding and gardening in both Gantry Plaza State Park and Hunters Point South Park. During this time we have also started popular recurring series like Cinema LIC, Summer Kids, Live at the Landing and a variety of healthy living events.
Sarah Crean
Sarah Crean previously served as deputy director of the NY Industrial Retention Network and executive director of the Garment Industry Development Corp. The mission of both organizations was to assist local manufacturing companies at risk of displacement and fight for public policies which protect the city’s industrial base. Crean also worked as an analyst at the Fiscal Policy Institute and a reporter covering climate resiliency and sustainability issues. She holds a masters in urban planning from Columbia University and currently serves as a communications director for the New York City Council.
Sheila Lewandowski
Executive Director and co-founder of The Chocolate Factory Theater is a community organizer and works to increase awareness of the importance of the arts in policy making in everything from education to housing to economic development and in regards to labor on a local, regional, state and national level. Sheila has received recognition for her activities most recently as a Business Person of the Year by the Queens Chamber of Commerce and as a Community Leader in and for the arts by the Queens Council on the Arts in 2018. Prior recognition included the Elizabeth Coleman Visionary Leadership Award from her alma mater Bennington College, Woman of Distinction by New York State Senator Michael Gianaris and proclamations from the New York State Assembly and New York City Council for her work in and for her local community. Sheila Chairs the Transportation Committee of Community Board 2 in Queens and is on the Steering Committee of the Sunnyside Yards Planning Project in addition to being active in many local projects.
Edjo Wheeler
Edjo Wheeler is an artist, as well as a curator and education director at Long Island City Artists, a non-profit arts advocacy organization founded by artists in Long Island City. Originally located in a studio/loft complex above a paper factory, LIC-A began producing art exhibitions and events, originated the Open Studios Annuals in 1985, and has continued since in providing professional development opportunities for artists. Members are professional artists from Long Island City and throughout the borough of Queens.
Karen Holmberg
Karen Holmberg is an archaeologist who specializes in volcanic contexts to examine the long-term experiences humans have had with environments that change unpredictably. She is interested in how the past can aid understanding of the environmental challenges and crises of the 21st century, particularly in the Global South. Holmberg is currently working on two book projects. The first, Mephistopheles on Mauna Loa: The Role of the Volcano in Climate Change, examines the role of the volcano in the haunted landscapes and global connections of the Anthropocene. The second book project, Personal Narratives of the Equinoctal, merges climate fiction, non-fiction, ethnography, and memoir to explore senses of place and belonging in contexts of radical environmental change. Holmberg is the Principal Investigator of a National Geographic funded project in Chaitén, Chile, that studies a rock art cave complex in Patagonia under a volcano that erupted unexpectedly in 2008. The transdisciplinary project examines the cultural heritage and geological heritage of the rock art caves in relation to modern houses preserved by the 2008 disaster. Scientific data are sought but a concomitant goal is to help provide a sustainable economic base for local residents as they continue to resettle the town. Holmberg received her PhD from Columbia University after which she taught at Brown and Stanford Universities. Her doctoral work was funded by Fulbright, Mellon, and Wenner-Gren awards. She is the recent recipient of a Creating Earth Futures award from the Geohumanities Centre of Royal Holloway University and the Leverhulme Trust for an art-science collaboration, Imaginary Explosions. She has also received a Make Our Planet Great Again award to collaborate with the Laboratoire de Géographie Physique at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris for the project, “Geoknowledge, environmental change, and volcanic eruption: the use of the past to inform the future.”
Steve Lang
Steve Lang is professor of Sociology at LaGuardia Community College at the City of New York where he teaches courses in urban sociology and environmental sociology. His research and writing focuses on urban waterfront redevelopment and public space issues as well as the politics of urban sustainability and resiliency. Currently, he is working on a book with Filip Stabrowski tentatively entitled, Long Island City as a shock community: housing, work and industry in the era of rising inequality and climate change.
Russell Greenberg
Russell Greenberg is the Founder / Creative Director, RUX Studios. Russell founded RUX Studios as an innovation engine in 2008. Over the following 10 years, he developed products and intellectual property for global brands like Unilever, Samsung, Mozilla Firefox, and Pernod Ricard. In 2017 he transformed RUX from a design consultancy into an entrepreneurial platform to create and grow in-house brands. Russell’s work ranges from lighting and fine jewelry to mobile devices and luxury vending machines to architectural work, including an award-winning masterplan for a mosque in Abu Dhabi. Prior to founding RUX, Russell founded the architecture department within Studio Dror, where he led the design of Nurai, an artificial island resort in Abu Dhabi voted “most luxurious project in the world” by Newsweek Magazine. Russell graduated cum laude from Yale University in 2002 and received his masters from the Yale School of Architecture in 2006, where he was awarded the HI Feldman Prize, the school’s highest design honor.
Christopher Beardsley
Charles Beardsley is the managing partner of the interdisciplinary design firm RUX Studios and the co-founder of Stickbulb and Gradual. Prior to joining RUX Studios, he served as Executive Director at the Forum for Urban Design from 2008-2014. During his tenure, Christopher steered the organization to be a platform to promote innovative urban design ideas for cities around the world, editing several publications including Next New York, a collection of visionary Urban Design proposals for New York City. Prior to that Christopher was a Project Manager at Flank Inc., a New York-based real estate development and architecture firm, where he split his time between the design and development sides of the office, analyzing acquisition opportunities as well as managing the design of two hotel projects. Chris graduated with honors from Yale University in 2002 and received his masters from the Yale School of Architecture in 2006, where he was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Medal for leadership.
Colin Curley
Colin Curley is a landscape and architectural designer and associate at James Corner Field Operations, where he recently led the Portage Cove Trail Framework Plan in Haines, Alaska. His design research explores the complex environmental and sociopolitical dimensions of hyper-toxic industrial landscapes and their aesthetic and experiential potential, and he is currently teaching a graduate landscape architecture design studio at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design focused on the energy transition in New York State. Colin holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Suzi Winson
Suzi Winson is the Director and Co-Founder/Owner of Circus Warehouse, the premier professional training center for elite circus performers in New York City. Circus Warehouse is a collaborative effort to produce the next generation of performers, to integrate circus arts into mixed-media forms, and to provide a space for the development of new and experimental works. Suzi runs the professional program, which turns out top-level performers for traditional and contemporary circuses, and for dance and theatre productions that incorporate circus art skills. The culture that the Warehouse has cultivated attracts seasoned pros from all over the world who come to train and teach. Our community ranges from those with traditional circus backgrounds to the emerging nouveau cirque. While professional training is the primary focus, the Warehouse also trains non-pro circus enthusiasts and serious athletic practitioners.
Ingrid Apgar
Ingrid Apgar, originally from Massachusetts, is a senior at Gallatin and an Intensive Professional Program student at Circus Warehouse in Long Island City. Her Gallatin studies, formally titled “Fragile Bodies, Transient Matter(s),” are centered on bodies, (un)translatability, temporality, and toxicity as situated in the Nuclear Age, and more generally in times of disaster, crisis, and atrocity. Within Circus Warehouse, Ingrid specializes in dance trapeze under Susan Voyticky, trains in hand-balancing with Nobu Mochimaru, and tinkers with a variety of other aerial apparatuses; prior to finding circus, she spent her formative years in ballet, performing as a company apprentice with Boston Dance Company until 2013. She prides herself on spending much of her time upside down, whether as a circus student or as a resident upside-downer and student worker in Gallatin’s Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts.
Sponsors
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
The Gallatin School of Individualized Study provides a distinctive liberal arts education for a diverse student body. Our faculty foster passionate intellectual commitments from learners and prepare them for a world in which managing knowledge is key to success. Guided by the philosophy that self-directed learning is the key goal, the faculty seek to cultivate an environment conducive to intellectual exploration across traditional academic disciplines, and they insist on active student engagement in developing the direction of their own education. Our highly specialized and deeply engaged advisers guide students in their intellectual explorations toward an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving.
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.