Graduate Alumni

Alexandra Appelbaum

Certificate Class of 2020
Ph.D. City and Regional Planning
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Frankfurt School, New York School: Critical Aesthetics and Modern Poetry, COMPLIT 225/CRITICAL THEORY 205

Sophia Arbara

Certificate Class of 2018
Master of Urban Design
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Borderwall Urban (core studio)
Advanced Study in Substantive Sociological Fields, Sociology 280
Citizen Involvement in the City Planning Methods and Models for Inclusive Planning and Design, LDARCH C424

Sophia Arbara is a MUD Graduate student at UC Berkeley and holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. Before coming to Berkeley, Sophia had the opportunity to work as a Research Fellow in the School of Urban Design and Architecture at the University of Florianopolis, Brazil, working with marginalized communities in informal settlements. Later on, she worked as an intern in the Madrid-based urban design firm, Ecosistema Urbano, in Spain, focusing on the design of public spaces and the development of participatory processes in design. Her previous academic projects examine issues of boundaries, spatial segregation,  interdisciplinary thinking and the intersections among built and natural environment. Currently, through the case of Athens, she is investigating the spatial implications of receiving forcibly displaced populations in cities and examine ways in which design can build towards more inclusive environments.

Laura Belik

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 284
Portraits of “Outsiders.” A Look at a Range of Excluded Others in Brazilian Literature and Film, PORTUG 275

Laura Belik is interested in questions of urbanism, politics of space and urban democracy, focusing on Brazil and Latin America.

Ree Botts

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. African Diaspora Studies
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
National Bodies, Sexual Subjects, ETHSTD 250

Ree Botts is a poet, artist and activist from Philadelphia, PA pursuing a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies. She received her MA from UCLA in African American Studies and her BA from Spelman College in Sociology and Anthropology.

Katherine Bruhn

Certificate Class of 2018
Ph.D. South and Southeast Asian Studies
2019 Global Urban Humanities – Townsend Fellow
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Art + Village + City in the Pearl River Delta (core studio)
Special Topics in Fields of Art History, History of Art 290

Katherine Bruhn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. Her research focuses on the history of Indonesian modern and contemporary art, examined through the lens of a specific ethnic group, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, as a means to articulate how local, transnational, and global networks have contributed to the production of creative ecosystems, from the early 20th century until now. Katherine’s research stems from a long engagement with artists in the Southeast Asian region, Indonesia specifically. Alongside research she has curated a number of exhibitions in Indonesia and Singapore. Since starting her PhD at Cal, the Global Urban Humanities has acted as an important forum through which to engage with students working across disciplines, contributing significantly to the conceptualization of her current research that seeks to articulate the utility of looking beyond more familiar units of analysis like the city in order to understand, more comprehensively, how artistic production contributes to economic growth and urban development globally.

Melody Chang

Master of City Planning
Fall 2021 Colloquium Instructor

Melody Chang is a master’s student in City & Regional Planning and draws from anthropology, art practice, and landscape history disciplines to inform her study of urban life. She is interested in promoting diverse methods of public communications around complex planning projects and diverse methods of research about place. She believes design and storytelling can be tools to help make opaque planning processes more legible to the public. She is obsessed with producing high-concept, imaginative, and playful site-specific experiences that promote a stronger sense of place, history, and belonging. Recently she has been looking at the shadow side of city planning and is trying to figure out how to represent that with literal shadow puppets. She comes to storytelling about city-wide issues from her background in reducing the jail population and working to end money bail in Louisiana.

Email: melodyychang@berkeley.edu

Scott Chilberg

Certificate Class of 2018
Master of City Planning
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Community Development Studio/Workshop, City Planning 268
Special Topics in Architecture Design Theory and Criticism, Architecture 239

Scott Chilberg (they/them) recently completed a Master’s in City Planning at UC Berkeley, where they focused their work and research on the interactions between queer and trans* culture creation in the Bay Area and the speculative real estate market and the broad spectrum of institutional (state and non-state) anti-displacement efforts. Scott’s master’s thesis looks at the formation of the Compton’s Transgender Cultural District in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, within the context of the growing popularity of cultural districts in cities more broadly as well as the particularities of trans* social and political networks that converge on the Tenderloin. They also work for a QTPOC-led non-profit in the TL that is working at the intersections of housing, economic justice, and the legal system to end incarceration of trans* folks and the prison industrial complex at large.

Annie Danis

Certificate Class of 2018
Ph.D. Anthropology
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Placemaking and Public Space (core seminar)
Sensing Cityscapes (core studio)
Special Topics in Cultural Geography: Cultural Landscape Methods, GEO 251

Annie Danis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, at University of California, Berkeley. Her work explores the intersection of art and archaeology through a sensory approach to historic landscapes. She explores how archaeology can use new and alternative forms of mediation to engage contemporary communities, and how art can use an archaeological sensibility to deepen our understandings of the materiality of history and place. She grew up driving around Los Angeles, CA and the long flat roads of the northwest and southwest.

Pol Fité Matamoros

Certificate Class of 2020
Ph.D. Landscape Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Berlin: The Guilt Environment (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 284
The Anthropology of Politics, ANTHRO 250E

Pol Fité Matamoros is pursuing a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, as recipient of the Regent’s Fellowship. His research focuses on the dialectical relationship between political-economic transformations and the production of space, particularly centered in late-dictatorial regimes in the European South. His recent research collaborations include Research Associate of the Critical Landscapes Lab for the project Atlas for a City-Region: Imagining the Post-Brexit Landscapes of the Irish Northwest and Communications Manager of the Urban Theory Lab, both at the Harvard GSD.

Giuseppina Forte

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Mexico City: Material, Performance and Power (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 290C
Cities and Citizenship, ANTHRO 250

Giuseppina Forte is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture. Her research focuses on urban politics, inequality, and epistemologies of architecture and urbanism. She is currently investigating the urban peripheries as sites of radical politics, subjectivities and citizenship production, taking São Paulo, Brazil, as an extended case study. As an architect, she participated in the design of the multi-awarded “Center for the Wellbeing of Women” (Burkina Faso) advocating against female genital mutilation. As a Fulbright-Hays fellow, Giuseppina is visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, in the Department of History of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP) and affiliated with the Laboratory of Other Urbanisms.

Samantha Gebb

Certificate Class of 2019
M.Arch Option 3
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Foundations in Performance Theory, THEATER 201A

Sam Gebb is a designer and dancer whose work explores human kinesthetic experience and agency in the built environment. She received a BA in Architecture and a Certificate in Dance from Princeton University in 2014 and is currently pursuing Masters in Architecture and Landscape Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Sourabh Harihar

Certificate Class of 2019
MA Global Studies 
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts, and Public Space (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Sufism, SSEASN 250

Sourabh Harihar is studying for his MA in Global Studies at Berkeley and holds degrees in civil and ocean engineering from TU Delft (Holland) and the Indian Institute of Technology. In his previous years as a management consultant and a Young India Fellow, he has engaged with projects relating to smart city planning and urban informality in Indian cities. He is pursuing the GUH Certificate as he strongly believes that an urban humanities perspective is extremely critical and valuable to understanding urban development, particularly in the Global South.

Natalie Koski-Karrell

Certificate Class of 2020
Master’s in City Planning
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Berlin: The Guilt Environment (core studio)
East Bay Revolution: Urban Spaces of Protest and Counterculture Practice, AMERSTD 102/ENVDES 109
Extracurricular art and performance activities

Natalie completed the Master of City Planning program, where she has a dual focus in environmental planning and urban design. Her academic research & professional work touches many elements of the built environment, and spans themes of social, environmental & economic sustainability and resilience. In the fall she hosted a panel on indigenous land rights and stewardship, and is planning to contribute to a study of cannabis cultivation effects on Klamath River watersheds on behalf of the Yurok Tribe. As a social impact artist, she most recently contributed an installation to the Albany Bulb as part of the Love the Bulb fest, and is working on a medicinal planter box for the Blake Garden and/or UCB campus as part of a Diversity Platform Initiative. Natalie cultivates an embodied practice of dance, improvisation, and storytelling and in the last year has performed in San Francisco & Istanbul. 

Xander Lenc

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Geography
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Populism, Art and the City (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Spaces of Queer Theory, ARCH 239

What is the relationship between California’s urban development and the management of the prisons along the city’s margins? My work points to moments where wardens, policymakers, and activists borrow concepts from urban debates about security, density, and human behavior to manage or reform prisons. Furthermore, my research assesses the importance of prisoner labor for the development of dams, power stations, and other forms of infrastructure on the fringe of the urban network.

Kerby Lynch

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Geography
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Lagos Studio (core studio)
Urban Theory, CYPLAN 284

Kerby Lynch is a current Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. Their research interests are in archival theory, literary cartographies and black lesbian subjectivities.

Lyndsey Ogle

Certificate Class of 2018
Ph.D. Performance Studies
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Sensing Cityscapes (core studio)
Dispossession, Dissent and Design: Spatial Politics and the Global City, ARCH 239

Will Payne

Certificate Class of 2018
Ph.D. Geography
2019 Global Urban Humanities – Townsend Fellow
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Sensing Cityscapes: Sensors, Cities, Policies/Basic Protocols for New Media (core studio)
Urban Theory, City Planning 290
Group Studies, City Planning 298/Geography 254

Will Payne is a PhD Candidate in Geography, currently researching the impact of crowdsourced location-based services (both contemporary digital technologies like Yelp, Google Local, Foursquare, and TripAdvisor, and their analog predecessors like the Zagat Survey) on the way that people experience cities, with a focus on the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, where many of these technologies have been developed and used intensively since the 1980s. Will studies how these services aggregate, shape, and commodify “local knowledge” by harnessing free labor, in tandem with the transformation of urban neighborhoods and housing markets across the Global North. Will is a member of the Designated Emphasis program of the Berkeley Center for New Media, and also co-chairs the New Media Working Group through the Townsend Center for the Humanities.

Valentina Rozas-Krause

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Architecture
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
City of Memory (core seminar)
Art+Village+City in the Pearl River Delta (core studio)
Mexico City: Spaces/Cultures/Histories, ARCH 139/239

Valentina Rozas-Krause is a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an architect with a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.  In 2008, she was awarded first place in a public competition to design “Memorial Patio 29,” which was inaugurated in 2010. Her project to transform Chile’s National Stadium into a public park, designed with Teodoro Fernandez Architects, was awarded first place in the “Parque de la Ciudadanía” competition (2011). Valentina has published two books. The first, Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco, is an urban, architectural and political history of the National Stadium in Chile (Ril, 2014). The second is the co-edited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018) which deals with spatial strategies of oppression, resistance, memory and reparation within varying urban contexts. These join peer-reviewed articles in History & Memory, Latin American Perspectives, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, and Bifurcaciones alongside a chapter in the forthcoming edited volume Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020). She recently received the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2019-2020 to complete her dissertation “Memorials and the Cult of Apology.”

Aaron Scherf

Certificate Class of 2020
Master’s in Development Practice
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The Demos: Politics, Art and the City (core seminar)
Berlin: The Guilt Environment (core studio)
Data Planning for Human Mobility and Sociotechnical Systems, CYPLAN 257

Aaron Scherf believes that our best response to the interrelated challenges facing humanity is to innovate with collaborative, interdisciplinary ideas. As a student of development practice, Aaron seeks to address gaps in the economic, health, and environmental systems that underpin our cities and societies. Following their graduation in May of 2020, Aaron will be entering the US Agency for International Development as a Foreign Service Officer, where they hope to apply many of the creative methods and concepts learned through the Global Urban Humanities program to guide more inclusive and effective development assistance.

Tonika Sealy-Thompson

Certificate Class of 2018
MA Performance Studies
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken: 
Populism, Art and the City
The Museum and the City: Reimagining the Oakland Museum of California and its Neighborhoods
O que e um pobre? Competing Answers from Literature, Social Sciences, and Film, PORT 275

Desmond Sheehan

Certificate Class of 2020
Ph.D. Music/Musicology
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Berlin: The Guilt Environment (core studio)
Readings in Music, Capitalism and Materialism, MUSIC 220
Music, Sound and Secularity Readings, ANTHRO 602

Desmond Sheehan works on German Protestant music in historical urban environments. His research traces the aesthetic, media, and institutional transformations that musical harmony underwent around Berlin from 1760-1840. The sum total of that history pronounces an emergent secularity unique to the German city. He is also a 2020 Global Urban Humanities Fellow.

Sophia Sobko

Certificate Class of 2019
Ph.D. Education
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
The City, Arts and Public Space (core seminar)
Borderwall Urbanism (core studio)
Social Practice: Critical Site and Context, ART 163

Sophia Sobko is an artist, educator and PhD student in the Graduate School of Education. In her trans-disciplinary work she employs participatory pedagogical and arts-based practices to understand and challenge structures and ideologies of white supremacy. Her current research involves the case study of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants negotiating whiteness under U.S. settler colonialism and neoliberalism. She is particularly interested in the ways that post-Soviet Jewish trauma and desire interact with U.S. political structures toward the forging of revised white, Jewish ways of being.

Robert Ungar

Certificate Class of 2018
Master of Urban Design
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Borderwall Urban (core studio)
Advanced Study in Substantive Sociological Fields, Sociology 280
Citizen Involvement in the City Planning Methods and Models for Inclusive Planning and Design, LDARCH C424

Robert Ungar is an architect, artist, activist, designer, project manager, teacher, gardener, producer, all of the above and none of them really. He is an independent urban designer who graduated from Bezalel academy in Jerusalem, Israel. He co-founded ONYA Collective, bringing together 15 designers, architects and social activists developing ecological urban interventions that strengthen community involvement and environmental justice within complex urban situations. As a designer, he focuses on collaborative design processes for re-claiming places and putting them to use according to local needs. Robert’s main project in the past years is navigating the grassroots transformation of an abandoned entrance to Tel-Aviv’s massive and polluted central bus station, to a green, lively and inclusive community gathering place for underserved communities of Israelis, refugees and migrants.

Connie Zheng

Certificate Class of 2019
MFA Art Practice
Global Urban Humanities Initiative courses taken:
Art, Populism and the City (core seminar)
Infrastructure Imaginaries: Informal Urbanism, Creativity and Ecology in Lagos, Nigeria (core studio)
Series in Comparative Transnational Theories and Methods–Global Refugees, ETHSTD 240

Connie Zheng is an artist and writer currently pursuing her MFA in Art Practice at UC Berkeley. She uses the dialogue between text, drawing, painting and time-based media as a conduit through which to consider the environment of the media and the media of the environment, and these investigations tend to center on the visual culture around environmental crisis and economies of waste and creative reuse. She received her BA in Economics and English from Brown University and worked as a researcher before beginning graduate school. Here, she writes about her current practice and research on cardboard is influenced by the GUH course, Populism, Art and the City.