People

Associate Professor of South Asian literature and culture at Northwestern University, Laura Brueck (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, 2006) specializes in modern and contemporary Hindi literature, with a particular focus on literatures of resistance, popular literatures, and translation studies.

Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her BA from the University of Chicago in 1997 and her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2008. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics.

A set of UChicago students will give a series of philosophical talks; the audience will have the chance to ask questions after each talk.

David Carlson has been a filmmaker, musician, car salesman, experience designer and is the co-founder of Opera-Matic, a non-profit street opera company in Chicago. The Hunting Accident is his first book.

Award-winning hip hop/contemporary dance company based in Chicago, Chicago Dance Crash has been described by The Chicago Tribune as “a compelling mixture of ballet, breakdancing, hip hop, martial arts and dangerous acrobatics into seamless alignment”.

Teresa Córdova (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1986) is the Director of the Great Cities Institute (GCI) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also Professor of Urban Planning and Policy in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs (CUPPA).

Led by Co-founder and Artistic Director Julie Nakagawa, DanceWorks Chicago fills a niche in the dance ecosystem. A creative incubator, DWC fosters a diverse next generation of movers and makers, empowering young artists to cultivate their unique voices through skill acquisition and development, collaborations and relationship-building with a global perspective, intense and intentional mentorship, and performances. #AlwaysMoving.

Marie Dougnac is a French Geography student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Lyon, France) and a Videographer, publishing Geographic content on Youtube.

Chayma Drira is a doctoral student in French and French Studies at NYU. Her doctoral research explores the memory of postcolonial immigration in France, and she has published as a Freelance journalist in France several articles comparing racial and social inequalities in the low-income neighborhoods of Chicago and Greater Paris. She will be in June 2022 one of the Villa Albertine’s residents in Chicago.

William Estrada explores how Art and art-making can function as a mode to critically listen to the experiences of historically marginalized people, emphasizing the generative process of collective knowledge, the importance of art making in amplifying stories often underrepresented, identifying networks of support that aim to organize a coalition of people, and invite a larger public to engage in imagining mutual liberation. The Mobile Street Art Cart Project is one of the platforms he uses to invite people in their neighborhoods to use art as a tool to complicate and celebrate the ideas they generate and in the process reclaim their creativity as a form of resistance.

Davey Friday is an artist and designer from the South Side of Chicago, IL. As a third generation Chicago resident, his work and design ambitions are heavily influenced by the urban fabric woven around him from childhood into adulthood. Davey has a Bachelor of Science in Biology degree from Roosevelt University and will be completing a Master of Architecture/Landscape Architecture dual degree from Illinois Institute of Technology in May of this year.

Mathilde views yoga as an opportunity to mute your mind and intentionally seek presence on the mat. She believes that a yoga practice develops rigor through strain, and builds strength from vigor. Mathilde has been a yoga instructor at CorePower Yoga since October 2019. Let’s get sweaty!

Beth Gibbons is the Executive Director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP). She works with companies, governments, and NGOs to understand and prepare for the impacts of climate change. She is a passionate advocate for the Great Lakes and a leading expert on preparing communities for climate induced migration to the region.

Erin Harkey is the Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) — appointed to the post by Mayor Lori E. Lightfoot in November 2021. She holds 20 years of experience working in the nonprofit and government sector helping individuals and communities succeed through the arts.

Professor Henderson is an international leader in landscape architecture design, history, and education. He is Director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program at Illinois Institute of Technology and founding principal of LIRIO Landscape Architecture.

Marvin Hoffman has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Harvard University. He has been a teacher at many grade levels from pre-K to graduate school. He was the Founding Director of the University of Chicago’s first charter school and one of the founders of its Urban Teacher Education Program.

Alenka Jerak is a slovenian career diplomat with many years of experience in various fields at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia and abroad. She has worked as a plenipotentiary minister and deputy ambassador to Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, and has served in Croatia and Canada. She is now Consul General in the U.S.A., based in Cleveland.

Tonika Johnson is a photographer, social justice artist and life-long resident of Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Englewood. She is also co-founder of the Englewood Arts Collective and Resident Association of Greater Englewood, which seek to reframe the narrative of South Side communities, and mobilize people and resources for positive change. Tonika’s art often explores urban segregation, documenting the nuance and richness of the black community to counter media depictions of Chicago’s violence.

Jamie Kalven is a writer and founding executive director of the Invisible Institute. His work has appeared in a variety of publications. In recent years, he has reported extensively on patterns of police abuse and impunity in Chicago. Among the national awards he has received are the 2015 George Polk Award for Local Reporting, the 2016 Ridenhour Courage Prize, and the 2017 Hillman Prize for Web Journalism.

Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Dutch-born CSO cellist Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she cultivates an exploratory, interactive creative practice at the fertile intersection of improvisation, composition, and collaboration. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts.

Marynia Kolak, MS, MFA, Ph.D., ​is a health geographer and data scientist at the University of Chicago using open science tools and an exploratory data analytic approach to investigate issues of equity across space and time. Her research centers on how “place” impacts health outcomes in different ways, for different people, from opioid risk environments to chronic disease clusters.

Emmanuelle Lallement is a French ethnographer. She is professor of urban ethnography at the Institute of European Studies at the University of Paris 8 and researcher at LAVUE (CNRS). Her research interests focus on urban and contemporary issues. Her ethnographic work focuses on Paris, through festive events, situations of commercial exchange and mobilities in the context of globalization.

Donald Lassere – born in Chicago, IL – was named the ninth President and Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago History Museum in April 2021. Lassere holds a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of San Francisco. He served as President and CEO of the Muhammad Ali Center and Museum (MAC) starting in 2012, providing leadership that enhanced the reputation of the center on a local, national and global basis.

Joséphine Lechartre is a French a Ph.D. candidate in Peace Studies and Political Science at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). Her research interests include: war legacies, transitional justice and post-conflict political participation. She works mainly on Latin America, with a specific focus on Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala.

Ann Marks spent thirty years as a senior executive before putting her skills to use unlocking the mysterious life of photographer Vivian Maier. She is the only person in the world to examine Maier’s archive of 140,000 images and is now the go-to source for information related to the photographer’s life and work. Her research has been featured in major media outlets around the world. Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny was published in 2021.

Kristin McWharter is a multidisciplinary artist that uses performance and play to interrogate the relationship between competition and intimacy. Her work conjoins viewers within immersive sculptural installations and viewer- inclusive performances that critically fuse folk games within virtual and augmented worlds. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Art and Technology Studies at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Juan Gabriel Moreno is an award winning Colombian born architect and President/Founder of JGMA (Juan Gabriel Moreno Architects), which operates from Chicago, Illinois. Moreno has worked on projects in many countries, and is known for his experimental socially-conscious designs.

Ingrid Nappi is currently professor in urban and real estate economics at Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and at the Observatoire de l’Economie de l’Architecture in Paris. Tenured research professor at Essec Business School where she created the Real Estate and Sustainability Chair. She concentrates her research mainly on sustainable cities and sustainable real estate as well workspaces in organisations.

Poems While You Wait, founded by Dave Landsberger, Kathleen Rooney and Eric Plattner, is a collective of poets and their manual typewriters whose mission is to appear around the city in public places – street festivals, museums, libraries, theaters and other events – to provide their patrons with a magical, unexpected, unpretentious and decontextualized encounter with poetry.

DJ and Music Historian Duane Powell has been a fixture in Chicago’s music, art and culture scene since the late 80’s. As a dj and music curator, he has held residencies and curated events at many of Chicago’s premiere venues and galleries including the House Of Blues, MCA and Stony Island Arts Bank. As a music historian, he has spoken at programs for UChicago Arts, Detroit Institute of Art, Chicago Public Library and many more.

Manijeh Razeghi was born in Iran. She is a French-American scientist in the field of  quantum semiconductors and optoelectronic devices. She is currently  the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Director of Center for Quantum Devices at Northwestern University and President and CEO of Nour.

Annelise Riles is Northwestern University’s Associate Provost for Global Affairs, the Executive Director of the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and a professor of law and anthropology. Her scholarship covers human rights, managing and accommodating cultural differences, and the regulation of the global financial markets. She is also the founder and director of Meridian-180, a multilingual transformative leadership forum.

Charlie Rizzo is the son of Matt Rizzo, the main character of the comic book The Hunting Accident.

Cindy Chan Roubik is a Deputy Commissioner with the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development and manages the design and planning review process for the central, north, and northwest planning regions. Recently, Cindy’s team completed the Central City Recovery Roadmap initiative, the Bronzeville Lakefront redevelopment project, the Chicago River Design Guidelines, and the Fulton Market Innovation District Plan. Cindy is a LEED accredited professional and prior to civil service, she worked as a licensed architect and lead designer for several mixed-use high-rise projects. Cindy is originally from Montreal and is an alumnus of McGill University’s School of Architecture. 

Aymeric Rousseau is the Manager of the Vehicle and Mobility Systems Section at Argonne National Laboratory. He received his engineering diploma at the Industrial System Engineering School in La Rochelle, France (1997) and an Executive MBA at Chicago Booth (2019). For the past 20 years, he has been evaluating the impact of advanced vehicle and transportation technologies from a mobility and energy point of view.

Lucas Roxo is a French-Portuguese journalist and documentary filmmaker. His work explores the issues of representation by interrogating the way the media depicts the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods, and settling in places marked by these issues. Currently in residence at the Ateliers Médicis, in Clichy-sous-bois / Montfermeil, he accompanies young people to make their own productions and create their own media.

Baudouin Saintyves is a multimedia artist, physicist and engineer. He is currently a staff scientist and visiting artist at University of Chicago. He was in residence at the School of the Art Institute in 2021 where he now teaches physics for art practices.

Noah Sobe (Ph.D., Wisconsin-Madison) is Professor at Loyola University Chicago. He works in the areas of history of education and in comparative and international education, and also teaches courses in international higher education. He is currently on an extended leave of absence from Loyola (2019-2022) and working at UNESCO headquarters in Paris on the Future of Learning and Innovation team where he helps to lead on UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative.

Connie Spreen co-founded The Experimental Station, a non-profit cultural incubator, in 2002. She holds a doctorate in French Literature and Languages from the University of Chicago. As Executive Director of Experimental Station since 2008, she has built its various programs, including the Blackstone Bicycle Works youth education program, the 61^st Street Farmers Market and food education program serving Chicago’s south side, and Link Up Illinois, which doubles the value of SNAP purchases at farmers markets throughout Illinois.

Obtained an Architecture Diploma in Paris 2007 with honors, Philippe Stanfield Pinel has focused on the value of urban spaces, throughout different means and typologies. Philippe has been through several architectural agencies such as Venturi Scott Brown (Pritzker Prize 1991), Atelier Christian de Portzamparc (Pritzker Prize 1994), X-TU. In 2014 with five other partners he has created BOA Studio and is now roaming around the globe to build-up projects with cities, governments and private clients to help create new values at night for the urban skylines.

Since September 2021, Yannick Tagand has been the Consul General of France in Chicago. Yannick Tagand is a graduate of the University of Paris I where he notably obtained a Masters in International Relations. He also holds a degree in Literal Arabic from the National Institute of Oriental Languages ​​and Civilizations.

Shermann “Dilla” Thomas— known as 6figga_dilla for his 86,000 TikTok followers — is a Chicagoan Urban Historian that has emerged through his videos as a charismatic and seemingly endless font of information, digging through Chicago history and making it relevant to our lives today — details that live in his head, ready to be offered at a moment’s notice.

Hugo Toudic is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Philosophy at Sorbonne University (CNRS) / University of Chicago. His doctoral research explores the political and philosophical influence of Montesquieu on the Federalist Papers (1787-1788), written to promote the ratification of the United States Constitution.

Emmanuel Vaillant is a French journalist. He is the director and co-founder of la Zone d’Expression Prioritaire, which is both a media project and a media education tool. Specialized in education and youth issues, he has written several books, including “Bonnes nouvelles de l’école” (Lattes, 2017) and coordinated collective books, including recently “Moi, jeune. Autoportrait d’un âge des (im)possibles” (Les petits matins, 2022). He is currently in Chicago as a Fulbright Scholar.

Ivy Wilson (Ph.D. Yale University) is associate professor of English and director of American Studies at Northwestern University. He teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture.

Architect Juliane Wolf (Studio Gang) designs and advocates for built structures that serve both their community and the environment. She has applied her expertise in designing sustainable public spaces, complex visitor-serving organizations, and towers, to many of the Studio’s most high-profile projects, including Writers Theatre, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, St. Regis Chicago, and the upcoming O’Hare Global Terminal.