Panelists

Hillel Arnold

Associate Director of Archives and Chief Digital Strategies Officer, Rockefeller Archive Center

Hillel is an archivist, technologist, and musician, currently residing in Poughkeepsie, NY. He leads the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Digital Strategies team, which ethically applies technology across the organization by connecting people to systems and expertise. Previously, he was a Project Archivist at NYU’s Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, where he prepared the Daily Worker’s photo morgue for public access.

Margaretta A. (Meg) Downey

Chair, Hudson River Valley Greenway Communities Council, and co-chair of the Maurice D. Hinchey Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area

Meg spent most of her career as a journalist. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, she was the executive editor of the Poughkeepsie Journal and the managing editor of the Tennessean in Nashville, TN. Meg has won more than 40 national journalism awards, including the Edward J. Meeman Award for Environmental Reporting, and has been an editor and contributing writer for more than a dozen books. She taught a journalism writing and ethics seminar at Vassar College for nine years and currently serves as chair of the Hudson River Valley Greenway Communities Council and co-chair of the Maurice D. Hinchey Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area.

Frank D. LoMonte

Legal Counsel at CNN and adjunct professor at the University of Georgia School of Law

Frank is an American lawyer and journalist known for his press freedom advocacy. He is legal counsel at CNN and an adjunct professor at the University of Georgia School of Law. He was the director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, part of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications from 2017 to 2022, and was previously the executive director of the Student Press Law Center from 2008 to 2017.

Laura McCann

Director of the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department at New York University (NYU) Libraries

Laura is the Director of the Barbara Goldsmith Preservation and Conservation Department at New York University (NYU) Libraries, where she previously served as the Conservation Librarian. Her research focuses on the preventive conservation of complex archival collections and the promotion of collaborative and ethical stewardship of collections. She holds an MSLIS from Long Island University, an MA in paper conservation from Camberwell College of Arts, and a BA from Bates College. She is also a fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.

Cassidy Meurer

Archivist for the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection, University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections

Cassidy is an archivist, artist, and curator based in Louisville, Kentucky. She is currently employed by the University of Louisville Archives & Special Collections as the Archivist for the Barry Bingham, Jr. Courier-Journal Photograph Collection. She holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Louisville. Her research interests include the history of photojournalism, the intersection of art and archives, and the reparative functions of archival photographs in the 21st century.

Kira Pollack

Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center

Kira is a Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, where she explores how AI can ethically unlock photojournalistic archives. Her research, detailed in her Washington Post essay “Photos Are Disappearing, One Archive at a Time,” pioneers frameworks for using technology to preserve and make these irreplaceable collections accessible. Throughout her career as creative director at Vanity Fair, director of photography at TIME, and deputy photo editor at The New York Times Magazine, she has overseen visual storytelling for hundreds of magazine covers. Her work has earned two Emmy Awards, a Lucie Award for Photo Editor of the Year, and five National Magazine Awards.

Giulia Taurino, Ph.D.

Member, NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science

Giulia specializes in AI for the management and preservation of Cultural Heritage Collections, particularly photo-archives, books, manuscript corpora, and art collections. Her research focuses on forms of content organization in online repositories and digital archives, the cultural implications of algorithmic technologies, and the applications of AI in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). She is currently a member of the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science, and of the AI & Arts interest group at The Alan Turing Institute. Past affiliations include Brown University’s Virtual Humanities Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, and MIT Data + Feminism Lab. Giulia holds a doctoral degree in Media Studies and Visual Arts from the University of Bologna and the University of Montreal.

Kira Thompson

Head of Adult Services at the Poughkeepsie Public Library District

Kira is a librarian and the Head of Adult Services at the Poughkeepsie Public Library District. She holds a BA in linguistics from New York University and an MLIS from Louisiana State University. She has been with PPLD for 16 years, previously serving as the Local History librarian and archivist. Kira has overseen the custodianship of and access to the Poughkeepsie Journal’s Photo Morgue since it was transferred to the library’s custody in 2020. She is a Hudson Valley native and current resident of the City of Poughkeepsie.

Featured Artists

Emilie Houssart

Emilie Houssart is a Dutch American artist and curator. Her work explores attitudes toward land in New York through installation, performance, drawing, and printmaking. Her initiative, The DIRT Project, invites play with earth, linguistics, and identity.

Recent presentations include print shows at Crown Gallery, CT and Wooyeon & Ssangri Galleries, Rep. of Korea; a performance for Soon is Now, Beacon, NY; and public installations at Urban Soils Institute, NY; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, NY; Unison Arts, NY; The Dorsky Museum & Wallkill Valley Land Trust, New Paltz, NY; and Frans Masereel Centrum/Koningsbos, Belgium. She has participated in residencies at Swale House, Governor’s Island, NY; Women’s Studio Workshop, NY; the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, NY; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; and Print to the People, UK.

Houssart holds a BA (Hons) in modern languages from the University of Durham, UK; completed three years of painting and drawing at Charles Cecil Studios, Italy; and earned an MFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from SUNY New Paltz, NY. She is a Lecturer, Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and member of the community collective Eddy at SUNY New Paltz.

Onaje Benjamin

Born in 1948, the same year that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, Onaje Benjamin was destined to be drawn into the activism evolving out of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Being of African American and Caribbean descent and raised in Harlem provided a rich cultural foundation for Onaje to develop his creative framework.

Defining himself as a documentary/humanist photographer, Onaje began his photographic work in the 1980s working with film cameras. While pursuing a career as a community organizer, activist, and social worker, he earned bachelors and masters degrees in liberal arts and social work. Since his retirement in 2015, Onaje’s work has been exhibited in galleries in the Mid-Hudson Valley, New England, and New York City, including a solo show at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. His numerous awards include the Leilani Claire Award for Outstanding Achievement in Photography, and he has conducted artist talks at the Center for Photography in Woodstock. Onaje’s photographs reflect the shifting cultural and political landscapes that make up the communities he resides in.

Xuewu Zheng

Xuewu Zheng was born in Heilongjiang Province, China. He received a BFA from Harbin Normal University in China and an MFA from SUNY New Paltz in the United States. He currently lives in New York.

Zheng’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout Asia, Europe, Australia, and the United States. He has served as a Visiting Professor at Harbin Normal University, China; Appalachian State University; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Columbia University; Vassar College; and University College Cork, Ireland. Previous artist residencies include the Vermont Studio Center; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Gwangju Art Museum, Korea; Jingdezhen Sanbao Ceramic Art Institute, China; and the Nebraska Art Farm.

Zheng’s work is held in international collections at the National Art Museum of China; the Kaethe-Kollwitz Museum Berlin, Germany; the Australian Embassy, China; the Woo Jae Gil Art Museum, Korea; the Ackland Art Museum, Guilford College, the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts, United States; and the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea.

Conveners

Dr. Kafui Attoh

Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and an affiliated faculty member of the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at the CUNY Graduate Center

Kafui is the author of Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay (University of Georgia Press, 2019) as well as a co-author of Disrupting DC: The Rise of Uber and the Fall of the City (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Jamie Kelly

Associate Professor of Philosophy

Jamie has a BA in English and philosophy, and an MA in philosophy from Carleton University. He received his PhD in philosophy from Boston University in 2007. His work in political philosophy focuses on the relationship between democratic theory and empirical research into human decision-making. He also has interests in the history of philosophy, as well as the philosophy of law. He is currently writing a book about Karl Marx’s account of automation and the possibility of artificial labour.