Joe Baker (Delaware Tribe of Indians), is a member of the Simon Whiteturkey family and direct line descendent of Captain White Eyes, War Chief of the Lenape, who negotiated the first Indian treaty with the new United States establishing an all Lenape 14th state. Baker is co-founder, executive director of Lenape Center in Manhattan, and an artist, educator, curator, and activist who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past 30 years. Baker is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work in New York, and was recently Visiting Professor of Museum Studies at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He serves as a board member for The Endangered Language Fund, Yale University and on the Advisory Committee for the National Public Art Consortium, New York and cultural advisor for the new CBS series, Ghosts.
Adrian Bejan was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for “his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems.” He earned all his degrees from the MIT. He is ranked among the top 0.01 percent of world scientists.
Sonja Bozic is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and professor. Serbian native and NYC-Baltimore based, she has edited, directed, and produced a wide range of video forms that have been screened at international festivals, including the Cannes Film Festival, and she participated in the 2013 Tribeca Hackathon as part of the Frontline/ProPublica team. Bozic is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Goucher College. She also served as a mentor and speaker internationally, giving talks at conferences such as SIGGRAPH and VR/AR Global Summit. Bozic is a Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellow and currently working on her VR project, “Chocolate Milk,” an immersive exploration of a mind of a person with autism.
Bassist Kim Clarke has performed most notably in two genres, jazz and R&B, with a plethora of musicians from Yusef Lateef, Joe Henderson to Defunkt and Queen Latifah. Her mother encouraged her to become a bandleader to help support women’s issues and education of students in the HBCU Bennett College.
Hadrien Coumans is a co-founder and co-director of the Lenape Center, as well as an adopted member of the White Turkey – Fugate family (Lenape). A leader in the creation and development of exhibits, performances, lectures, symposia, workshops, public art, publications, his work is centered in collective and individual well-being, empowerment, cultural continuance, genocide prevention and healing. Coumans is a published author, anthology editor, and a guest lecturer at Columbia University.
Caroline Davis is a composer, saxophonist, and artivist. She is active as both a side-person and a leader in a diverse set of music communities (jazz, improvised music, modern classical, R&B, folk). She has released six albums and has won Downbeat’s Critic’s Poll Rising Star Alto-Saxophonist (2018). Davis has been on the faculty at Litchfield Jazz Camp for 15 years, Stanford Jazz Institute for 6 years, and an educator at The New School, Northwestern University, Harvard University, DePaul University, Columbia College, University of Texas at Arlington, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Her work has garnered much praise from NPR, The New York Times, The Wire, DownBeat, JazzTimes, and many international publications.
Amélie Gaulier is a performance artist, Mindfulness instructor, coach, facilitator (MNDFL), and somatic movement therapist. Amélie’s approach crafts and weaves contemplative tools to nurture collective paths of care, creative imagination and deep listening. Making accessible frameworks to understand how accessing body wisdom, collecting stories, art and ethics practices relate and impact social transformation is where her collaborative work takes her.
French American, Julie Girard is a graduate of HEC and a Ph.D student in philosophy of aesthetics at Paris
8 University. She has worked for many years in the art world. Her first novel, The Twilight of the Unicorns,
recently published by Éditions Gallimard, explores the question of artificial intelligence.
Hannah Grunow is from Juneau, Alaska and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a BA in French Studies from Scripps College in 2022. During her undergraduate, she taught several weekly beginning-to-advanced French conversation classes and directed language activities at Claremont McKenna College. She wrote her undergraduate thesis on topics of music and the history of philosophical aesthetics. Having been a fellow at her college’s Humanities Institute, she especially enjoys studying non-European philosophy, as well as history.
Audrey Hatfield began her career in the corporate sector financing start-up technology companies. She is currently a masters student at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University focusing on mis/disinformation and tech accountability.
Cedric Ido is a French-Burkinabe artist, author, director, actor and illustrator. His short film, the award winning and critically acclaimed Hasaki ya Suda (2011), was exhibited worldwide in festivals such as FESPACO, Dubai, Venice and others. His directing work also includes documentaries such as Un Stains de musique, in which he followed several artists from his hometown Stains, and recorded their struggle to exist trough their art. His The Gravity, presented at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema puts a sci-fi twist on a gritty, up-to-the-minute drug crime saga and adroitly uses genre to comment on race, class, and the struggles of the recently incarcerated to reintegrate into society.
Wanjiru Kamuyu is a dancer and choreographer. She has worked with choreographers Jawole Willa Jo Zollar , Bill T. Jones, Okwui Okpokwasili, Molissa Fenley, Dean Moss, and in Europe with Emmanuel Eggermont and Nathalie Pubellier, as well as dir. Julie Taymor, among others. Kamuyu is the founder of the dance company WKcollective and her choreographic projects are presented internationally. Her dance-making’s overall eco-system is grounded in storytelling, focusing on unearthing un-heard, under-heard, ignored, rarely told and untold stories of marginalized communities.
Sarah Marx is a reporter covering the intersection of media and technology. She is currently pursuing an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University.
Nicholas Mirzoeff is a visual activist, working at the intersection of politics, race and global/visual culture. In 2020-21 he was ACLS/Mellon Scholar and Society fellow in residence at the Magnum Foundation, New York. A frequent blogger and writer, his work has appeared in Hyperallergic, the Nation, the New York Times, Frieze, the Guardian, Time and The New Republic. His new book White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness is forthcoming from MIT Press in early 2023.
Bruno Patino is President of ARTE since 2020. Dean of the Sciences Po Paris School of Journalism from 2007 to 2020, he is now an associate professor. An essayist, he has published several books on media and digital, including: Une presse sans Gutenberg, (Grasset 2005); La Condition Numérique, (Grasset 2012); Télévisions, (Grasset 2016); La civilisation du poisson rouge, (Grasset 2019); Tempête dans le bocal, (Grasset 2022); S’informer à quoi bon ? (Collection ALT, La Martinière, 2023). A former correspondent for Le Monde in Chile, he has held several key positions in the media and digital sectors.He has also led several official French missions on the digital shift (“Le devenir Numérique de l’édition”, 2007 or “Etats généraux de la presse”, 2008). He is a fellow of the Oxford Reuter’s Institute.
Cecelia Ramsey holds a master’s degree from NYU in literary translation from French to English. She currently edits articles produced by machine translation and is interested in the alteration of texts, particularly in works of translation, but also through the process of publication and subsequent textual reception. Passionate about pedagogy and mentorship, Ramsey has taught language in diverse environments, ranging from a two-room schoolhouse to a liberal arts university to a women’s prison. With experience in collaborative teaching, she is interested in innovative course design that connects French to other disciplines.
Live Reading of Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux’s Happening (L’événement) | Night of Ideas
Mona Eltahawy, Feminist Author
Niharika Rao, Student, Barnard College, and Co-Founder of Reproductive Justice Collective NY
Margo Jefferson, Author and Professor, School of the Arts, Columbia
Susan Rubin, Family Physician at the Institute for Family Health and Abortion Care Provider at Planned Parenthood
Thomas Dodman, Assistant Professor of French, Columbia University
Chiara Gabily Dodman, Student, Bard High School Queens
Ken Chen, Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Creative Writing, Barnard College
Rosalie Fisher, French Teacher, Saint Ann’s School
Colm Toíbín, Writer and Professor of the Humanities, Columbia
Taylor Rae Almonte, Student, Columbia
Domna Stanton, Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies, CUNY Graduate Center
Brooke Habit, Student, Columbia
Maria Stuebner, Student, Columbia
Dee Beasnael, Stage and Voice Artist
Dan Simon, Publisher, Seven Stories Press
Nellie Hermann, Writer
Judith Thurman, Writer and Critic
Ruth Weiner, Publicity Director, Seven Stories Press
Camila Valle, Editor, Translator, Writer, and Member of NYC for Abortion Rights
Marianne Hirsch, Professor Emerita, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, Columbia
Vinus Mahmoodi, Assistant Professor of Medical Psychology, Columbia Medical Center
Sanaë Lemoine, Writer
Chayma Drira, Journalist and Doctoral Student at NYU, and Villa Albertine Resident in 2022
Taylor Steinbruegge, Communication Officer at Villa Albertine
Alex Pekov, Early Career Fellow, Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, Columbia
Camille Abdesselam, Student, Columbia
Ilana Custos-Quatreville, Program Assistant, Columbia Maison Française
Laura Kolbe, Physician, Writer and Poet
Shanny Peer, Director, Columbia Maison Française
Madeleine Dobie, Professor of French, Columbia
Milène Klein, Student, Columbia
Tatiana Serafin is an award-winning journalist and senior fellow for the U.S. Global Engagement Initiative at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs where she co-hosts the international news podcast, The Doorstep. Serafin currently heads the journalism program at Marymount Manhattan College. Previously, she was a staff writer at Forbes and co-editor of the magazine’s annual “Billionaire’s List,” initiating coverage of billionaires in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City, currently teaching as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is the author of the Cyberfeminism Index.
Dr. Mona Sloane is a sociologist of design, inequality, and technology. She is Research Assistant Professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) and The GovLab, and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Mona founded and runs the IPK Co-Opting AI series at NYU and currently serves as editor of the technology section at Public Books.
Katharina Tittel is a doctoral student in Sociology at Sciences Po Paris, focussing on (social) media discourses around immigration in Germany and France, and inequality in who is visible on the subject on different platforms. She is currently a visiting student at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University.
McKenzie Wark is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and Program Director of Gender Studies at the New School. She is the author of notably A Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Molecular Red: Theory of the Anthropocene, The Beach Beneath the Street, and most recentlyPhilosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker, and Raving.
Lauren Wolfe is an award-winning journalist and photographer who has written for publications from The Atlantic to The Guardian. She publishes a Substack called Chills, where she pulls back the curtain on her many years of international investigative reporting. She is a contributing writer for Washington Monthly as well as an adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate school of journalism.