Afaf

Co-founder of The Cultural Salon and a freelance writer. She writes about culture and arts in the West Bank, elevating both traditional and innovative creative work. This, in turn, supports urban regeneration as a solutions-based approach to the challenges experienced by Palestinians living under occupation. The problems of gentrification in the Global North differ from those in cities like Hebron, Bethlehem, and Jenin, where people are severely deprived of access to the arts and culture. This is why Afaf supports local solutions to local problems and centers creativity in her writing.

Alex Smith

Alex Smith is a writer and Associate Teaching Professor in the English department at Seattle University. She has a PhD in Twentieth Century Multi-ethnic Literatures of the U.S. from the University of Washington. Her writing explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in urban spaces and her research has been published in Praxis and MELUS. 

Chisara Asomugha

.CHISARAOKWU. is an Igbo American transdisciplinary poet, artist, and physician creating multimedia poetry. Her chapbook “This Wake Holding, Mmiri” received the 2023 Evaristo Poetry Prize’s Honorable Mention from the Africa Poetry Book Fund. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, Cave Canem, and The Poetry Foundation. A retired physician, she is working on her debut poetry collection.

Elizabeth Moss

Elizabeth Moss is an award-winning journalist based in Los Angeles. Moss likes writing solutions stories about child welfare, domestic violence, and health disparities. Her work has appeared in The 19th, AfroLA, and PBS, among others. She has held multiple reporting fellowships, including a California Health Equity Fellowship at USC’s Center for Health Journalism. In the past, she worked as a podcast producer, fact-checker, and researcher.

Hannah Fenster

Hannah Fenster is a writer and dancer in Baltimore, MD, where she is the Events Manager at The Ivy Bookshop. Her writing appears in Lumina, The Shallow Ends, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is a former educator at Goucher College and likes making things with other people, most recently with the Baltimore immersive theatre collective Submersive Productions.

Johannes Novy

Johannes Novy is an urban planner and works as Senior Lecturer and Course Director of the MA Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Westminster in London. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University, New York, and researches and teaches on a range of issues including urban development and urban tourism and their interaction as well as urban conflicts and protests.

Laura Scherling, Ed.D.

Laura Scherling Ed.D. is designer, researcher, and educator. She is a director and lecturer at Columbia University and the co-editor of Ethics in Design and Communication and the new open access book Digital Transformation in Design. Scherling is also the co-founder of the design and sustainability organization GreenspaceNYC and their annual lab Civic Art Lab.

Lottie Hanwell

Lottie Hanwell is a researcher and writer based between London and Brighton, UK. She leads research at Democracia84, a participatory think tank and creative engagement lab focused on young and working-class communities. She also holds an MSc in Climate Justice from Glasgow Caledonian University, where she researched equitable approaches to urban greening. Her writing focuses on social and environmental justice in cities.

Michael Koy

Michael Koy is a Toronto-based journalist who covers topics related to improving our cities and urban environments. His writing has been featured in places such as Context News (Thomas Reuters) and Next City Magazine.

Prosper Adankai

Prosper Adankai is a Ghanaian-born educator, freelance broadcaster, and social entrepreneur. Born on November 11, 1986, he excelled academically and professionally to become a sought-after writer. He began his writing career as a professional teacher in September 2011 and transitioned to Broadcasting by pursuing training at GBC Broadcasting College in October 2017. 

Since then, he has worked with URA Radio, the Upper East Regional station of the State Broadcaster GBC, as a News Anchor, as well as a correspondent for Radio Ghana and Ghana Today until 2022. As a Freelancer, he has several publications on social, environmental, and cultural stories featured on bisaafrica.org,  modernghana.com,  gbcghanaoline.com , among others. 

As part of his corporate social responsibility, he has volunteered for several organizations, including serving as Coordinator of the Green Africa Youth Organisation (GAYO) Eco-Club campus at UDS Nyankpala in the Northern Region, Ghana; President of the IoT Network Hub—Bolgatanga Hub, Upper East Region, Ghana; and Ambassador to B. ISA.

He has also served as a Resident Journalist and Education Officer at the Upper East Regional Museum of the Ghana Museums and Monument Board.

Simone Egger

Simone Egger is a cultural anthropologist from Munich, Germany. She is a professor for European anthropology at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany. Transformations in urban societies are main topics of her research that is often located at the interface of art and science.

Toby Godfray

Toby Godfray, Master’s in MSc Sustainable Cities at the King’s College London, is a mobility consultant within the Cities department at Buro Happold, a Trustee for public arts charity Urban Eye, and newly a city director for the FEM.DES. London chapter. His interest in the intersections of mobility, critical feminist design, public art, and spatial justice ultimately underlines his written work.

Valeria Schiller

Valeria Schiller — born in Crimea, Ukraine, 1994. Art historian, curator, author and editor of texts. In 2019, she was a Junior Curator at the PinchukArtCentre and a Curatorial Team Member at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre. From 2016 to 2018, she worked in the archive of PinchukArtCentre’s Research Platform in Kyiv. From 2019 to 2022, she was an art history lecturer at the Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, and from 2020 to 2022, Schiller was an editor-in-chief of an online media about contemporary art Artslooker. In 2022, Schiller was a fellow at the educational department at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and in 2023 she was a scholarship holder at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien Berlin. Currently, she lives and works between Berlin and Buenos Aires.

Vivienne Marquart

Vivienne Marquart is a social and cultural anthropologist interested in urbanity, migration, and the various forms of memory and remembrance. She gained her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, doing research in Istanbul (Turkey) on the construction and contestation of cultural heritage, focusing especially on UNESCO World Heritage.

Yasmeen Abdallah

Yasmeen Abdallah is an interdisciplinary artist, working across intersections of sculpture, textiles, painting, collage and social engagement. Drawing from the personal and the political through elements of memory, trauma, resilience, and persistence, this work takes shape in various capacities from minimal gestures to maximal installations. Yasmeen uses a variety of materials and processes to illustrate the connections between our bodies, allegories, contemporary culture and colonialism. This work is inspired by histories, social movements, space, place and personhood. Yasmeen earned Bachelor’s degrees from University of Massachusetts in Anthropology (emphasis in Historical & Collaborative Archaeology, which included field schools with New England indigenous tribal communities); and another in Studio Art with honors, including a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Yasmeen also holds an MFA in Fine Arts with distinction from Pratt Institute. Her work as an artist, curator, writer, and educator has included roles as a visiting lecturer, grant recipient and resident at numerous institutions. Fusing together years of decolonial practice, grassroots organizing and creative reuse, Yasmeen has cultivated regenerative discussion, support for emerging artists, and fostered foundational thinking for place-making. Through this work, Yasmeen believes solid communities are sustained and can thrive through cultures of care, collectivity, and resourcefulness as they navigate shifting discourse, movements and landscapes.

Yosuke Homma

Yosuke Homma is a researcher and urban activist based in Tokyo with a Master’s degree in Architecture from Waseda University. While professionally analyzing human lifestyles and well-being within the housing industry, he focuses his independent research on sustainable urban design and bicycle-oriented strategies. Drawing on his academic background in urban design, he recently launched a grassroots initiative to advocate for human-centric streets in Tokyo, viewing the city’s infrastructure through the lived experiences of its residents.