Archive

  1. Nadine Nelson

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    Nadine Nelson is a career educator, chef, artist, activist, and owner of Global Local Gourmet. As an expert in interactive culinary education and placemaking, she uses food as a catalyst and platform to build community, revitalize the neighborhood, preserve our cultural heritage, and empower people to lead healthier, happier, connected, and more prosperous lives by creating educational and recreational programming around cuisine from seed to waste. She has a teaching certificate from Tufts University, has studied cooking at the Ritz Escoffier in Paris and the New School in New York, and farming at Sterling College and with Soul Fire Farm.

  2. Marium Naveed

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    Marium (she/her) is a Fulbright scholar and a graduate student at Pratt Institute’s MS Urban Placemaking and Management program. In her work, she loves to explore themes of mobility and transportation and is interested in its intersection with social space.

    She has previously worked as an intern at Open Plans, studying placard abuse and the ways in which the government encourages driving among city employees. Her internship with the NYC DOT consisted of researching potential formalized curbside spaces for micro mobility delivery workers. She enjoys spatial analysis and has explored neighborhood walkability and cycling mobility for Brooklyn through a series of detailed maps.

    Her interests in placemaking and public spaces derive from studying urban sociology. For her undergraduate thesis, Marium analyzed the built environment of bus stops in Lahore, Pakistan with the aim of making them safer and more comfortable for women. On the weekends, she loves biking through NYC parks and neighborhoods and petting bodega cats. 

  3. Joanne Wu

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    Joanne Wu is an undergraduate student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn majoring in Industrial Design and minoring in Interior Design. She’s a community-driven individual with a strong academic background in art, design, and leadership. In the future, she hopes to work in urban design, placemaking, and/or public space with a professional commitment to social equity, justice, and accessibility.

  4. Pramity Shah

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    Pramity Shah (she/her/hers) is a designer in the greater New York Area. She is currently in her third year at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York where she is working towards her Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Design. She is interested in placemaking, inclusivity, and equity, and believes that public space is what holds communities together.  

  5. Natalie Quah

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    With the goal of doing urban planning, Natalie is currently pursuing her Masters in Applied Urban Science and Informatics at NYU to complement her background in ecology and environmental science. She was born and raised in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia. Moving to NYC after completing undergraduate studies in Los Angeles, she is curious to discover similarities and differences between all the cities she has lived in. Most of all, she is incredibly passionate in place-making, and believes that spaces should be activated with meaning and potential for stories to continue being made.

  6. Akshay Shetty

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    Akshay Shetty is an aspiring Urban Data Scientist focused on issues of social and environmental justice and social equity. He is interested in researching the role of technology-driven solutions in voicing the rights of marginalized communities and thereby creating safe, sustainable, and resilient cities. This interest is grounded in an architecture and urban planning education and driven by the experience of working on urban research projects where he’s been involved in design and storytelling capacities. Akshay co-founded a multidisciplinary design and analytics organization and has recently worked in the Data Science team of a prominent Public Policy think tank in Mumbai, India.

  7. Sofia Kavlin

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    Sofia Kavlin (she / her) is a designer and storyteller born in Toronto, Canada and raised in La Paz, Bolivia. She is currently completing a Masters degree in Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons, New York. She believes in the power of storytelling to organize people around new values and goals — striving towards regenerative systems that support our environment and communities equally. She grounds her work in the Slow Movement, questioning the “need for speed and caffeine culture” in favor of a slower pace of living revolving around community and connection to place. She is conducting an independent study on embodied pla(y)cemaking with Mary Abrams.
    Previously, Sofia worked on projects for the United Nations – Office for Landlocked and Least Developed States, the Inter-American Development Bank and Art for Amnesty. She co-founded Seeds Game Lab in 2020 focusing on the role of play in bringing forth narratives anchored in indigenous knowledge, just and regenerative values. She is a yoga teacher and poetry writer on medium.