students from There’s No Business Like Small Business

Students from the School for Legal Studies in class worked with CUP and Teaching Artist Sam Holleran on an Urban Investigation that investigated the future of small businesses in NYC. 

Mahkeddah Thompson

Mahkeddah Thompson is a two time Public Access Design alum. Thompson works at Housing Court Answers, a group that provides eviction prevention services to pro se litigants in NYC Housing Courts. Thompson is a passionate social justice, crochet and roots reggae records. She runs a small handmade business, Konjo Crochet.

Thumb

Thumb is a graphic design office that works on both commissioned and speculative projects, usually in the areas of architecture and urbanism. They collaborated with CUP on The Cargo Chain MPP.

Frampton Tolbert

Frampton is CUP’s Deputy Director. For more than 20 years, he has worked in development and communications for arts and architecture organizations. Previously he was the Deputy Director of the Historic Districts Council. He has received a New York State Council on the Arts grant and a James Marston Fitch Foundation Fellowship for his work examining vernacular modernism in the borough of Queens, and currently serves on several boards including Docomomo New York/Tri-State and Municipal Art Society’s Preservation Committee. Frampton holds a degree in historic preservation from the University of Mary Washington. 

Mark Torrey

Mark Torrey is a Community Education Program Manager for CUP, working on Making Policy Public and the Envisioning Development Toolkits. Previously he spent a good long while working as an Information Technology Specialist (computer guy) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but then decided to firm up his understanding of cities by getting a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. He wears his pants in the Highwater fashion, which most of the CUP staff find to be ridiculous, but it keeps his pants from getting caught in the bike chain.

He has been a CUP staff member since 2011.

Chat Travieso

Chat Travieso is a Brooklyn-based artist, designer, and educator. He creates architectural public art projects that reinforce social bonds in our public spaces. His most recent works were commissioned by or organized in collaboration with The Architectural League of New York, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Lower East Side Waterfront Alliance, Design Trust for Public Space, and the NYC Department of Transportation. He has worked as a teaching artist with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and Hester Street Collaborative. He is currently a Smack Mellon Studio Program Artist and a recipient of a New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship as part of his Smack Mellon residency.

Valeria Treves

Valeria Treves is the Executive Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment (NICE), a community based organization and workers center in Jackson Heights Queens that works to ensure that new immigrants can build social, political and economic power in their communities and beyond. As Executive Director, Valeria has overseen the transition of NICE into a member led organization streamlining programs and campaigns to more closely fit the needs of the member base, newly arrived low wage undocumented immigrants working in the unregulated sectors of the construction, domestic work, and service industries. Prior to coming toNICE in 2006, Valeria worked as an Adjunct Lecturer at Hunter College-CUNY and was an adjunct organizer for the PSC-CUNY. Before that she worked as a Middle School Teacher in Oakland, California and was active in teacher organizing in the fight against high-stakes standardized testing. Valeria holds an M.A. in Geography from Hunter College-CUNY and a B.A. in Development Studies from UC Berkeley. Valeria is a native of Buenos Aires, Argentina and grew up in Mexico, Argentina and Los Angles, CA.

Rich Tu

Rich Tu is an award winning designer and art director working in New York City. He is a recipient of the prestigious Young Guns award through the Art Directors Club, and has exhibited at galleries and festivals in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Miami. Commercially, his clients include The New York Times, The New Yorker, Business Week, Alfa Romeo, Bombay Sapphire, G-Shock, Converse, NPR, NorthFace, Purple Label, Skype, Coca-Cola, Verizon, Fuse TV, and Bravo TV, among others. Rich is a graduate of the Illustration as Visual Essay program at the School of Visual Arts.

Teachers Unite

Teachers Unite is an independent membership organization of public school educators supporting collaboration between parents, youth and educators fighting for social justice. TU organizes teachers around human rights issues that impact New York City public school communities, and offers collaborative leadership training for educators, parents and youth.  We believe that schools can only be transformed when educators work with and learn from parents and youth to achieve social and economic justice. TU collaborated with CUP on the MPP “Schools Are Us.”

The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board

The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board is a nonprofit organization that helps low-income tenants control their housing through the creation of limited-equity cooperatives. UHAB also helps tenants preserve existing and affordable housing by empowering them to make proactive decisions about the future of their homes. UHAB collaborated with CUP on the MPP Predatory Equity.

Michelle de la Uz

Michelle de la Uz became the Fifth Avenue Committee’s (FAC) Executive Director in January 2004. Prior to joining FAC, Michelle was program director for the uptown sites of the Center for Urban Community Services in Washington Heights and Harlem, where she oversaw services in supportive housing for 400 low-income tenants and managed a staff of 30. Previously she was Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez’s first director of constituent services and directed her South Brooklyn District Office. Michelle is the first in her working-class immigrant family to graduate from college and is a product of bilingual education. She is a long-time Park Slope resident, a former trustee of Connecticut College, the recipient of the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award and is now President of the Board of Directors of ANHD (Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development). Recently, Michelle was accepted into Fannie Mae’s NeighborWorks Achieving Excellence in Community Development program at Harvard University.

Michelle was a MPP juror.

Anusha Venkataraman

Anusha Venkataraman is an urban planner, writer, artist, and activist. She is presently the Director of the Green Light District initiative at El Puente, a community human rights institution in Brooklyn, NY. She has worked with numerous community groups in local organizing efforts, and as a visual artist both individually and with collectives. In 2010, she edited Intractable Democracy: Fifty Years of Community-Based Planning, a book celebrating New York City’s legacy of grassroots neighborhood-based activism. Anusha was the Youth and Outreach Director at the Steel Yard in Providence, Rhode Island. She holds a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute, and a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Brown University. She served on a 2013 Public Access Design jury.

Mariel Villeré

Mariel Villeré, former intern at CUP, focuses on the revitalization of post-industrial architecture and urban spaces through art, architecture, and cultural activities. Professional experience at small design studios, non-profits, and museums situates her work between disciplines. She is currently a Masters Degree candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art and holds a BA in Architecture from Barnard College, where she first learned about CUP.

Minh Anh Vo

Minh Anh Vo is one half of Papercut, along with Victor Schuft. Minh Anh & Victor are two French graphic designers, though their names may sound either Vietnamese or German. Minh Anh was born in Annecy and grew up in Paris. Victor comes from Troyes. They met in Brussels, where they studied Graphic Design and Typography at La Cambre School of Arts. After graduating in 2006, they decided to move to Los Angeles and eventually got married at LAX. They are now living and working in Brooklyn. Papercut worked with CUP to design the Fracking in the Delaware River WatershedMPP.

Mary Voorhees Meehan and Neil Donnelly

Neil Donnelly and Mary Voorhees Meehan are graphic designers who work in print, identity, interactive, exhibition, and motion design. Their clients include Yale University, Williams College, the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, The New York Times, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The New School, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have been working together since meeting in the graphic design MFA program at Yale. Both are active design educators and live and work in Brooklyn. Neil and Mary will be working with CUP on the upcoming MPP Increasing Immigrants’ Access to Banks.