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

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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.

Visual storyteller Ash Marinaccio (2024-25 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow) joins host Catherine LaSota to talk about her projects in theatre, photography, film, and activism. Ash is faculty in Media Studies at Queens College CUNY and is the Founding Artistic Director of Girl Be Heard and Founder of Docbloc, an organization dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. In this conversation, she discusses her connection to nonfiction theater, ways to approach community-engaged work, and how we can use art to foster systemic change locally.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 25 available here.

About our guest:

Ash Marinaccio, Ph.D., is a multidisciplinary documentarian and visual storyteller working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling , highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times, and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker. Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations-recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc (docbloc.org), dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. She holds her M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from The Graduate Center, CUNY.

More about Ash Marinaccio:

Website: ashmarinaccio.com
Instagram: @ashmarinaccio
Documentary Photography portfolio: ashmarinacciophotography.com

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.

Art Jones, a native New Yorker and a 2023-24 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow at the City College of New York, joins host Catherine LaSota for a conversation about Art’s work in film and video and music, and in live performance. Art talks about how his experience with COVID lockdown caused him to have a new relationship with time, and the resulting collapse of social reality and science fiction since then. Art also talks about the assignments that he brings into the classroom for his students at CUNY, as well as the way in which our experiences of reality, when captured in documentary, become complicated by memory.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 24 available here.

About our guest:

Art Jones works with film/video, sculpture, and expanded media. Jones’s work often utilizes mainstream and social media as raw material to be sampled, remixed, and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working within a particular genre or mode, Jones’s practice seeks to reveal and reorient how information is transmitted and received. Jones is a native New Yorker and lives in the Bronx, New York.

More about Art Jones:

Instagram: @artjones3000

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.

Artist and activist Alicia Grullón (SPCUNY Faculty Fellow 2022-23) joins host Catherine LaSota on this episode to discuss the foundations of her own practice as a socially-engaged artist, including her background in acting and her continued interest in the concept of "backstage." Alicia and Catherine also talk about the ways that our relationships to people and places affect our experience of time, and Alicia shares some information about her Percent for Green project, which addresses climate change and environmental injustices.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 23 available here.

About our guest:

Alicia Grullón is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary artist whose work critiques the politics of presence in political, environmental, and social spheres through image-making, performance, and social practice. At the core of her practice is a focus on exploring the metaphorical and emblematic connections between place and our bodies. Her social practice project Percent for Green (PFG), inspired by the NYC bill Percent for Art, positions art as a form of civic dialogue and legislative imagination. PFG proposes redirecting one percent of city-funded construction budgets to grassroots environmental justice initiatives in frontline communities. Her recent solo exhibition Like a Slow Walk with Trees at Amherst College extends her investigation into belonging, displacement, and the politics of land and labor. Grullón has exhibited widely, including at The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, El Museo del Barrio, and Columbia University. A 2024 Mellon Initiative Community Fellow at The New School and 2025 Creative Time R&D Fellow, she has also received awards from the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, Franklin Furnace Archives, the Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Walentas Fellowship at Moore College of Art and Design. Her activism as a co-lead organizer of the People’s Cultural Plan challenged the city's first ever cultural plan by addressing housing & displacement, labor and cultural funding equity. A frequent collaborator with museums, grassroots organizations, and academic institutions, she has published writing in Hyperallergic and several anthologies on social practice and feminism. Beyond the studio and classroom, Grullón is known for her panache in bringing people together, often over an open fire, and cooking good food for a large crowd as an act of care, celebration, and community.

More about Alicia Grullón:

Website: aliciagrullon.com

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.

Our second episode of season two brings you a conversation with Floor Grootenhuis, a 2022-23 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow. Floor chats with host Catherine LaSota about blood and breath and embodiment. They discuss her Ask a Parasite project with the Department of Biological Sciences at CUNY's Hunter College, where she partners with biologists to bring science and art closer to the public, and the work she does as a teacher at Hunter College, where she brings movement into the classroom.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 22 available here.

About our guest:

Floor Grootenhuis is a Dutch-Kenyan transdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York City. Her socially engaged, embodied performance practice explores invitation, connection, and identity. She is an artist-in-residence in the Jayne Raper Lab in the Department of Biological Sciences at CUNY Hunter College. She holds an MFA in Social Practice (CUNY) and a Master’s in Human Geography (University of Amsterdam). Her work has been supported by organizations including the Rubin Foundation, Vilcek Foundation, NYFA and the City Corps of New York.

More about Floor Grootenhuis:

Website: fgrasa.com

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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.

It's our first episode of season two! 2021-22 SPCUNY Faculty Fellow Nora Almeida joins host Catherine LaSota to talk about environmental activism, urban swimming, and the subversion of different spaces in Nora’s practices. They also discuss the many forms of life in the city and ponder the question: "What do we do with all of the stuff that we collect?"

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 21 available here.

About our guest:

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, social practice and performance artist, educator, and activist based in Lenapehoking. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), Open Water (ongoing), Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart (ongoing), and Refuge (in process)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed waterfront spaces.

Nora was a 2023-2024 Climate Justice Fellow with Culture Push, a 2022 Water Connector with Works on Water, and a 2021 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow. She has recently shown work / performed at: LMCC on Governors Island, Gowanus Dredgers Boathouse, FEED Media Art Center, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Coney Island Creek, and Valentino Pier. She is co-founder of the Hydrofeminist Map Collective and a long time volunteer at Interference Archive. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with Jen Hoyer, was published in 2021.

More about Nora Almeida:

Website: noraalmeida.com
Instagram: @norasays

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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.

On our final episode of season one of Part of the Practice, writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist Tao Leigh Goffe is in conversation with host Catherine LaSota about art, freedom, and her project Dark Laboratory, located at Hunter College CUNY. Tao talks about her book Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, and about the importance of asking questions that you don't have answers to. Tao's brand new human, affectionately referred to as Dragon Baby, joins the conversation, too!

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 20 available here.

About our guest:

Tao Leigh Goffe is a critically-acclaimed writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist who grew up between the UK and New York City. For the past fifteen years she has worked as an academic and has been invited to give keynote lectures in her specialities of colonial histories of race, geology, climate, and media technologies. Dr. Goffe lives and works in Manhattan where she is an Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. She teaches classes on literary theory and cultural history. Dr. Goffe’s book on how the climate crisis is a racial crisis is called DARK LABORATORY (Doubleday and Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK, 2025)). It has been celebrated in the New York Times, the Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, and Publisher’s Weekly.

More about Tao Leigh Goffe:

Website: taoleighgoffe.com
Instagram: @taoleighgoffe
X/Twitter: @taoleighgoffe
Bluesky: taoleighgoffe.bsky.social

More about Dark Laboratory:

Website: darklaboratory.com
TikTok: @darklaboratory

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 is a special episode about Social Practice CUNY connections and collaborations! Host Catherine LaSota chats with Ari Wolff (SPCUNY Student Fellow 2022-23) and Cristina Ferrigno (SPCUNY Student Fellow 2021-22) about their project Citation Needed, where Ari is Founder and Director, and Cristina is Studio Director. This conversation is about finding the partners and communities that lift you up, the importance of meeting together across experiences and generations, combining your skill sets, and so much more.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 19 available here.

About our guests:

Cristina Ferrigno is a Colombian-born, Brooklyn-raised artist currently based in Queens. She received her BFA from MICA in 2009 and earned her MFA in Studio Art from Queens College  in 2022 with a focus on socially engaged art as a part of the inaugural Social Practice CUNY cohort. Her work explores questions of identity and cultural “inbetween-ness” as a transnational adoptee, using photographic processes, archive building, and community engagement to create combined media works and long-term interdisciplinary projects. Cristina currently works as a teaching artist with Citation Needed, the Queens Public Library, Sunnyside Arts, and other community-based organizations.

Ari Wolff is an NYC-based artist working in text, installation, pedagogy, and publication. Her work examines language as a visual material, systems of learning, and sensory perception as a form of translation. In 2022, she founded Citation Needed, an intergenerational publishing initiative dedicated to the production of artist books by children. Wolff's work has been exhibited at Collarworks, Plaxall Gallery, The Brick, Longwood Gallery, The Foundry, Glasshouse, Para//el, Molasses Books, and the New York Queer Zine Fair (NYQZF). Wolff's research on publishing as a social practice has been presented at the Center for Book Arts Conference and is forthcoming in a special issue of Visual Art Research focused on radical publications in Summer 2025.

More about Citation Needed:
Website: citationneeded.xyz
Instagram: @citation_needed_press

More about Cristina Ferrigno:
Website: cmferrigno.com

More about Ari Wolff:
Website: ariwolff.work
Instagram: @ariwolfff

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.

Environmental writer, teacher, and parent Emily Raboteau is in conversation with host Catherine LaSota on this episode of Part of the Practice. Emily, who teaches creative writing as a professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY), talks about the genesis of her book Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse," and how her definition of "environmental writer" evolved after reading an essay by the writer Camille Dungy. Emily also discusses the role of public art in her practice, as well as the importance of speaking up about the things we care about.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 18 available here.

About our guest:

Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, public art, and parenthood. Her books are Lessons for Survival, shortlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the Anisfield Book Award, Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter. Since the release of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, she has focused on writing longform essays about the climate crisis. A contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Raboteau’s distinctions include the Climate Narratives Prize, the Deadline Club Award in Feature Reporting, and grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Yaddo. She serves as nonfiction faculty at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writing Conference and is a full professor in the Black Studies Department at the City College of New York (CUNY). She lives with her family in the Bronx.

More about Emily Raboteau:

Website: emilyraboteau.net
Instagram: @emilyraboteau
Facebook: /emily.raboteau

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.

Author, scholar, and activist Ashley Dawson is in conversation with host Catherine LaSota on this episode of Part of the Practice. Ashley, who is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, talks about how his training in postcolonial studies and as a literary critic led to his work dealing with the struggle against climate injustice and ecological imperialism. Ashley discusses how he developed a relationship with South Bronx Unite, among other groups fighting for climate justice, and he also talks with Catherine about the importance of soil as an intricate ecosystem, and what human societies might learn from it, as well as the possibilities of working in different media.

FULL TRANSCRIPT of Episode 17 available here.

About our guest:

Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the toxic impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.

More about Ashley Dawson:

Website: ashleydawson.info
Instagram: @ashleyjdawson

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.