CARL BELIZAIRE
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MY NGUYEN
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ALYSSA TOHYAMA
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SEAN TURNER
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ALAN WAXMAN
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CARL BELIZAIRE
Carl Belizaire is a professor, dance performer, and entrepreneur. He teaches math at Baruch College where he is a graduate in Entrepreneurship/Small Business Management. Carl spent years pursuing his love for dance and has built himself an extensive background through the performing world. Self taught in "Flexing," which originated from the Jamaican dance style "Bruk-Up" he has performed on the television station BCAT on the program "Flex in Brooklyn." The technique incorporates waving, gliding, pausing (pop locking), connecting (tutting), animation, lyricism, storytelling and musicality.
Carl's mastery of Flexing has allowed him to go professional and he has since worked as an instructor at Sports and Arts in School Foundation, an afterschool program geared towards enriching the lives of youths thorugh academics and extracurricular activities. Carl is featured in films such as "Girl Walk All Day," produced by Jacob Krupnick, "Attitude 3" produced by Isaac Goodwine, the documentary "Flex is Kings" produced by Diedre Schoo, and the opera "Kwaidan" by Yara Travieso and Jerome Begin. In addition, he manages his own group of dancers called Street's Finest and has performed at the WIld Project and the Brooklyn Museum. Carl has written a number of books on motivation, and when asked what drives him, he responds, "my desire to succeed in life and be able to support my family."
ABNER CALIXTER
Originally from Brazil, Abner Calixter holds a Master of Arts (M.A) degree in Sustainable International Development from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management - Brandeis University on sustainable development planning, design and policies. His expertise in Urban Climate Adaptation has been further enriched through his time with the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) DUSP – Department of Urban Studies and Planning. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), he has earned Executive Education Certificates in Climate Adapted Design and Master Planning for Sustainable Cities.
Calixter has contributed in 2014 as technical advisor to the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) Equator Initiative nominating sustainable projects across the globe to award the Equator Prize 2014. He is the co-author of Climate Adaptive Just and Urbanism CAJU which was awarded the global finalist position at the Mojdeh Baratloo Urban Urge Awards 2014 and granted the 3rd place at the Best Climate Practices from the International Center for Climate Governance ICCG. Calixter is currently pursuing his Ph.D at the University of Brasilia – UnB, with his research project based on adapting vulnerable urban communities that lie at the São Francisco River basin (semiarid region) against excessive heat stresses tackling heat-related mortality with sustainable urbanistic proposals. His investigation is being funded by Brazilian the Ministry of Science and Technology and Capes Foundation – Ministry of Education.
TAMEEL MARSHALL
Tameel Marshall curates psychological environments through music, word, and fashion. Recognizing our schizophrenic society, he aims to create spaces that bring people closer to their authentic self. He has worked for the Brownsville Community Justice Center since 2013, helped to design the Osborn Plaza, collaborated with major advertising design firms with the goal of reducing violence, and offers individual counseling to dozens of youth in Brownsville.
With the Matcha Party program, fashion styling, critical workshops, narrative design, and the Delicious Memories program with the Claus Meyer Melting Pot, he reveals the complex nature of often misunderstood environments and people.
MY NGUYEN
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My Nguyen is a public health biochemist who works to make structural change at multiple scales- from protein and nucleic acid arrangement to food and place making. Bringing people together goes hand in hand with scientific research, building social and economic capital locally. Currently, Nguyen is creating small genius labs for lower cost high quality care in Vietnam with her Vietnam Genius Lab project.
In New York City she worked in the New York Structural Biology Center on X-ray crystallography while starting a restaurant in lower Manhattan, Vietspot. This followed half a decade of research in histogenics as a genetics research analysts in Ossining NY. Before coming to the U.S., she worked at KBEC VINA in Seoul researching Vietnamese environmental regulations for international disputes and as a senior research analyst at the Pohang Accelerator Laboratory in X-ray crystallography. Her work combines biomedical, environmental, and social elements for population health improvement.
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DAYERLIN SANTIAGO
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Dayerlin Santiago works with migrant and immigrant populations in South American edge conditions. She is particularly focused on early childhood education and child psychology. The innocent child who gives without receiving is her magician, creating special environments that form the basis of communities despite challenging circumstances. In Caracas, Venezuela and in Lima, Peru, she works towards creating safe and educationally meaningful environments for children and women. This kind of space forms a kind of shrine in the city.
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She is currently working on identifying, protecting, and creating these sacred spaces of sanctuary on the outskirts of Lima.
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Simran Singh, an architect and an urbanist, is passionate about the intersection of contemporary architectural design with urbanism that mirrors her academic background from the Architectural Association, London. She strives to achieve balance between the two-scales by reconstituting place-making as an agenda of social, economic, and political concerns. Inclined towards domesticity and its role in shaping our communities, Simran presented her research on alternative housing typologies for sustainable city densification at the Healthy City Design International Congress 2019, London. Her design critique on mass housing projects as a consequence of biopolitics was published on the digital platform, CARTHA Magazine.
SIMRAN SINGH
Alyssa Tohyama is currently a student at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing a degree in Architecture with minors in Global Poverty and Practice, History and Theory of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and Architectural History. She is interested in the overlap between the built environment and inequality and is pursuing a career in creating built solutions for poverty alleviation. She currently works with the unhoused community in the Bay Area doing outreach and meal service.
ALYSSA TOHYAMA
SEAN TURNER
Turner was the face of Mayor Bloomberg's young man's initiative from 2013-2014. During this time, he was an Americorps member implementing Sandy recovery in Red Hook and Coney Island. Every year he participates in the Martin Luther King day of service. He has painted over 14 murals with Groundswell; 4 in Brownsville, and 10 elsewhere across New York City. He believes in designing restaurants from decor to menu, field to plate, emphasizing a diversity of international cuisine. Try his stromboli. He has been creating holistic food systems from community gardens to family gatherings for four years, since he has become the primary caregiver for his mother, suffering from diabetes.
He believes art and design are an essential part of treatment and food systems. Born in Brookdale hospital, Turner is a Brownsville resident of the New York City Housing Authority.
ALAN WAXMAN
Alan Waxman MLA creates ecosocial design for health equity and cultural resiliency. By operating in locations of fragility in space and time, he aims to bring people together to reopen critical narratives. His current Urban Rhythms studios assess urban patterns by way of participatory engagement, setting up emic spectrums of data derived from meaning for cultural insiders. Resident participants, those who have the most to gain and the most to lose, collaborate to make real time interventions through events, dance, and environmental change. As "Neighborhood Doctor," Waxman deploys ecosocial design in Brownsville, Brooklyn NY and Kyoto, Japan, where he serves as an instructor with the University of Oregon in their Myoshinji Zen temple based urban design program. In 2015, he and Sang Cho produced New York City's first Health Impact Assessment with a group of elder residents in Brownsville. Working on projects primarily for NYC Parks, Waxman works for Quennell Rothschild and Partners, a leading landscape architecture firm for public space design. He is an inaugural Forefront Fellow with the Urban Design Forum in New York City and he is working towards a PhD in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California Berkeley.
Waxman led Harvard’s Project Link Program from 2013-2014 for under-served youth, performing a youth led urban design charrette for a critical transportation artery in Malden Massachusetts. He is co-founder of Real Time Health Mapping, a trans-disciplinary thought experiment to bring social and environmental data streams into hospital IT to create a model for low cost, high quality chronic disease treatment based in long term community engagement. He served on the organizing committee for the 2014 Health Equity and Leadership Conference (HKS, HSPH, HGSD, College) aimed at curating closer relationships between Universities and community groups in Boston neighborhoods, particularly those at high risk for chronic disease. In 2012, with Nikola Bojic, Waxman designed and built Hangzhou’s Sinking Gardens, positioning a displaced community at the fore-front of Hangzhou’s contemporary public art scene. He has taught English as a second language in Kyoto, Japan, at the University of Oregon, and tutored high school in the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Waxman is originally from the Pacific Coast.
CALLIE WHEELER
Callie Wheeler is a Venture Catalyst - an instigator that makes things happen. Focusing primarily on social and interactive experiences she directs her energies towards supporting artists and entrepreneurs, working with them to kickstart, refine and implement their visions - creating lasting value and self expansion. Currently, Callie works as a Product Manager of mobile experiences at Prezi, the conversational presentation tool, in Budapest, Hungary. Having spent the last five years in San Francisco working for various digital experience companies as a User Experience Researcher and Product Manager, she has honed her skills in cultivating action.
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As a researcher at social shopping site ModCloth Callie utilized diary studies and contextual inquiry to provide guidance to product direction and strategy. While working with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) on a $2.5B project to replace all existing train cars, she facilitated participatory design, rapid prototyping, and community discussions with non-native english speakers and persons with disabilities to provide insight and feedback on train car and communication systems design. Using the tools and experience of Product Management, Callie supports experiential projects across the world from Pikkpack Shoes in Budapest to MatchaParty in New York City. She also regularly holds Product Office Hours for anyone who has an idea and would like to take it forward.
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