Marsha Weissman

Marsha Weissman holds a Ph.D. in Social Science from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University. She is the founder of the Center for Community Alternatives, a not-for-profit organization that works to end mass incarceration and was its executive director until 2015. She has served on the New York State Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice and the State Council Community Re-Entry and Reintegration. Dr. Weissman has worked and written about criminal and juvenile justice reform and has been active in campaigns to end criminal history screening in higher education and efforts to end the school-to-prison pipeline. She is the author of “Prelude to Prison: Student Perspectives on School Suspension” and currently is an adjunct professor of sociology at Syracuse University.

Margaret Himley

Margaret Himley is Associate Provost for International Education and Engagement and a professor of rhetoric and writing. She oversees the study abroad programs of Syracuse University, as well as leads efforts to internationalize the campus more in terms of curricular and extracurricular experiences.

Marion Elizabeth Wilson

Marion Elizabeth Wilson is an artist and associate professor and director of Community Initiatives in the Visual Arts at Syracuse University. Wilson institutionalized an interdisciplinary art and design curriculum called New Directions in Social Sculpture as a result of her belief in the revitalization of urban spaces through the arts. Students work with community members to offer spatial solutions to pressing social concerns. In 2007, she created MLAB—a mobile classroom, gallery, and digital lab in a renovated RV that curates local and national artists projects in its renovated mobile space. In 2009–2012, Wilson led the purchase and renovation of 601 Tully, renovating an abandoned house on the West Side of Syracuse (the ninth poorest neighborhood by zipcode in the country) into an artist-in-residency space for new genre public art, and creating educational, cultural, and job opportunities for the neighbors.

Kathleen Brandt

Kathleen Brandt is Assistant Professor in the Industrial and Interaction Design Program at Syracuse University in New York, and director of Thinklab, an experimental laboratory and collaboration environment for transdisciplinary thinking. She has taught in Industrial Design as well as Electronic Media Art programs since 1998. She holds an MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Integrated Electronic Art Program, and has developed a body of exhibited work merging computation, videography, and information visualization.

Professor Brandt’s art and design work has been supported by Imagining America, Franklin Furnace and the New York State Council on the Arts, and has been exhibited at various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art and SIGGRAPH.

Prior to her teaching work, Kathleen served as Director of the Massachusetts Artist Fellowship Program at the Massachusetts Artist Foundation and as an Associate Systems Analyst at Baybank Inc..

Her ongoing academic research is centered around the confluence of design and systems thinking, and advocates for a renewed ethic of more rigorous transdisciplinary design research. Current work seeks to create new resources for innovative and responsible research models for designers. She is a founder of Thinklab, an ambient-media research and collaboration environment for structured, transdisciplinary collaboration, funded by the Transdisciplinary Media Studio at Syracuse University.

Brian Lonsway

Brian Lonsway is Associate Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University. Brian is an architectural theorist studying how built environments materialize cultural values, especially in the context of the professionalization and commercialization of design practices since the 20th century. His first book, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy, surveys the evolution and convergence of these histories, and explores new theories of civic agency within consumer-centric landscapes.

His current research is centered on exploring the inherent transdisciplinary of design, and the intersection of disciplinary and professional identities with alternative models of design practice. He is co-founding co-director of Thinklab, an experimental media environment and situation room for complex thinking designed to explore and foster alternative practices of transdisciplinary design inquiry.

Jan Cohen-Cruz

Jan Cohen-Cruz was Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (2007-12), and for more than two decades before that, a professor at New York University, directing a minor in applied theatre and collaborating on socially-engaged projects and courses. She wrote Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response and Local Acts: Community Based Performance in the US. She edited Radical Street Performance and co edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion. Jan recently evaluated smARTpower, an interactive visual arts cultural diplomacy project sponsored by the US State Department. She is the 2012 Recipient of the Association of Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Jan is a University Professor at Syracuse University.

Phillip P. Arnold

Philip P. Arnold, a Syracuse University associate professor of religion, specializes in Native American traditions of the Americas with special emphasis on contact between Europeans and pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations and the Haudenosaunee (“People of the Longhouse,” mistakenly called the “Iroquois”) traditions. His articles have included topics on the ritual symbolism of material culture, cultural contact in the development of religion in the Americas, and “book culture” in Native communities. Currently, his work highlights the local history and religious landscape of the Erie Canal and of New York state, using the issues and insights of Haudenosaunee. His latest book, The Gift of Sports, looks at the relationships of religious ceremonies and sports, with particular emphasis on the traditional game of lacrosse.

Kevin Bott

Kevin Bott, PhD, is Imagining America’s associate director and the artistic director of Imagining America’s grassroots theater project, The D.R.E.A.(M.)3 Freedom Revival. Kevin continues to develop A Ritual for Return, a cocreative theater process and a strategy for ameliorating the stigma experienced by formerly incarcerated individuals. Bott is the former director of education for the New York State prison-arts nonprofit, Rehabilitation for the Arts. In addition to his work in US prisons and with formerly incarcerated men, Kevin has implemented applied theater initiatives in public schools, drug rehabilitation clinics, and at a minimum-security prison in northern Uganda. Bott received both his masters and doctoral degrees in educational theater from New York University’s Steinhardt School.