Participants

Speaker

Barry Bergdoll is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University and the former Chief Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he curated numerous exhibitions at MoMA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Musée d’Orsay, and other venues, including Mies In Berlin (2001), Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (2009-2010), Latin America in Construction : Architecture 1955-1980 (2015) and Frank Lloyd Wright at 150 : Unpacking the Archive (2017).

Photographer

Sarah Blesener is a documentary photographer based in New York City. She is a graduate of the Visual Journalism and Documentary Practice program at the International Center of Photography in New York. In 2019, her personal project, Beckon Us From Home, received a first place prize in the Long-Term Project category of World Press Photo.

Artist

Jenny Brockmann is an artist and sculptor living in Berlin and New York. Her works combine technology, science, and art, and have been shown internationally. She studied fine art at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she was a student of Rebecca Horn, and received a diploma in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin. Brockmann creates works characterised by discursive aesthetics. In the form of sculptures, interactive spatial arrangements, or outlines of thought, the artist has for years researched dynamic, spatial, and social processes, as well as natural cycles. Brockmann’s works are a starting point for philosophical discourse, and for questions about patterns of human behavior and social structures.

Architect

David Chipperfield was born in London in 1953 and founded David Chipperfield Architects in 1985. He has developed a design methodology that is now used across four offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai. In addition to design work, David Chipperfield has taught and lectured worldwide. In 2012 he curated the 13th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale under the title Common Ground and he was the 2020 guest editor of Italian design magazine Domus.

Performer

Oxana Chi is a German choreographer, dancer, filmmaker, curator, and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her repertoire comprises 20 productions touring across the globe. Her newest work,Wings to fly (2021) was commissioned by the Leo Baeck Institute (Berlin/New York). Honors and awards include AIR at Abrons Arts Center, and Ambassador of Peace Award, and being listed in The Dance Enthusiast’s “A to Z of People Who Power The Dance World”. Her work explores how our present is built upon in/visible remnants from the past, and its porous relation to our futures.

Artist, Presenter

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and founding principal of Huff + Gooden Architects. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, and performance. Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016). Image: David Hartt

Speaker

Dominique Jean-Louis is an Assistant Curator of History Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society, where she has worked on Black Citizenship in the Age of Jim Crow (2018), and the ongoing exhibition Meet the Presidents. She is a doctoral candidate in US History at New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on race, education, and youth culture in post-Civil Rights Era New York City.

Speaker

Rebecca Kobrin, Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History, works in the fields of immigration history and American Jewish History. Professor Kobrin served as the Hilda Blaustein Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University (2002-2004) and the American Academy of Jewish Research Post-Doctoral Fellow at New York University (2004-2006).

Photographer

Andrew Lichtenstein, a native of New York City, is a documentary photographer, journalist, and teacher who works on long term stories of social concern. Over the last two decades he has concentrated on photographing stories about social justice in America. As a working photographer and journalist, Andrew’s work on a wide variety of subjects has appeared in newspapers, magazines, web sites, and books.

Speaker

Alexander Manevitz is a scholar, public historian, consultant, and educator focusing on the transformations of race, urban space, and capitalism in the nineteenth-century United States. His current book project—under contract with Cornell University Press—focuses on the founding, life, destruction, and memory of Seneca Village, a predominantly Black political community destroyed to build Central Park before the Civil War.

Tour Guide

Architectural and social historian Tom Miller is the author of "Seeking New York," "Seeking Chicago," as well as the popular blog "Daytonian in Manhattan." Since 2009 Tom has published a blog post on a different Manhattan location every day — now totaling more than 3,500.

Speaker and Tour Guide

Justin leads Untapped New York’s experience department, creating and delivering some of its most popular tours including the Underground Tour of the NYC Subway, the Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam, and the Remnants of Penn Station tour. His mission continues to be creating and leading unique experiences that help New Yorkers and visitors alike rediscover their city.

Tour Guide

Elissa Sampson, Visiting Scholar in Cornell's Jewish Studies program, is an urban geographer who studies how the past is actively used to create new spaces of migration, memory, heritage and activism. Her life-long interest in Jewish migration, re-diasporization and culture had been pursued in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, Jerusalem, London and Paris prior to realizing Ithaca’s centrality to that map.

Curator

Gideon Fink Shapiro, Ph.D., is an author and curator focusing on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. A contributor to journals such as Architect, Domus, Places, and The Avery Review, he brings a historical perspective to the study of contemporary design. His recent books include 50 Lessons to Learn from Frank Lloyd Wright (with Aaron Betsky) and The New Residential Colleges at Yale: A Conversation Across Time (with Robert A.M. Stern). Based in Brooklyn, Gideon has taught courses at University of Pennsylvania and Virginia Tech. He frequently collaborates with design firms and nonprofits.

Artists and Speakers

Stih & Schnock is a Berlin-based artist duo, formed by Renata Stih, a professor in Berlin and Lüneburg and a member of Berlin's art in public space advisory commission, and Frieder Schnock, an artist, art advisor and a former curator at the Museum Fridericianum in Kassel. Their works deal primarily with collective memory in society. Human rights issues and the Holocaust are recurring reference points in their artistic interventions.

Artist

Virginia Wagner is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. Her paintings explore the tension between human progress and the natural world. She is currently working on commissions for National Geographic to make work about climate change for an Arctic passenger ship and for the Guggenheim Works & Process. She teaches classes on world building at Pratt Institute. Wagner's visual art is presented as part of Wings to Fly, a live performance by Oxana Chi Dance & Art.

Performer

Dr. Layla Zami is an interdisciplinary academic and artist, whose work orbits around matters of memory, diaspora, language, and spacetime. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, and the author of Contemporary PerforMemory (CUP, 2020). Zami holds a PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin. She is a Resident Artist (multi-instrumental music, spoken words, theater) with Oxana Chi Dance & Art.