Mike Hickey

Michael Hickey currently serves as Director of Strategy and Partnerships for the NYC Office of Community Schools, an initiative to address poverty and inequity in public education by embedding non-profit social services in schools.  Prior to this, Mike consulted as Man About Town for nonprofit, foundation, public sector and private partners in project development, strategic planning, and organizational change.  From 2008 to 2011 he served as the founding executive director of the Center for NYC Neighborhoods (CNYCN):  the nation’s single largest foreclosure prevention intermediary.  Before stepping up to lead CNYCN, Mr. Hickey spent ten years as a community development banker and philanthropic program manager with Deutsche Bank, providing loans and investments to leading non-profit partners revitalizing low and moderate income communities throughout New York City and beyond. 

Mike has served on many boards and advisory committees over the years, and currently acts as board chair and Resident Composer for Downtown Art, and as board Treasurer for Civic Consulting USA. Mike has a B.A degree in English Literature from Ohio University and a Masters of Science in Social Work from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Deja Holden

Deja was the Design Assistant at CUP. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in Communication Design and her BA from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in Political Science. She is interested in design as a tool for demystifing public policy, and its role as a vehicle for broader civic engagement. 

Adriene Holder

Adriene Holder serves as Attorney-in-Charge of the Civil Practice of The Legal Aid Society, and is responsible for managing the provision of comprehensive civil legal services through a network of 25 neighborhood offices courthouse based offices, and specialized city-wide units serving all five boroughs of New York City for the oldest and largest provider of legal services for low income individuals and families in the United States. The Civil Practice works on over 43,000 civil matters yearly. In addition to her formal duties, Adriene also serves as an executive member on several boards, is actively involved with not-for-profits, and in 2002 was appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to serve as a Tenant Representative on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board.

Sam Holleran

Is an artist, designer, and writer. Sam was CUP’s Communications Coordinator from 2011 to 2014. He attended the the Cooper Union where he was the recipient of the Herb Lubalin Fellowship for Typography and the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for Creative Inquiry. Sam has worked extensively in printmaking; his fields of interest include: photogravure, letterpress, Ukiyo-e, and silkscreen.

Fielding Hong

Fielding is a Youth Education Program Manager at CUP. He has over 10 years of experience as a youth educator working at the intersections of history, the arts, and social justice. Fielding has worked as both a high school history teacher in Philadelphia and a museum educator in New York. He holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Wesleyan University, a teaching degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master’s in Culture and Gender Studies from Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. 

Christina Houle

New media artist Christina Houle holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is currently working to complete an EdM in Technology, Innovation and Education from Harvard (2016).  Primarily interested in new forms of story telling as a tool for social justice, Houle’s work aims to bring new insights into how empathy can inform conflict resolution and is committed to the apprehension of emergent phenomena at the intersection of the aesthetic and journalistic.  As an award winning choreographer and filmaker her work has appeared at Movement Research at Judson Church, the NYU Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and at Second City Chicago, been supported by the Rema Hort Mann Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation. 

Students from How Do We Look?

CUP and CUP Teaching Artist Paul Sargent worked with students from Ms. Cardarelli’s advisory class at the Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice on  a project about surveillance. Those students were: Zarminaoy Akhmedova, Susie Alvarez, Nalyn Celestine, Evelyn Cordero, Marium Dar, Ashley Desil, Melissa Dominique, Hira Ghaffar, Kiram Imtiaz, Sara Iqbal, Alyssia King, Aisha Loane, Deeba Mazhar, Kelly Mishquiri, Shanel Montreuil, Lina Mubarez, Shanella Palmer, Tayyaba Rehman, Manahil Sami, Khadija Sarwar, Iqra Tariq.

Rajan Hoyle

Rajan Hoyle is a Project Manager (Contractor) at CUP. Born in Los Angeles and raised in Long Beach, California, Rajan is an urbanist, a geographer and a multimedia storyteller. Rajan previously worked for the City of Long Beach where he wrote policy on digital inclusion, led community engagement and project managed creative placemaking initiatives. He has also directed a year-long participatory GIS mapping project with Garifuna youth in rural, coastal communities in Honduras. His research interests are at the intersection of spatial analysis, ethnography and participatory planning in marginalized communities. Rajan holds a BA in Urban Studies from UC Berkeley and is a Master in City Planning candidate at MIT.

Students from I Heart East New York

Students from the BCCP at Wingate Campus on the I Heart East New York Urban Investigation. The student participants were Ian Boyd, Thaddeus Cooke, Nayelly Escobar, Dionne Matthias, William Metellus, Gavin Noble, Isaiah Peeples, and Kendra Tull. 

Students from Internet is Serious Business

Kristian Roberts, Joanna Pajuelo, Darnell Lubin, and Brian Garrido, all from City-as-School, collaborated with CUP and Helki Frantzen on “The Internet is Serious Business.”

IntraCollaborative

IntraCollaborative is David Frisco, Chantal Fischzang, Natalie Sims, Richard Hall and Leigh Mignogna. Our recipe is an educational methodology: a designer/professor with many years experience combining design with public service, and three former and one current Pratt Communications Design MFA students who’ve worked closely for the last several years.

IntraCollaborative worked on the Rent Regulation Rights Making Policy Public project with CUP and CAAAV. The project has gone on to be translated into Spanish for both New York and San Francisco residents, and most recently has been awarded a Sappi: Ideas That Matters grant which funded the 2015 MTA Subway poster campaign.

Ellie Irons

Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator exploring the interplay of humanity and ecology through drawings, environmental sculpture, and site responsive projects. Born in rural Northern California, she went to college in Los Angeles, where she studied art and environmental science. After falling in love with biology field work, she began combining ecology with art. She relocated to New York City in 2005, and completed her MFA at Hunter College in fall 2009. She now teaches and keeps a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Leon Anthony James

Leon Anthony James is a Brooklyn based photographer. He believes whole heartedly in the goodness and creativity of people and hopes that any and all work he does reflects that belief. In the past he has had the honor of teaching at Brooklyn College, as well as being a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow and Caribbean Cultural Centers African Diaspora Initiative Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellow. 

Rebecca John

Rebecca was CUP’s Development and Communications Assistant. She joins CUP after working with organizations building the power of working-class, immigrant communities in New York City. She is interested in the ways art, culture, and design play a critical role in instigating social change by building people’s capacities to engage with social issues, organizations, and movements from an individual to a mass level. She takes inspiration from the legacy of artists like Gayle Asali Dickson, Emory Douglas, and Rini Templeton who produced art and graphics for Black Liberation and Latin American movements for liberation.  She hopes to amplify CUP’s work creating tools that connect, inform, and activate communities impacted by systems of oppression to transform our world towards justice. In her free time, she is a creative writer, a pie-maker, an animal enthusiast, and a lover/collector of textiles from the Global South.

Parker Johnson

Parker Johnson was CUP’s Spring 2021 intern. Parker is currently pursuing a BA in Studio Art at Hope College. Residing near Lake Michigan, her passion for adventure has led her to learn more about the environment and form new connections with different cultures. She loves photography and wants to help advocate for social and environmental change through design. In her spare time, you can find her at the dog park or swimming in Lake Michigan.