Part of the Practice

2024-25 SPCUNY Student Actionist April Wen (2026 MFA in Film Directing, Brooklyn College) joins host Catherine LaSota for a conversation about community, what is possible in public space, and the importance of telling our stories and being witnessed. They also talk about privately owned public space, where disruption plays a role, and the process of learning and unlearning how to be in social space.

April Wen is one of the contributors to our book Practicing in Public, forthcoming from OR Books in February 2027. Pre-order by December directly from OR Books for early shipping and a 15% discount:
PRE-ORDER here: https://orbooks.com/catalog/practicing-in-public/

About our guest:

April Wen is an artist and filmmaker. Their work transforms personal experiences of loss and reincarnation into invitations for collective mourning, acts of historical remembrance, and consideration of the “nature” of such rituals in a digital age.

More about April Wen:

website: aprilwen.info
Instagram: @echofaunalang

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Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

We are kicking off our final season of Part of the Practice with a very special guest: Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, one of Social Practice CUNY's amazing doctoral fellows.

Host Catherine LaSota chats with Jacquelyn, a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center CUNY, about her dissertation research and her ritual offerings on The Witch's Dance; her work in attention, magic, thresholds, and possibilities; and the program that Jacquelyn recently organized called "How Do We Keep Secrets in Public?", which brought together people from her network of magicians, ritualists, psychic mediums, sex workers, death doulas, hypnotists and more for an evening of experiences to investigate the idea and practice of secrets. This episode is a fantastic opportunity to get to know the projects and interests of artist, scholar, and educator Jacquelyn Marie Shannon outside of the invaluable work she does for SPCUNY! Find out more at jacquelynmarieshannon.com.

About our guest:

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a ritual and dance artist, occult scholar-educator, and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY whose work explores dramaturgies of magic, witchcraft, haunting, and the supernatural. She is especially interested in ritual and artistic processes that engage spirit(s), alternative temporalities, liminal and altered states, synesthesia, hypnosis, visions and dreams. Jacquelyn has performed, presented research, taught, designed and facilitated transformative ritual experiences across the US and internationally, heavily informed by over 20 years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical & psychodramatic theatre, ritual practice, and contemporary performance. Her dissertation project weaves archival, ethnographic, and practice-based research to investigate the relationship between theatricality, embodied technique, and ritual efficacy towards producing experiences of magic and transformation in The Witch’s Dance. Beyond academia, Jacquelyn consults on ritual, magic, and supernatural experience design for theatre, dance, and film, while also working behind closed doors with private clients as a ritualist, magical consultant, and integrative hypnotist. Jacquelyn (not-so-secretly) weaves her research and practice into everything she creates, taking exquisite care to craft both intimate and collective experiences that genuinely affect those who take part and leave them a little haunted.

More about Jacquelyn Marie Shannon:

website: jacquelynmarieshannon.com
Instagram: @ghostinglass

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
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Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Social Practice CUNY Teaching Scholar-in-Residence Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib joins host Catherine LaSota for a conversation about the South Bronx, cats, definitions of home, ecosexuality, and more. Tune in and be inspired by Nicolás's description of his writing office, The Shrine, plus his deep love for water and his connection to the Bronx River.

This is our last episode before a brief hiatus in season two, while Catherine focuses on other projects at SPCUNY, including a book of conversations (Practicing in Public) to be published by OR Books in February 2027. We will be back with more Part of the Practice episodes soon!

A couple of corrections on things mentioned in this conversation:

Dumit is actually Nicolás's middle name (not his last name), and the Ecosex Symposium in the UK was in 2013.

About our guest:

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel Atrib treads an elusive path that manifests itself through creative experiences that he helps unfold within the quotidian. He has exhibited or performed at Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05/07/21, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, Pontevedra Biennial, Queens Museum, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Sculpture Center, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance BAAD!, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, City as Living Laboratory, Princeton University, Anthology Film Archives, El Museo del Barrio, Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Nicolás has received mentorship in art in everyday life from Linda Mary Montano, a historic figure in the performance art field. Nicolás holds an M.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, where he studied with Coco Fusco, and an M.A. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He was recently a Senior Lecturer and Social Practice Artist in Residence in the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at Austin; and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Nicolás is a 2025-26 Teaching Scholar in Residence at Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY). Born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite in 2011.

Photo of Nicolás is by Donna Hoffman.

More about Nicolás:

website: interiorbeautysalon.com
Instagram: @interiorbeautysalon

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
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Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

This episode features a conversation with Chris Harding (2024-25 SPCUNY Student Actionist Fellow), who is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the City University of New York Graduate Center. His work focuses on themes relating to capitalism, class, labor and agrarian life in Mandate Palestine, and his work was featured in the Biennale di Venezia in 2024. In this conversation with host Catherine LaSota, you'll hear about Chris's time learning Arabic and living and working in Palestine in 2022-23, as well as the projects he's worked on in Bethlehem with Dar Jacir and his ongoing research. Chris also discusses how his interest and research in 1920s through 1940s Palestine intersects with his connections with Palestinian communities today and his archival research more broadly.

About our guest:

Chris Harding is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. His work focuses on labor and capital in the Mandate period (1922-1948) in Palestine. In 2024, his work, “Researching Palestine” featured in the Biennale De Venezia, as part of the exhibition South West Bank—Landworks, Collective Action and Sound and is available online at Jadaliyya. Recently he published an essay with the magazine Public Seminar titled, "A House in the Middle of the Road", which examined the dual-colonisation of Palestine during the Great Revolt (1936-1939).

More about Chris Harding and organizations mentioned in this conversation:

Dar Jacir: darjacir.com and on Instagram: @darjacir
Researching Palestine booklet: jadaliyya.com/Details/46118
Public Seminar essay by Chris Harding: publicseminar.org/2026/03/cannibal-colonization-palestines-great-revolt

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Join strip tease scholar and burlesque performer Alyssa Kitt Hanley (2025-26 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow) for a conversation with host Catherine LaSota in this episode. They discuss Alyssa's experience as a performer, dramaturg, and mentor, as well as Alyssa's view of a burlesque audience as co-conspirators. Alyssa also shares her personal journey with cancer and facial paralysis, as well as her involvement with the Disabilibabes community. Tune in for an inspiring discussion and learn what burlesque can teach us about the importance of inclusivity and diversity in our social practice.

About our guest:

Alyssa Kitt Hanley is a burlesque scholar, award-winning performer, and PhD candidate in Theatre & Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. Known onstage as the “Siren with the $7 million smile,” she bridges performance and research as a theorist of embodied political practice and specialist in contemporary performance infrastructures. Director of the Australian Burlesque Museum and National Associate Producer of Mx Burlesque Australia, she has competed at and judged the Burlesque Hall of Fame’s Mx Exotic World. Her scholarship examines erotic performance, disability, and subcultural value formation within global burlesque circuits.

More about Alyssa Kitt Hanley:

Website: alyssakitt.com
Instagram: @missalyssakitt
Facebook: /alyssa.kitt     Bluesky: @missalyssakitt.bsky.social

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

In this episode, Dr. Alexandra Juhasz (SPCUNY 2022-23 Faculty Fellow) joins host Catherine LaSota to share her thoughts as a scholar, maker and organizer around activist media. She discusses the queer and feminist methods in her work and talks about process and the importance of the distribution of an artwork -- how it is received, and how it is archived. This episode also includes reminders of how important it is for us to keep making our artwork in the face of fascism and censorship.

About our guest:

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz is a Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY. She makes and studies committed media practices that contribute to political change and individual and community growth. She is the author of scholarly work on feminist and Black lesbian media, most recently with Yvonne Welbon, Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Media Making (Duke 2018); AIDS, most recently, We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (with Ted Kerr, Duke, 2022); and fake (and real) documentaries, most recently, Really Fake (with Nishant Shah and Ganaele Langlois, Minnesota and meson Presses, 2021). Her edited anthology of community-produced poetry about Fake News, My Phone Lies to Me was published in 2022 by punctum press. Her VHS Activism Archive holds records of all her tapes collected about the issues raised above. Her current work (Fall 2025), HOLDING PATTERNS, takes the form of an installation about archives, grief, AIDS, and research and is showing at ONE Archives in Los Angeles and the Center in NYC. See: pleaseholdvideo.com for more.

More about Dr. Alexandra Juhasz

Website: alexandrajuhasz.com
Instagram: @mediapraxis

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
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Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Social Practice CUNY Student Fellow Jay Reinier, an MFA candidate in the Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) program at Brooklyn College, joins host Catherine LaSota in this episode to discuss the more-than-human grief of climate collapse, speculative posthuman subjectivities, game theory, and how we might use technology in productive ways. The pros and cons of Instagram are touched upon in this conversation, too.

About our guest:

Jay Reinier (they) creates multimedia performances and interactive art that blends approaches from composition, concrete and sound poetry, and software design. Their work explores questions surrounding the way software shapes our values and creativity, the more-than-human grief of climate collapse, and speculative posthuman subjectivities.

More about Jay Reinier

Website: jpalindrome.com
Instagram: @j.palindrome

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

Monica Rocha, a 2025-26 SPCUNY Student Fellow and MFA candidate in the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter College, joins host Catherine LaSota to discuss her interest in conversation as a method of engagement, and how manipulation in its most radical sense shows up in our conversations, and what we can learn from that. Monica discusses her love of combining text, image, and sound in her work, and the importance of keeping her art financially independent (i.e., having a job for income that is not the same thing as one's art). She also talks about her current radio project with the Brazilian immigrant community, and asks the question, “How can we engage people in a way where we are letting them set the terms of what their art is, what it looks and sounds like?”

About our guest:

Monica Rocha is an audiovisual and performance artist. Through video performances involving cast and crew, she interrogates the assumed relationships between the body, truth, consent, and the technology which backgrounds them. She has performed at Harvestworks, The Irish Center, Roulette, and Artist’s Space and is pursuing her MFA at Hunter College.

Photo of Monica Rocha is by Dominick Noboa.

More about Monica Rocha

Website: mineral-creative.com
Instagram: @sapphostraphouse

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

We return from our season two break with conversation featuring 2025-26 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow Amirtha Kidambi. Host Catherine LaSota chats with Amirtha about her improvisational approach to music, teaching, and activism, and about the many influences in her work, from jazz to Rage Against the Machine. This is an episode to listen to if you want some inspiration about co-creating a better future and a reminder of the important role that art plays in fighting injustice and violence.

About our guest:

Amirtha Kidambi is “heavily invested in decolonization and deconstruction of borders physical, mental and musical” (NPR). Spanning free jazz, punk, noise and Indian devotional music, Kidambi crafts subversive sounds challenging hegemony. Based in Brooklyn-Lenapehoking, Kidambi is an vocalist, improviser and composer focused on critical intervention, responding to our fraught times, in collaboration with musicians including Luke Stewart, Angel & Demons with Darius Jones, Neti-Neti with Matt Evans, Mary Halvorson and William Parker. She is also the composer for the anticolonial films of Suneil Sanzgiri. Leading the protest ensemble Elder Ones which recently released its third album New Monuments, her work garners acclaim from Wire Magazine and tours festivals including Rewire, Le Guess Who?, Berlin Jazzfest and others. She is also the host of Outernational, a new podcast on music and liberation. Kidambi was a 2025 Working Artist Fellow at Pioneer Works and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University for 2026-2027. An educator and activist, Kidambi teaches at CUNY Brooklyn College and Feirstein Graduate School and organizes with several artist-activist collectives.

Photo by Acudus Aranyian

More about Amirtha Kidambi:

Website: amirthakidambi.com
Substack: amirthakidambi.substack.com
Instagram: @kidominator  @outernationalpod  @elder.1s

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.

In this final episode before we take a brief holiday break during season two of Part of the Practice, host Catherine LaSota is in conversation with SPCUNY Teaching Scholar-in-Residence Tom Finkelpearl. Tom is a former Director of the Queens Museum and is also a former Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for New York City. In this conversation, he talks about the relationship between museums and social practice, the reasons that community-engaged projects often happen in coordination with the education departments of museums, and the importance of having artists in residence at museums. Catherine and Tom also talk about the book that Tom is currently working on in collaboration with Pablo Helguera, on the challenges facing American art museums.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 26 available here.

About our guest:

Tom Finkelpearl organized fifteen shows at PS1 in the 1980s, managed over 100 public art commissions at the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in the 1990s, spearheaded a 50,000 square foot expansion as Director of the Queens Museum (2002-2014), and oversaw the city’s cultural policy and funding when he returned to DCLA as Commissioner (2014-2020). Since then, was a consultant for the Mellon Foundation (2020-21), and was appointed Social Practice Teaching Scholar in Residence at SPCUNY (2023-present). He co-curated a show of Christine Sun Kim’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2025) and Walker Art Center (2026). Currently he is working on his third book, Recast the Museum (working title) in collaboration with the artist Pablo Helguera.

More about Tom Finkelpearl:
Instagram: @tomfinkelpearl
LinkedIn: Tom Finkelpearl

Learn more about Social Practice CUNY.
Follow us on Instagram.

Thank you to our podcast editor Jade Iseri-Ramos, and thank you to Gaius LaSota for our Part of the Practice music.
Part of the Practice logo courtesy of Maliyah Mohamed.

Social Practice CUNY is funded by the Mellon Foundation.