Prior Juries

2008-2009:
Andrea Batista Schlesinger
Doug Ashford
Michael Beirut
Damaris Reyes

2009-2010:
Omar Freilla
Sarah Ludwig
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
Charles Blow

2010-2011:
Eddie Bautista
Michelle de la Uz
Ellen Lupton
Mike Perry

2012:
Maya Wiley
Sondra Youdelman
Prem Krishnamurthy
Tomer Hanuka

2013:
Harvey Epstein
Lisa Strausfeld
Myrna Perez
Willy Wong

2014:
Georgianna Stout
Andrew Reicher
Rodrigo Corral
Rachel LaForest

2015:
Abbott Miller
Denise Miranda
Vincent Warren
Ping Zhu

2016:
Alicia Cheng
Steve Choi
Ejim Dike
Scott Stowell

Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Since 2002, Andrea Batista Schlesinger has led the effort to turn the Drum Major Institute, originally founded by an advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement, into a progressive policy institute with national impact. Under Andrea's leadership as Executive Director, DMI has released several important policy papers to national audiences including: Congress at the Midterm: Their Middle-Class Record and Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the American Middle Class. Andrea has worked in various capacities to promote educational equity and youth empowerment. She directed a national campaign to engage college students in the discussion on the future of Social Security for the Pew Charitable Trusts, and served as Director of Public Relations of Teach For America before working as the education advisor to Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer. Andrea has been profiled in the New York Times, New Yorker magazine, Latina Magazine and the award-winning documentary, "Hear us Now." She is a contributor to The Huffington Post, serves on the Editorial Board of The Nation and the boards of the Sadie Nash Leadership Project, WireTap and the Applied Research Center and was named a "40 under 40 Rising Star" by Crain's New York Business.

Doug Ashford

Doug Ashford is a teacher and artist. He is Associate Professor at the Cooper Union where he has taught design, sculpture and theory for many years. His principle art practice from 1982 to 1996 was as a member of Group Material, an artist’s collaborative that produced exhibitions and public projects using the museum and the city as forums for questioning culture. Since those years he gone on to write, paint and produce independent public projects. Ashford’s most recent effort is as a organizer of Who Cares, a book constructed from a series of conversations on public expression in 2006.

Michael Bierut

Michael Bierut is a partner in the international design consultancy Pentagram. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design. He is a Senior Critic at the Yale School of Art, the recipient of the AIGA Medal, and the author of Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989, to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003, and was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006.

Damaris Reyes

Damaris Reyes has been the Executive Director of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), a neighborhood housing and preservation organization dedicated to tenants' rights, homelessness prevention, and community revitalization. She is a lifelong resident of the Lower East Side and has been involved in public housing issues for more than ten years. Previously, as the Director of Organizing for public housing (Public Housing Residents of the Lower East side – PHROLES, a GOLES partner), she worked to educate and empower residents about the issues that plague public housing. She was involved in building several coalitions, including T.R.A.D.E.S., Rebuild with a Spotlight on the Poor and Neighbors Empowering Neighbors. Damaris continues to work on behalf of local residents, but uses a holistic approach to neighborhood improvement addressing issues that include zoning, job creation, education, affordable housing, small business retention and general community awareness. She sits on several boards including New York City Jobs with Justice, the Pratt Center for Community Development, LSNY-Manhattan, and the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development. In November 2006 she received the Helen LaKelly Hunt Neighborhood Leadership Award from the New York Women's Foundation for her work and commitment to the Lower East Side.

Omar Freilla

Omar Freilla has been named one of “The New School of Activists Most Likely to change New York City” by City Limits magazine (2000). Raised in the South Bronx, where he continues to live, he has gained international recognition as an outspoken environmental justice activist who has dedicated himself to seeking solutions to the disproportionate environmental impacts faced by low-income communities of color. He is the founder and director of Green Worker Cooperatives (GWC), an organization dedicated to the creation of worker-owned and environmentally friendly businesses in the South Bronx. Through GWC, he is working to develop ReBuilders Source, the first worker-cooperative reuse center for building materials that will help create a new generation of “green collar” jobs and help reduce the generation and export of waste. His writing on community opposition to transportation racism in New York City was published in 2004 by South End Press in the book “Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity” edited by Robert Bullard. Omar has received numerous awards for his work including the Open Society Institute’s New York City Community Fellowship, the Union Square Award for grassroots activists, the Environmental Leadership Program fellowship, and the Jane Jacobs Medal for New Ideas and Activism. He has also been featured in the 2007 environmental documentary “The 11th Hour” produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Sarah Ludwig

Sarah Ludwig is the Co-Director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, a leading advocate on community equity and financial justice issues. Since founding NEDAP in 1995, she has worked with hundreds of grassroots groups to develop local organizing and advocacy strategies to address redlining and lending discrimination. Sarah co-leads New Yorkers for Responsible Lending, a state-wide coalition of more than 140 community and consumer groups and community financial institutions dedicated to combating predatory lending practices. Sarah was a 2000 fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation's Next Generation Leadership Program, and in 2002 received the Union Square Award. In 2004, she was selected as a Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World awardee. Sarah recently completed a 3-year term on the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, and serves on the boards of directors of the Consumer Federation of America and North Star Fund. In December 2008, she received New York Lawyers for the Public Interest's Felix A. Fishman Award, for "her exceptional service on behalf of low income communities."

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville

Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design at Yale University School of Art, received a BA in art history from Barnard College, Columbia University and a MFA in the graphic design area of study at Yale University School of Art, as well as honorary doctorates from California College of the Arts and Moore College of Art. She is on the first list of 40 honored as the most influential people in design by I-D, and in 2004 Sheila was awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts gold medal awarded since 1920 to individuals who have set standards of excellence over a lifetime of work. Her award winning print graphics are in the special collections of museums and libraries here and abroad as are her site-specific public artworks. Whether in print or permanent materials, Sheila specializes in the inclusion of local populations and multiple perspectives in her work.

Charles Blow

Charles M. Blow is The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist. Mr. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper's graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best-in-show award from the Society of News Design for the Times's information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best-in-show awards from the Malofiej International Infographics Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. Mr. Blow went on to become the paper's Design Director for News before leaving in 2006 to become the Art Director of National Geographic Magazine.

Eddie Bautista

Eddie Bautista is an award-winning community organizer and urban planner who currently serves as the Executive Director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), an umbrella network of community-based organizations in low-income communities of color throughout the City. From 2006 to 2010, Eddie served as Director of the Mayor's Office of City Legislative Affairs. As Director, Eddie spearheaded efforts to pass several major pieces of legislation, including the City’s 20-year landmark Solid Waste Management Plan. Previously, Eddie was the Director of Community Planning for NY Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI), where he served as the lobbying/communications/community organizing director for this non-profit civil rights law firm. At NYLPI, Eddie organized numerous grassroots coalitions and campaigns, including the Organization of Waterfront Neighborhoods (OWN) and Communities United for Responsible Energy (CURE). Eddie has a B.A. from N.Y.U., an M.S. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute and was a Revson Fellow at Columbia University. In 2003, Eddie was among 17 national winners of the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World awards. Eddie is also a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment.

Michelle de la Uz

Michelle de la Uz became the Fifth Avenue Committee’s (FAC) Executive Director in January 2004. Prior to joining FAC, Michelle was program director for the uptown sites of the Center for Urban Community Services in Washington Heights and Harlem, where she oversaw services in supportive housing for 400 low-income tenants and managed a staff of 30. Previously she was Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez’s first director of constituent services and directed her South Brooklyn District Office. Michelle is the first in her working-class immigrant family to graduate from college and is a product of bilingual education. She is a long-time Park Slope resident, a former trustee of Connecticut College, the recipient of the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World award and is now President of the Board of Directors of ANHD (Association of Neighborhood and Housing Development). Recently, Michelle was accepted into Fannie Mae’s NeighborWorks Achieving Excellence in Community Development program at Harvard University.

Ellen Lupton

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. She has produced numerous exhibitions as curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992. An author of numerous books and articles on design, she is a public-minded critic, frequent lecturer, and AIGA Gold Medalist.

Mike Perry

Mike Perry works in Brooklyn, NY, making books, magazines, newspapers, clothing, drawings, paintings, illustrations and teaching whenever possible. His first book, titled Hand Job and published by Princeton Architectural Press, hit the book shelves in 2006. His second book, titled Over & Over, hit the shelves in 2008. He is currently working on two new books. In 2007 he started a magazine called Untitled, that explores his current interests. He has worked with clients from New York Times Magazine, Dwell Magazine, Microsoft Zune, Urban Outfitters, eMusic, and Zoo York. In 2004 he was chosen as one of Step Magazine's 30 under 30, as a groundbreaking illustrator by Computer Arts Projects Magazine in 2007. He received Print Magazine's New Visual Artist award in 2008, and was chosen by the Art Directors Club as one of this years Young Guns. Doodling away night and day, Perry creates new typefaces and sundry graphics that inevitably evolve into his new work, exercising the great belief that the generating of piles is the sincerest form of creative process. His work has been seen around the world including a recent solo show in London titled "The Place between Time and Space."

Maya Wiley

Maya Wiley is the Founder and President of the Center for Social Inclusion, a national public policy strategy organization that unites policy research and grassroots advocacy. As a civil rights attorney and policy advocate, Ms. Wiley has litigated numerous cases, lobbied Congress and developed programs to transform structural racism in the US and abroad. 
Prior to founding the Center for Social Inclusion, Maya was a senior advisor on race and poverty to the Director of U.S. Programs of the Open Society Institute and helped develop and implement the Open Society Foundation - South Africa’s Criminal Justice Initiative. She has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Department, in the Poverty and Justice Program of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and in the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Maya previously served on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota School of Law and the Council on Foreign Relations. She currently chairs the Tides Network Board and was named a NY Moves magazine 2009 Power Woman. In 2011 Wiley was named as one of "20 Leading Black Women Social Activists Advocating Change" by The Root.com.

Sondra Youdelman

Sondra has been at CVH since 2000 and was named the organization’s Executive Director in March 2007; she was previously CVH’s Director of Public Policy and Research. Sondra has worked both in the United States and abroad to achieve social and economic justice through organizing. She has over 15 years experience as an organizer and activist with grassroots groups including farm workers, Native Americans, public housing residents, and low-income workers in the United States, and abroad for various populations throughout Latin America and in several African countries. She obtained a Master’s Degree in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in order to gain policy analysis tools to bring back to the grassroots. She also has a BA in American Studies focusing on Oppression and Revolution from Wesleyan University.

Prem Krishnamurthy

Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, and founding principal of the design studio Project Projects. Project Projects has been honored twice as a Finalist in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum's National Design Awards for its work with clients such as CCS Bard, Columbia GSAPP, Guggenheim Museum, Harvard University, MoMA, SALT (Istanbul), Steven Holl Architects, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

In addition, Prem has edited and curated projects with the Berkeley Art Museum, Center for Architecture New York, Paper Monument, Print magazine, and SALT. Recent lectures and teaching include the Gwangju Design Biennial 2011, GAMeC 4th International Symposium of Emerging Curators, Walker Art Center, Jan Van Eyck Academie, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, University of the Arts Bremen, and RISD Graduate Graphic Design Program.

Tomer Hanuka

Tomer Hanuka is an illustrator and a cartoonist based in New York City. He works on a range of projects for magazines, book publishers, ad agencies and film studios. His Clients include The New Yorker, D.C comics, Nike and Microsoft. He has won multiple gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and the Society of Publication designers, and was showcased in Print magazine and American Illustration. In 2008 a book cover he created won the British Design Museum award as part of the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions. Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary for which Tomer contributed art, was nominated for an Oscar in 2009, and won the Golden Globe that same year. He is currently developing an animated series for Canal Plus and working on a graphic novel for First Second.

Harvey Epstein

Harvey Epstein is the Project Director of the Community Development Project at the Urban Justice Center which represents dozens of community-based organizations in a variety of transactional matters and assists their members in litigating employment, housing, health, and consumer matters. These cases are litigated in both state and federal court and are usually on behalf of groups of individuals organized by the community-based organization.

Prior to working at UJC, Harvey was the Associate Director/Managing Attorney for Housing Conservation Coordinators ("HCC"), a community based Not-For-Profit organization which works to preserve decent affordable housing. Prior to working for HCC, Harvey was a staff attorney at the Community Law Offices for The Legal Aid Society. Harvey was also instrumental in creating a Community Economic Development Project at The Legal Aid Society which assists small businesses and Not-For-Profits with transactional legal matters including incorporation, applications for tax exemption, negotiating commercial leases and loan agreements.

Lisa Strausfeld

The recipient of the 2010 National Design Award for Interaction Design, Lisa’s work wraps the complexity of Big Data in the sophisticated construction layers of an architect and the aesthetic sensibilities of a skilled artist. She has completed high-profile assignments for the new Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Study of the Senate in Boston, Gallup Inc’s redesigned website, and Bloomberg Inc’s Manhattan headquarters. Her newest entrepreneurial project, Major League Politics, seeks to make the mind-numbing data of government activity as engaging and addictive to Americans as professional sports are. Prior to that, she had been a partner at Pentagram Design in New York for the past ten years.

Myrna Pérez

Myrna Pérez is the Deputy Director of The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. She works on a variety of voting rights related issues, including redistricting, voter registration list maintenance, and access to the ballot box. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Pérez was the Civil Rights Fellow at Relman & Dane, a civil rights law firm in Washington, D.C. Ms. Pérez graduated from Columbia Law School in 2003, where she was a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow. Following law school, Ms. Pérez clerked for the Honorable Anita B. Brody of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and for the Honorable Julio M. Fuentes of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Ms. Pérez earned her undergraduate degree in Political Science from Yale University in 1996. She obtained a masters degree in public policy from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in 1998, where she was the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Public Service. Prior to law school, she was a Presidential Management Fellow, serving as a policy analyst for the United States Government Accounting Office where she covered a range of issues including housing and health care.

Willy Wong

Willy Wong is Chief Creative Officer at NYC & Company, the City of New York’s official marketing, tourism, and partnerships organization. Wong leads the creative vision on global campaigns and initiatives as well as major NYC events and programs. He is President of AIGA/NY, serves on the steering committee for NYCxDESIGN, board member of Adobe Partners By Design, a graduate thesis advisor at the School of Visual Arts, and a former advisory board member of SXSW Interactive. Wong holds an AB from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Yale University.

Georgianna Stout

Georgianna Stout is founding partner and creative director at 2x4, a global design consultancy headquartered in New York City. She leads diverse projects from retail and packaging projects to large-scale identity, exhibition and environmental graphics. She directed digital and environmental projects for Tiffany and Co. and Barneys New York and a series of exhibition designs for the Cooper-Hewitt and National Design Museum. She was creative director for an exhibition of Nike's 100 design innovations exhibited in Beijing China during the summer Olympics. Stout has been a visiting design critic at RISD and Yale University School of Art. Stout holds a B.F.A. from RISD.

Andrew Reicher

Andrew Reicher has worked at UHAB (the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board) for nearly 35 years and has been Executive Director since 1981. Under his leadership, UHAB's base of tenant-run and tenant-owned buildings has grown from several dozen to over 1,400 buildings in New York City and beyond. In addition to his work at UHAB, Mr. Reicher recently stepped down as the Chair of Center for an Urban Future after more than thirty years and remains a board member. He is the 1997 recipient of the Bowdoin College Common Good Award and 2003 recipient of the National Association of Housing Cooperatives’s highest honor, the Jerry Voorhis Award.

Rodrigo Corral

Rodrigo Corral Studio creates conceptual design and art for print, interior spaces and film. Rodrigo Corral has created some of the most iconic visuals in publishing. He is a celebrated designer, partnering with talent such as Junot Diaz, Jay- Z, Deepak and Sanjiv Chopra, Chuck Palahniuk, Tory Burch, Gianna Angelopoulos, Gary Shteyngart, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, and organizations such as the Criterion Collection, New York Magazine and The New York Times. In addition to running the Rodrigo Corral studio, he also the Creative Director for Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the Creative Director at Large for New Directions.

Rachel LaForest

Rachel LaForest has been the Executive Director of Right to the City Alliance since May 2011. She joined the Alliance after eight years of working with progressive labor, directing the Organizing and Public Policy departments of the Transport Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 and Actors Equity Association (AEA). Prior to her career with TWU and AEA, Rachel served as Lead Organizer/Co-Campaign Director for Jobs with Justice/New York Unemployment Project, building community-labor solidarity and joint action and co-coordinating the campaign that won an increase of $2 per hour in the minimum wage for New York State.

Abbott Miller

Abbott Miller has evolved a design practice that crosses from page to screen to exhibitions, environments, and architectural signage. Embracing the role of editor, writer, and curator in many of his exhibition and publications, he has used design as a way of exploring and interpreting art, architecture, public space, performance, fashion, and design. Before joining the New York office of Pentagram as a partner in 1999, he founded Design/Writing/Research, a multidisciplinary studio that pioneered the concept of the “designer as author.” In 2014, Miller received the American Institute of Graphic Arts Medal, the profession’s highest honor.

Denise Miranda

Denise Miranda is the Managing Director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center, shaping its research, advocacy, and litigation agenda. Born and raised in the Bronx, Ms. Miranda is a member of the New York State Bar as well as admitted to the Southern and Eastern Federal District Courts. She serves on the Board of Directors at Union Community Health Center and the Community Services Association and is an outspoken advocate in the fight against economic inequality.

Vincent Warren

Vincent Warren is the Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). Vince oversees CCR's litigation and advocacy work, which includes using international and domestic law to hold corporations and government officials accountable for human rights abuses; challenging racial, gender and LGBT injustice; and combating the illegal expansion of U.S. presidential power and policies such as illegal detention at Guantanamo, rendition, and torture. Prior to his tenure at CCR, Vince was a national senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), where he litigated civil rights cases, focusing on affirmative action, racial profiling and criminal justice reform. Prior to the ACLU, Vince monitored South Africa's historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings and worked as a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn.

Ping Zhu

Ping Zhu is a Brooklyn-based illustrator. She received the ADC Young Gun in 2013 and has been recognized by American Illustration and Communication Arts. Her clients include the New York Times, Pentagram, New Yorker, Coach, GOOD Magazine, The Independent, Sunday Times, Pushkin Press, Hèlium, and Nobrow Press. She is a visiting instructor at Pratt Institute and a graduate of Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Alicia Cheng

Alicia Cheng is a founding partner of MGMT. design, a collaborative design studio based in Brooklyn. Established with Sarah Gephart, MGMT. approaches all projects with substantive research and a conceptual rigor that is an integral part of the process. Alicia has worked as a senior designer for Method, New York, and was the co-design director at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. She has served as a lecturer and visiting critic at Yale University, Cooper Union, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Rhode Island School of Design. She serves on the board of the AIGA/NY chapter as well as the Fine Arts Federation. Alicia received her BA from Barnard College and her MFA from Yale University.

Steve Choi

Steve Choi, Esq. is the Executive Director of the New York Immigration Coalition, an umbrella advocacy and policy coalition of nearly 200 member groups representing New York State’s immigrant communities. From 2009 to 2013, he was the Executive Director of the MinKwon Center for Community Action, which organizes, advocates for, educates and serves Korean and Asian community members in New York. Prior to that, Steve was a Staff Attorney and the founding Director of the Korean Workers Project at the Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, the only project on the East Coast focused on providing free legal services to low-wage Korean immigrants. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an M.A. from the University of Hawai’i, and a B.A. from Stanford University in History with Honors.

Ejim Dike

Ejim Dike is Executive Director of the US Human Rights Network. She has been a leader in human rights movement building over the past thirteen years. Her human rights work focuses on addressing poverty and discrimination using a human rights and intersectional framework. Previously, she was Director of the Human Rights Project (HRP) at the Urban Justice Center. Under her leadership, the Human Rights Project launched an annual report card on the human rights record of New York City Council members; coordinated a shadow report on racial discrimination with 30 local groups for submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD); and organized a New York City visit by the UN Special Expert on Racism. She has been cited in articles appearing in Harper’s Magazine, MSNBC, AlJazeera, The Root, The Daily News, Gotham Gazette, and other media. Ejim received her undergraduate degree from Berea College and a Masters of Urban Planning from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service at New York University.

Scott Stowell

Scott Stowell is the proprietor of Open, an independent design studio that creates rewarding experiences for people that look, read, and think. Recent Open projects include identity systems for Bravo, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Planet Green, and WNYC Radio; the editorial design of Good magazine; short films for Google and Jazz at Lincoln Center; and architectural signage for the Yale University Art Gallery. Before starting Open, Scott was the art director of Colors magazine in Rome and a senior designer at M&Co. New York. A former vice president of AIGA/NY, Scott teaches at Yale and the School of Visual Arts. In 2008, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum named Scott the winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design. He received a BFA in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design.