Staff


Raquel Almazan

Youth Program Manager
(raquel@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x 21)

MFA in Playwriting, Columbia University

Raquel is the Youth Program Manger, director of the Urban Explorers After school program, and associate for the Education Program. She is an interdisciplinary artist, facilitator and activist. (M.F.A. – Playwriting, Columbia University).  Interests: Social justice, activism through the arts, youth development, interdisciplinary art practices, Butoh dance, traditions and political history of (Latin America, the Caribbean and the African diaspora). Her eclectic career spans original multi-media solo performances, playwriting, devising and dramaturgy. Almazan’s work has been featured in New York City- including Off-Broadway, throughout the United States and internationally in Greece, Italy, Slovenia, Colombia, Chile, Guatemala and Sweden; including several of her plays within the (Latin is America play cycle) writing bi-lingual plays in dedication to each Latin American country.  Select venues include: Lincoln Center- Classical Theatre of Harlem, The Signature Theatre, Next Door-New York Theatre Workshop, Bric Arts, New Georges, Pregones-PRTT, Repertorio Espanol, La Micro, INTAR, Hi-Arts, Pangea World Theatre, La Mama and Bushwick Starr.

Select awards and residencies include: The Eugene O’Neill Center Playwrights Conference and The Playwrights’ Center. Recipient of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Grant, Kennedy Center’s Latinidad Award. She is the president of the board of directors of the Indie Theatre Fund and Artistic Director of La Lucha Arts, collaborating with organizations, social movements, and the impacted.

Amanda Dargan

Education Program Director
(adargan@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x14)
PhD, Folklore, University of Pennsylvania
Amanda Dargan is the Director of Special Projects in Education at City Lore and served for 27 years as Education Director. Her research interests include children’s play, word play, world poetry duels, informal learning, family folklore, and folk arts in education. She currently serves on the boards of the American Folklore Society and the Association for Cultural Equity. Her publications include City Play, a book about children’s informal play in New York City, articles in the books A Celebration of American Family Folklore, Encyclopedia of New York City, New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Through the Schoolhouse Door, and Play from Birth to Twelve and Beyond, and in the journals, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Learning through the Arts, Journal of Folklore and Education, Teachers and Writers Magazine, and Educational Leadership. She was co-editor for many years of CARTS, a magazine devoted to folk arts in education, and The Culture Catalog, that offered cultural arts resources for educators. She holds an MA in Folklore from Memorial University of Newfoundland and a PhD in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, she was awarded the Benjamin A. Botkin award by the American Folklore Society for significant lifetime achievement in public sector folklore. 

David Dean

Development Director
(david@citylore.org, BA(Hons) London Sociology)
David Dean has over 40 years of experience as an arts administrator, strategic planner, and non-profit fundraiser. He was the Executive Director of Printed Matter for five years and has worked for a range of other organizations in both the United Kingdom — where he was born and educated — and the United States, including Queens Museum of Art, Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education, The French-American Foundation, The English National Opera, The National Council for Civil Liberties (Liberty) and The National Trust. As a consultant current and recent clients include Poster House New York, the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Association for Cultural Equity, Residency Unlimited, The Hispanic Society, The Camargo Foundation, the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra, The Gross Foundation, Young New Yorkers, Bronx Documentary Center, and Art Fag City. He is a graduate of Goldsmiths College, University of London.  He is a UK and US Citizen.

Molly Garfinkel

Co-Director, City Lore and Place Matters Program Director
(molly@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x17)
MA, Architectural History, University of Virginia

Molly is the Managing Director of City Lore and the Director of City Lore’s Place Matters program. Both roles enable her to lead initiatives related to cultural resource management, historic preservation, public history, exhibition curation, public education,  and traditional arts presentation. Her research explores Western and non-Western building traditions, theories of cultural landscapes, cultural policy, and histories of urbanism and city planning. Molly has published articles in the University of Oregon’s CultureWork broadside, Voices, the journal of New York Folklore, the University of Pennsylvania’s LA+ design journal, and the Journal of American Folklore. She holds a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University and an MA in Architectural History from the University of Virginia.

Colleen Iverson

Gallery Director
(colleen@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x 19)
Duties:
Manages City Lore’s gallery, shop, and rentals.

Hiroko Kazama

Accounts Manager
(hkazama@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x15)
Diploma, Berklee College of Music
Hiroko manages City Lore’s accounting and oversees annual audits. She is a trained pianist, and teaches music and Japanese language and culture to young children.

Elena Martínez

Folklorist
(emartinez@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x16)
MA, Anthropology, MA Folklore, University of Oregon
Elena is the Co-Artistic Director of the Bronx Music Heritage Center and a Folklorist at City Lore. She has a Master’s Degree in Anthropology and a Master’s Degree in Folklore, both from the University of Oregon. She co-produced the documentaries, From Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Tale, which aired on PBS in September 2006, We Like It Like That: The Story of Latin Boogaloo, which premiered at the SXSW Festival in 2015, and Eddie Palmieri: A Revolution on Harlem River Drive (Red Bull Academy 2016). Elena curated the exhibition, “¡Que bonita bandera!: The Puerto Rican Flag as Folk Art,” and co-curated the exhibit, Las Tres Hermanas: Art & Activism, with Joe Conzo Jr.

Sahar Muradi

Director of Education Programs 
(sahar@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x18)
MFA, Poetry, Brooklyn College; MPA, International Development, NYU
Sahar is the Director of Education Programs at City Lore, which brings a cultural and community-based perspective to arts education. Her responsibilities include developing and overseeing school partnership programs, helping grow and support our cadre of teaching artists, and collaboratively leading the Education Programs team. Before City Lore, she facilitated social advocacy, and international service programs for young people, and prior to that, worked with government and civil society groups in her native Afghanistan. Sahar is also a poet and author of the chapbooks [ G A T E S ] and A Garden Beyond My Hand, as well as co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature. She is an active member of several writing community groups, including the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association (co-founder), Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.  Sahar has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MPA in international development from NYU, and a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College. More at: saharmuradi.com

Eva Pedriglieri

Communications Manager and Education Programs Coordinator
(eva@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x13)
BFA, Fine Arts; BA, Culture and Media Studies, The New School

Eva is City Lore’s Communications Manager overseeing all social media platforms and email communications for projects and public programs. She is also the Education Program Coordinator, bringing her own interest and experience as a teaching artist to the role. She has served as a cultural ambassador and English teacher for the US as part of a Fulbright grant in southern Italy. She is also a practicing interdisciplinary artist with a degree in fine arts from Parsons School of Design and has exhibited her artwork in various galleries and international festivals in the US, Europe and the Caribbean. Her work investigates and represents cultural tradition and heritage through personal and community identity through performance, installation, painting and social practice. Learn more about her work: www.evaliaart.com 

Seth Schonberg

Archivist
(seth@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x14)
BA, Anthropology, CUNY Hunter College 
Seth is the Archivist at City Lore, where he develops and maintains the City Lore Archive, supports researcher access, and manages publication requests. Interested in preserving all things cultural, he has a background in music archiving from his work at New York Public Library’s Library for the Performing Arts Music Division, the Archive of Contemporary Music, and from volunteer work digitizing music charts for the 369th Infantry “Harlem Hellfighters” Regimental Band collection at City Lore. Recent external projects include the NYPL Library for the Performing Arts’s 2022-2023 exhibit “Lou Reed: Caught Between The Twisted Stars,” for which he was the Curatorial Assistant. Additionally, has a background in Exhibit Curation and Art Gallery Administration. Seth has a BA in Anthropology from CUNY Hunter College and is currently pursuing an MLS degree at CUNY Queens College.

Malini Srinivasan

School Programs Manager, Teaching Artist
(malini@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x 12)
Malini is a third-generation Bharatanatyam/Indian classical dancer, choreographer, and educator. She is the disciple of world-renowned Guru Sri C.V. Chandrasekhar. Malini choreographs works for soloist and group, and performs at prestigious venues in the US, Europe and India. Based in Queens, NY, Malini teaches dance to students of all ages. She was an Adjunct Lecturer at SUNY Stony Brook between 2006-16, and is a visiting artist at Princeton University, Colgate University, UNC Asheville, Wellesley College and more. Malini has been a Teaching Artist with City Lore since 2008, and became the School Programs Manager in 2018. In this role she brings her work as an arts educator to serve the exceptional community of Teaching Artists and teachers that work with City Lore.

Steve Zeitlin

Founding Executive Director
(steve@citylore.org, 212-529-1955 x 11)
Ph.D., Folklore, University of Pennsylvania, M.A., Literature, Bucknell University 

Steve Zeitlin is the founding Executive Director of City Lore, an organization dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage. With a focus on New York, but with an increasing number of projects of national and international scope, City Lore works with grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. City Lore’s successful programs include Place Matters, the People’s Hall of Fame, and the POEMobile which projects poems on to buildings in tandem with live readings and performances. In 2007, he received the Benjamin Botkin Award from the American Folklore Society for lifetime achievement in public folklore. In 2010, he was awarded an Archie Green fellowship from the Library of Congress.

Steve Zeitlin has served as a regular commentator for a number of nationally syndicated public radio shows, and his commentaries have appeared on the Op Ed pages of The New York Times and Newsday. He also coproduced with NPR producer Dave Isay the storytelling series American Talkers for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday and Morning Edition.

Prior to arriving in New York, Steve Zeitlin served for eight years as a folklorist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and has taught at George Washington, American University, NYU, and Cooper Union. He is coauthor of a number of award winning books on America’s folk culture including A Celebration of American Family Folklore (Pantheon Books, 1982); The Grand Generation: Memory Mastery and Legacy (U. of Washington Press, l987); City Play (Rutgers University Press, l990); Because God Loves Stories: An Anthology of Jewish Storytelling (Simon & Schuster, 1997); Giving a Voice to Sorrow: Personal Responses to Death and Mourning (Penguin-Putnam, 2001), and Hidden New York: A Guide to Places that Matter (Rutgers U. Press, October, 2006). He is the author of a volume of poetry, I Hear American Singing in the Rain (First Street Press, 2002), and his poems have appeared in Rolling Stone MagazineLiterary Review East and other publications. His book, The Poetry of Everyday Life, was published by Cornell University Press in 2016.

Steve has also coproduced a number of award winning film documentaries Free Show Tonight on the traveling medicine shows of the l920s and 30s; From Mambo to Hip Hop, broadcast on public television in the fall of 2006, and winner of an Alma Award for Best Documentary; Deaf Jam, about American Sign Language poets, recently broadcast by Independent Lens on PBS; and Let’s Get the Rhythm: the Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack, which premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in 2014.

Website

Elaine Norman • Backdrop Art (thenormanconquest@earthlink.net)
ConvertCraft • Web Management (hello@convertcraft.com)

Board of Directors

Rohit Acharya,is a Partner at Common Good Labs where he works with foundations, governments, non-profits, and for-profit businesses to create applied solutions and tools built on data analytics. He spent many years working across five continents as a chief data scientist and investment professional at both traditional and startup organizations focusing on approaches that were culturally and geographically relevant. His current research focuses on improving poor neighborhoods without displacement and promoting drivers of entrepreneurship within the United States. Rohit has spoken extensively about data-driven sociological research, data product development, and financial inclusion at conferences hosted by the World Bank, G20 Summit, The Brookings Institution, and leading universities and institutions. He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Ray Allen is Professor Emeritus of Music and American Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. In addition to teaching classes in American music and folklore, he served as Sr. Research Associate at the college’s Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music where he produced conferences and festival on American music including tribute to Alan Lomax and the early folk music revival (in partnership with City Lore and the Alan Lomax Archive/Association for Cultural Equity, 2003).

His books on New York City music cultures include Singing in the Spirit: African American Sacred Quartets in New York City, Island Sounds in the Global City: Caribbean Popular Music and Identity in New York (co-edited with Lois Wilcken); Gone to the Country: The New Lost Ramblers and the Urban Folk Revival,  and most recently Jump Up! Caribbean Carnival Music in New York.

Ann Banks’ website Confederates in My Closet: Reckoning with Ancestors on the Wrong Side of History, explores how the past informs the present, in particular the continuing impact of slavery on this country. She uses her family history to challenge the Lost Cause narrative, the enduring pro-Confederate propaganda campaign that became the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow. The website is carried by History News Network. Her journalism has appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, The Nation and many other publications.  She has also published eight books for children.  She is a director and past president of the Writers Room, a writers’ colony in New York. First-Person America, her anthology of oral histories collected by the Folklore Unit of the Federal Writers Project, was published by Knopf and Norton and is available on Audible.  She co-produced a National Public Radio series on the same subject called “Voices from the Thirties.”  For the American Historical Association, she conducted a survey of Federal Writers Project manuscripts in state depositories.

Henry Chalfant started out as a sculptor in New York in the 1970s, and later turned to photography and film to do an in-depth study of hip-hop culture and graffiti art.His photographs record hundreds of ephemeral, original art works that have long since vanished. He has co-authored the definitive account of New York graffiti art, Subway Art with Martha Cooper (Holt Rinehart Winston, N.Y. 1984) and a sequel on the art form’s world-wide diffusion, Spraycan Art with James Prigoff (Thames and Hudson), with Sacha Jenkins (Thames and Hudson, 2015).In 1983, Henry co-produced with director Tony Silver the PBS documentary, Style Wars, the highly considered documentary about Graffiti and Hip Hop culture.He has continued to make documentary films about street culture and community life in New York City. In 1993 he and Rita Fecher made Flyin’ Cut Sleeves, a portrayal of 5 street gang presidents in the Bronx. His film produced by City Lore, From Mambo to Hip Hop was featured in the Latino Public Broadcasting series, Voces in 2006-2007, and won an Alma Award for Best Documentary.Chalfant is executive produceron Queer City, released in 2015, a documentary on gay life in New York in the new millennium, and Producer of Some Girls, a film by Raquel Cepeda that explores issues of identity within the Latina-American community.He is Executive Producer on a second film by Raquel Cepeda, La Madrina, The Savage Life of Lorine Padilla, which was featured in the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival. 

Exhibits of his photos begin with the O.K. Harris Gallery, 1980, the Mudd Club in 1980, the landmark ‘New York-New Wave’ show at P.S. l in 1981, and continue to include The American Century, at the Whitney Museum, New York, 1999; Born in the Streets at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, 2010 and Art in the Streets at MOCA in Los Angeles in 2011; Language of the Wall, at the Pera Museum in Istanbul, 2014; The Bridges of Graffiti, at the Biennale di Venezia, 2015; Henry Chalfant: 1980, at the Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, 1915; Art is Not a Crime, at the Centro de Arte Tomas y Valiente, Madrid, 2018: Art vs Transit, at The Bronx Museum, 2019.

Henry is represented by the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City

Amy Chin 陳雪媚 is a cultural leader who has advanced the role of arts and culture in communities large and small for over 30 years, through leadership and service in organizations like the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corporation, the Cultural Arts Advisory Commission for the City of New York, the New York Chinese Cultural Center, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Also an experienced genealogist and researcher, Amy lectures and conducts workshops nationally and internationally. Amy’s grandfather came to New York in 1903 and lived on Pell Street. After a childhood in her father’s Chinese laundry in the Bronx and Sundays in Chinatown, Amy earned a degree in East Asian studies from Barnard College and speaks Toisanese, Cantonese and Mandarin.  

Raquel Cepeda is the director, writer and co-producer of “Bling: A Planet Rock,” an 87 minute documentary about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds—“blinging”—and all its social trappings, and how this infatuation correlated with the ten-year conflict in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The film follows three rappers—Paul Wall, Tego Calderon, and Raekwon—as they trek to the country to meet the survivors, perpetrators and diamond miners in the country. The film also features Kanye West, Juelz Santana, Jadakiss and former child soldier/author Ishmael Beah. Cepeda co-produced the documentary with VH1, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A modified version for television of “Bling…” premiered under the title “Bling’d: Blood, Diamonds and Hip-Hop” on VH1 on February 22, 2007 (3.3 million viewers).  She is the author of And It Don’t Stop: The Best American HipHop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. New York: Faber & Faber Inc., 2004.

Esther Cohen (esthercohen.com) is a cultural activist who writes, teaches, curates, and helps people write books. She’s Executive Director of the non-profit arm of the National Writers Union, co-founder of Labor Arts, a virtual gallery for workers histories and the visual artifacts of labor, co-director of the Clara Lemlich Awards honoring women activists in their 80’s, 90’s, and 100’s, and former Executive Director of Bread and Roses, the cultural arm of 1199/SEIU.  She’s currently working with Beyond the Bars, at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, for formerly incarcerated and incarcerated women. She’s published six books and posts a poem a day on overheardec.substack.com

Terry Delis has worked closely with Amanda Dargan and the educational team while teaching and as a Principal at PS 78, LIC.  She collaborated with Amanda to help write grants for NEH funded programs to develop and implement in-depth social studies through the arts units for our students in grades 2 to 5. The focus was on collaborative planning with classroom teachers and City Lore Teaching Artists to implement weekly arts activities that culminated in student performances and presentations. Performances were integrated with the NYC social studies curriculum and included studies of China and its dances,, the study of the dance and history of the Iroquois and Seneca Native Americans in our state, and the study of the Mexican Revolution through theater and dance, which also reflected the students’ cultural backgrounds. As a member of the City Lore Board of Directors, she also assisted Amanda and her team to observe and document arts in education programs in D. 30 schools, and has also served on the NEH committee for the Summer Institute.

Ram Devineni is a documentary filmmaker, technologist, and founder of Rattapallax. He is the creator of the augmented reality comic book series, “Priya’s Shakti” which received the Tribeca Film Institute New Media Fund from the Ford Foundation and supported by the World Bank, and showcased at 2016 New York Film Festival. For creating India’s first female superhero who is a rape survivor, he was named a “gender equality champion” by UN Women. He produced “The Russian Woodpecker,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. He is developing HAL, a voice modulation that incorporates poetry to help people with Parkinson’s disease improve their speech.

Carrie Harris is a real estate attorney, specializing in landmark preservation, zoning, and government relations. She also “dabbles” in real estate development, focusing on mixed use, community development projects. Carrie is an amateur photographer and a passionate supporter of City Lore.

Bob Holman has been elected a member of the “Poetry Pantheon” by the New York Times, featured in a Henry Louis Gates, Jr. profile in The New Yorker, crowned “Ringmaster of the Spoken Word” by the New York Daily News, and “Dean of the Scene” by Seventeen Magazine. Holman has performed his poems with a Ukrainian punk band in Kiev, a griot in Timbuktu, a ballet company in San Francisco and at international poetry festivals around the globe. As the original Slam Master and a director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, creator of the world’s first spoken word poetry record label, Mouth Almighty/Mercury, and the founder/proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, Holman has played a central role in the spoken word and slam poetry movements of the last several decades. He is the author of 17 poetry collections, including The Cutouts (Matisse) (PeKa Boo Press), Sing This One Back to Me (Coffee House Press), and A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, a collaboration with Chuck Close), and has taught at Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Bard, and The New School. A co-founder and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, Holman’s study of hip-hop and West African oral traditions led to his current work with endangered languages. He is the producer and host of various films, including “The United States of Poetry” and “Language Matters with Bob Holman,” both nationally broadcast on PBS. “Language Matters,” Berkeley Film Festival’s 2015 Documentary of the Year, highlights Holman’s work with Endangered Languages. He was awarded the Ostana Award for Service to Endangered Languages in 2018, and presided over the European Poetry Slam Championship in Budapest. 2019 saw the presentation of “The Cut Outs (Matisse)” with dancer Molissa Fenley, and the premiere at the Camden Arts Centre, London, of a new film, “Talking Pictures,” which features his poems inspired by the paintings of his late wife, Elizabeth Murray. His new film, “Ginsberg’s Karma,” investigating the Beats in India and how they spawned the counterculture in the US, premiered at the Berlin Soup Festival of the Arts in Copenhagen. The accompanying book, Bob Holman’s India Journals, was published by Rattapallax.

Phyllis M. May-Machunda is a folklorist and scholar of African American culture, American multicultural studies, and social justice. A native of Iowa, she earned a Bachelor’s in Music (Voice) with Honors from the University of Iowa, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University-Bloomington in Folklore and Ethnomusicology.  After teaching for 30 years, including serving as founding chair of her department for 6 years, she is Professor Emerita of American Multicultural Studies at Minnesota State University Moorhead.  In the decade prior to moving to Minnesota, Phyllis was employed as a folklorist/curator in the Office of Folklife Programs, as well as a contract researcher for the Program in Black American Culture at the Smithsonian Institution.  A budding poet, her research and publication interests include African American traditional culture and music—with particular interest in women’s and children’s traditions and performance—as well as disability studies, multicultural education, antiracism, and social justice.

Bill Pearson is a management consultant with Gallup Hill, LLC, a partner with Contemporary Leadership Advisors, and a partner with the Windale Group. He earned an MBA from Columbia University as well as degrees in music and ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and worked as an ethnomusicologist in the public sector before going into business. He has served as CEO and CFO of several corporations.  He was a lecturer in Economics at Harvard University.  He is also a board member of the National Council for the Traditional Arts, Young Audiences Arts for Learning (chair), Young Audiences New York, and The Osborn.  He has written or produced books, articles, exhibitions, recordings, TV, and radio programs and has received two Grammy nominations  He is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors.

Holly Sidford is Co-Director of Helicon Collaborative, a national consulting firm that works with artists, cultural organizations, foundations and other creative enterprises to make communities better places for all people – more vital, adaptive and just.  Helicon focuses on three themes central to healthy communities:  equity, sustainability and beauty.  Holly has more than 30 years’ experience leading and developing nonprofit cultural and philanthropic organizations, and is nationally recognized for her work in expanding access to arts and culture, enhancing support for artists, and building organizations’ strategic capacity.  She has held leadership positions at the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and New England Foundation for the Arts.  Publications include Not Just Money:  Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy, Making Meaningful Connections; Fusing Art, Culture, and Social Change; Bright Spots Leadership in the Pacific Northwest; and The Case for Change Capital — all available onwww.heliconcollab.net.

Kiran Singh Sirah is a Speaker, Folklorist, Storyteller, Peacebuilder and Past President of the International Storytelling Center (ISC,) producer of the world-renowned National Storytelling Festival. Prior to his appointment at ISC, Sirah helped establish a number of award-winning arts, cultural, and human rights programs in numerous countries. These included community building programs at National Museums Scotland in response to the 9/11 attacks, and a number of peacebuilding and conflict resolution initiatives exploring issues of religious, ethnic, and sectarian conflicts in Scotland, Northern Ireland and the United States. In 2011, he embarked on a Rotary Peace Fellowship focusing on the folklore of “home” at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Upon graduating in 2013, he began his ten year tenure at ISC and helped the institution grow in ways previously unimaginable. Sirah is regularly asked to provide keynote lectures, workshops, and trainings for such entities as the Smithsonian Institution; the US State Department and Department of Defense; the Library of Congress; the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, the Pentagon, the White House, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and the United Nations; and has worked in and in collaboration with projects in Colombia, Brazil, Palestine, Israel, South Sudan and Uganda. In addition to storytelling for peace and justice, his passion includes mentoring youth and young adults, particularly youth-at-risk, peace activists, and poets (including mentoring national Poetry Out Loud champions,) to help them be positive change agents in their communities. In 2017, Kiran was awarded the “Champion of Peace” recognition at the Rotary International ceremony at the United Nations in Geneva and was recently nominated for work to receive a national educational Martin Luther King Jr. human rights award. Kiran firmly believes storytelling not only enriches lives, but also holds the key to building a fairer and more balanced world. https://www.kiransinghsirah.net/

Caitlin Van Dusen is a freelance editor and writer living in Brooklyn. She is the copy editor of the literary magazines McSweeney’s Quarterly, the Believer, and NOON and also edits books of literary fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies, she is an avid urban explorer and writes City Lore’s blog Sense & the City, documenting sensory experiences in little-known corners of New York City.

Marilyn M. White is professor of Anthropology at Kean University in Union, NJ, where she teaches courses in cultural anthropology and in African American Studies. She has a Master’s and Ph.D. in folklore, and her areas of interest include African American folklore, family folklore, folk narratives, and jokes and humor.

Kendall K. Williams is one of the newest board members of City Lore as well as a teaching artist with City Lore. As a teaching artist he is able to connect with the students through the cultural engagement of steel pan history and performance applications from Trinidad and Tobago while adding a unique perspective to convey to his fellow board members. Kendall has over thirty years of experience in steel pan while still pushing the limits through compositional experimentation, writing and educational tools, and continuous performances to bring awareness to his passion and talents. He graduated from Florida Memorial University with a BA in Music performance specializing in steel pan and holds an MM in Music Theory and Composition from New York University. Kendall has since returned to New York University as an adjunct lecturer while teaching Caribbean Carnival at Brooklyn College. He is also a current Teaching Assistant at Princeton University while he completes his Ph.D. in Music Composition.