2008-2009:
M. Beirut
D. Reyes
A. Schlesinger
D. Ashford
2009-2010:
O. Freilla
S. Ludwig
S. Levrant de Bretteville
C. Blow
2010-2011:
E. Bautista
M. de la Uz
E. Lupton
M. Perry
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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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."