Kate Balug

Kate is an artist and an urbanist. She holds a bachelor’s in studio art from USC and a master’s in urban planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She recently spent a year as a Harvard fellow in Mexico City, creating the project “Museum of the Future” that involved time travel and building a time machine with over 100 youth. She is a founding member of the Department of Play, a new collective that will infuse Boston with temporary play zones. She has developed art projects and youth collaborations in the US, Latin America and Poland. Her work examines collective imagination as a tool for bold, inclusive city-making, and her process connects local histories toward the future to build local agency. Originally from Poland, Balug grew up in Chicago. She was a CUP teaching artist for “Museumopolis,” where she led youth at Dia:Beacon on a quest to research the role of a museum in a city and build three fantasy museums.

Pema Domingo-Barker

Pema was CUP’s Program Assistant for youth education programs. She previously worked at the Queens Museum and was a Public Allies New York fellow. Pema grew up in Bangkok and went on to study art at the University of Washington and the University of the Arts London.

Sam Holleran

Is an artist, designer, and writer. Sam was CUP’s Communications Coordinator from 2011 to 2014. He attended the the Cooper Union where he was the recipient of the Herb Lubalin Fellowship for Typography and the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for Creative Inquiry. Sam has worked extensively in printmaking; his fields of interest include: photogravure, letterpress, Ukiyo-e, and silkscreen.

Pema Domingo-Barker

Pema was CUP’s Program Assistant for youth education programs. She previously worked at the Queens Museum and was a Public Allies New York fellow. Pema grew up in Bangkok and went on to study art at the University of Washington and the University of the Arts London.

Valeria Mogilevich

Valeria is a visual storyteller who creates tools for participation in collaboration with social justice organizations. She also consults with cultural institutions, education non-profits, and others on community engagement and youth education. Valeria was formerly the Deputy Director of CUP, where over the course of eight years she created popular education tools with community-based organizations and developed curricula to help public high school students change the way the see their own neighborhoods. She has shared her thoughts on project-based learning, collaboration, and design for social impact at places like the New Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, Pratt Institute, and institutions from Indianapolis to Rotterdam. Valeria holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media.

Freedom To Thrive

Freedom To Thrive works to create a world where safety means investment in people & planet and to end the punishment-based criminal and immigration systems. We are a powerful Black and brown network, centering youth, nonbinary, and femme leadership through our Freedom Cities, Freedom Campus, and ongoing prison industry divestment work. We target the root causes of criminalization and mass incarceration and confronting these oppressive systems using strategic campaigning, leadership development, and popular education.

Freedom to Thrive was founded in 1998 by visionary organizations from the U.S. and Mexico to support women of color led grassroots campaigning against transnational corporations. Ten years ago, our members cited the threats of mass incarceration and immigration detention as the most harmful systems impacting their lives. We have spent the past decade building campaigns led by Black and brown communities to confront criminalization.

Shreyas R Krishnan

Shreyas is an illustrator-designer from Chennai, India, with an eye for the everyday and an affinity for the drawn image. Rooted in research, her non-fiction work takes on the forms of comics, editorial illustration, and documentary drawings. She is curious about the ways visual culture and gender intersect. Through drawing and writing, she tries to understand the construction and endurance of memory – how, why and what we remember. 

Siyona Ravi

Siyona is CUP’s Program & Communications Coordinator. Before joining CUP, she worked on several creative advocacy projects, including the Fundred Project, a campaign led by artist Mel Chin, and a documentary film for a TGNC branch of a sex workers’ labor union in Kolkata, India. In 2019 she was a Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project. She holds a BA in Visual Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She was born in Bangalore, grew up in Chicago, and now lives Crown Heights, where you can find her making a mess in the kitchen. 

Mark Torrey

Mark Torrey was 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 was a CUP staff member 2011-2020.

Pema Domingo-Barker

Pema was CUP’s Program Assistant for youth education programs. She previously worked at the Queens Museum and was a Public Allies New York fellow. Pema grew up in Bangkok and went on to study art at the University of Washington and the University of the Arts London.

Sam Holleran

Is an artist, designer, and writer. Sam was CUP’s Communications Coordinator from 2011 to 2014. He attended the the Cooper Union where he was the recipient of the Herb Lubalin Fellowship for Typography and the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for Creative Inquiry. Sam has worked extensively in printmaking; his fields of interest include: photogravure, letterpress, Ukiyo-e, and silkscreen.

Valeria Mogilevich

Valeria is a visual storyteller who creates tools for participation in collaboration with social justice organizations. She also consults with cultural institutions, education non-profits, and others on community engagement and youth education. Valeria was formerly the Deputy Director of CUP, where over the course of eight years she created popular education tools with community-based organizations and developed curricula to help public high school students change the way the see their own neighborhoods. She has shared her thoughts on project-based learning, collaboration, and design for social impact at places like the New Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, Pratt Institute, and institutions from Indianapolis to Rotterdam. Valeria holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media.

Christine Gaspar

Christine is the Executive Director of CUP. She has over fifteen years of experience in community design. Prior to joining CUP, she was Assistant Director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, Mississippi, where she provided architectural design and city planning services to low-income communities recovering from Hurricane Katrina. In 2012, she was identified as one of the “Public Interest Design 100.” She holds Masters in Architecture and in City Planning from MIT, and a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University.

She’s been a CUP fan since 2001, and a staff member since 2009.

Sam Holleran

Is an artist, designer, and writer. Sam was CUP’s Communications Coordinator from 2011 to 2014. He attended the the Cooper Union where he was the recipient of the Herb Lubalin Fellowship for Typography and the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship for Creative Inquiry. Sam has worked extensively in printmaking; his fields of interest include: photogravure, letterpress, Ukiyo-e, and silkscreen.

Valeria Mogilevich

Valeria is a visual storyteller who creates tools for participation in collaboration with social justice organizations. She also consults with cultural institutions, education non-profits, and others on community engagement and youth education. Valeria was formerly the Deputy Director of CUP, where over the course of eight years she created popular education tools with community-based organizations and developed curricula to help public high school students change the way the see their own neighborhoods. She has shared her thoughts on project-based learning, collaboration, and design for social impact at places like the New Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt, Pratt Institute, and institutions from Indianapolis to Rotterdam. Valeria holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media.

Alliance of Families for Justice

The mission of the Alliance of Families for Justice is to support, empower, and mobilize families with incarcerated loved ones and people with criminal records so that they can marshal their collective power and bring about the systemic changes they want to see in the world. AFJ was founded in September 2016 to address the need for an organization with a specific focus on the empowerment and support of families impacted by the criminal justice system. 

AFJ empowers directly impacted families and individuals by providing them with training in advocacy and communications. Families and individuals are then mobilized to tackle the issues that directly impact their lives and their communities. 

Karl Orozco

Karl Orozco is an artist and educator based in Queens, NY. He is interested in gaming as a multidisciplinary art form for community building, storytelling and social commentary. He believes good art is playful. Karl loves working with youth and strives to give them the tools to create change in their communities.

Tahnee Pantig

Tahnee Pantig is an artist and designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is characterized by taking on the stuff that people don’t like to talk about because she believes in the value of having difficult conversations. Tahnee’s practice is medium agnostic, producing work that is reflective of her own experience and her community’s.