Advancing One Water Through Arts and Culture
Tyler Antrup serves as the Urban Water Program Manager for the City of New Orleans, leading coordination of the city’s drainage and green infrastructure programs across all departments and agencies. He joined the City in 2015 to assist in implementing the City’s first stormwater management regulations for private development - Article 23 of the new Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance - and serve as a design review planner in the Land Use division of the City Planning Commission. His work has included developing the review process framework, educating designers and engineers, and reviewing applications for compliance with requirements for detention, retention, and filtration of stormwater runoff. Prior to working with the City, he worked for GCR Inc. as a planner, working on resilience, housing, and market analysis projects. His work included the New Orleans Main Street Resilience Plan, HousingNOLA, and authoring the Economic Benefits section of the Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan. He holds a Master's degree in Sustainable Real Estate Development from Tulane University, and a Bachelor's degree in Urban Planning and Design from the University of Missouri- Kansas City.
Matthew Clarke, an architect, planner and writer, is the Director of Creative Placemaking at the Trust for Public Land. He is a nationally recognized leader in the urban placemaking movement. He is the author of The Field Guide for Creative Placemaking in Parks. Other writing has appeared in such publications as The Princeton Chronicle, Clog, Atlantic Magazine, DOMUS, as well as several monographs. Prior to his current role, Matthew held positions with SHoP Architects, NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, and LTL Architects. He is the 2017 German Marshall Fund Urban Policy Fellow and was named a member of Next City Magazine’s Urban Vanguard in 2013. Matthew serves as a Trustee of Bennington College, as Vice-President of the Lucille Lortel Foundation, a Governor of the Princeton Association of New York and as a Board Member of the North Limestone CDC in Lexington, Kentucky. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Kentucky.
Nicole Crutchfield, a registered landscape architect and certified city planner, and is currently employed as the City of Fargo Planning Director. She has been with the City of Fargo since 2007. Between 2009-2015 she collaborated with Jackie Brookner and co-managed The Fargo Project. The Fargo Project is an Our Town NEA grantee, ArtPlace America Creative Placemaking grantee, and a Kresge Foundation grantee. Through the work of The Fargo Project and working with community and artists, the city is learning how to integrate community development and design into city infrastructure.
Ramón Cruz has over 15 years of experience intersecting the fields of sustainability, environmental policy, urban planning, energy and climate change. He has worked in the public sector in his native Puerto Rico as the Deputy Director of the Environmental Quality Board, the state environmental regulatory agency and as Commissioner of the Puerto Rico Energy Commission. He has also worked in the non-governmental sector in senior positions at the Environmental Defense Fund, the Partnership for New York City and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). Ramón is a graduate of American University in Washington D.C. and Princeton University in New Jersey.
Joanne Dahme is the General Manager for Public Affairs for the City of Philadelphia Water Department. She has 30 years of engineering program management, public relations, and government affairs experience. Joanne is currently responsible for all forms of departmental communications, including production of publications, public information campaigns and citizen advisory committees. From 1999 to 2008, Joanne was the department’s Watersheds Programs Manager with the Office of Watersheds, directing the development and implementation of regional watershed partnerships.
Milly Hawk Daniel, Vice President for Communications, leads a highly talented team of digital and offline communications strategists, print and online designers, specialists in social and traditional media, writers, and editors. The team works to disseminate messages about economic and social equity to an ever-growing audience of policymakers, equity advocates, and funders. A speechwriter, editor, presentation and strategic communications trainer, and author, Milly has directed communications for several nonprofit organizations and provided communications consulting services for many others. For PolicyLink, she leads communications activities and campaigns focusing on health equity, infrastructure equity, equity as a superior growth model, and federal and state advocacy. She is an avid jazz lover, arts and culture fanatic, and a staunch believer in the power of equity.
Tom DeCaigny is the Director of Cultural Affairs for the City and County of San Francisco. As the Director of Cultural Affairs, he oversees the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), the $24 million City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts sector, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy. Before being appointed Director of Cultural Affairs by Mayor Ed Lee in 2012, Mr. DeCaigny was an independent consultant and strategist in the fields of arts and culture, youth development and education. He served nine years as Executive Director of Performing Arts Workshop, a San Francisco-based organization dedicated to helping marginalized young people develop critical thinking, creative expression and essential learning skills through the arts. Prior to being an Executive Director, he helped found an arts middle school for youth in the juvenile justice system, managed the AIDS Memorial Quilt’s National Youth Education Program and conducted research for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
Mr. DeCaigny currently serves on the Executive Committee of the United States Urban Arts Federation and on the Program Committee for the World Cities Culture Forum. He has appeared on CNN International and was invited to present at the first-ever UNESCO World Conference on Arts Education. His prior board service includes: Two terms as Board Co-Chair of LYRIC, an LGBTQQ youth community center in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood; terms as Board Secretary and Treasurer for the California Alliance for Arts Education; Secretary of the SFUSD Arts Education Master Plan Advisory Committee; Host Committee Co-Chair of the National Guild for Community Arts Education’s 2010 annual conference; Steering Committee Chair for Making Art, Making Change, a conference dedicated to examining the relationship between art and social change; and service as Host Committee Co-Chair for the 2017 Americans for the Arts convention in San Francisco. Mr. DeCaigny has a B.A. degree in Dramatic Arts from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and currently resides in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood.
Jayeesha Dutta is a tri-coastal Bengali-American artist, activist and healer-in-training, currently serving as lead strategist for StoryShift at Working Films. She is part of the core leadership circle for Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative, galvanizing the voices and experiences of brown (indigenous, Latinx and Desi) women from across the Gulf Coast working towards a just transition for our people and the planet. She is the communications committee chair on Big Class/826 NOLA’s board of directors and the visual arts working group chair for Alternate ROOTS. Jayeesha is an avid traveler, home chef, live music aficionado, loves being near (or in) any body of water and is trying to learn how to salsa dance. Jayeesha was born in Mobile, raised in New York, aged in Oakland and is deeply grateful to call New Orleans home.
Jorie Emory is an artist, nonprofit professional, and educator who works at the intersection of art, environment, and community. She is a producer for the Wild & Scenic Film Festival at the South Yuba River Citizens League. In the studio, Jorie is a textile artist, working predominately in weaving and natural dyeing to explore sense of place. She has exhibited her work nationally and has been awarded residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute and the Prairie Center for the Arts. Jorie earned a Ph.D. in Arts Administration, Education, and Policy from the Ohio State University. Her research interests are community engagement and environmental art.
In years of involvement with community outreach, Juliet has managed multi-million dollar projects to benefit under-served communities and businesses throughout the Bay Area. As Executive Director of the Urban Habitat program she successfully transitioned this San Francisco based non-profit organization into a $2 million national leader. Juliet has been a Commissioner of SFPUC and served on numerous other national, regional and local boards and committees. She’s currently a member of the President’s White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Environment and Climate Change Taskforce. Juliet received her Masters of Science in Business Administration at San Francisco State University with an emphasis in Environmental and Urban Studies.
Stephanie Gidigbi champions public policy solutions that promote economic, social, and environmental benefits for communities. She directs the policy, capacity, and systems change function for the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC), a $90 million initiative advancing equitable infrastructure investment. Gidigbi previously served as a political appointee for President Obama and advanced the administration’s economic opportunity agenda at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She worked on Capitol Hill for several years. Gidigbi brings more than a decade of international, federal, state, and local government experience to NRDC's Urban Solutions team. She has a master’s degree from Seton Hall University and based in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Haqq joined the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District in 2005 as Director of Communications and Community Relations. She currently serves as Director of Administration and External Affairs and is responsible for the organization’s internal and external communications, public outreach and education n, media relations, customer service and government affairs functions. Ms. Haqq has held several leadership positions in her career including Executive Director of both INROADS/Northeast Ohio, Inc. and the Nordson Corporation Foundation. A native of Cleveland Ohio, she holds a Bachelors degree from Tufts University and a Masters Degree from Case Western Reserve University’s Mandel School of Applied Social Science. She has served on numerous philanthropic boards including: Ohio Boys Town, Inc., Karamu House, Inc., Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital and Business Volunteers Unlimited. Ms. Haqq currently represents the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District on the Commission for Economic Inclusion’s leadership committee.
Shanai Matteson is a writer, public artist and arts organizer. She is one of the founders and Collaborative Directors of Water Bar & Public Studio, an artist-led public benefit corporation based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We serve water to build relationships and transform the cultures of cross-sector collaboration. Shanai loves working with others on public projects that are rooted in place, and which seek to grow our collective capacity for reciprocity and care. She's most interested in work at the margins of established fields and practices, and believes that edges and intersections provide fertile ground for artists and others to learn and create, with and in community. More info about Water Bar can be found here: https://www.water-bar.org
Katie Mika is a Water Policy Advisory in the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Trained as a sculptor, her work creates situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. Mary Miss has collaborated closely with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists, and public administrators on projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City or turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. Recent projects include an installation focused on water resources in China for the Olympic Park in Beijing and a temporary installation at a seventeenth-century park in Delhi, India as part of the exhibition 49°: Public Art and Ecology. A proposal for a permanent project at the North Carolina Museum of Art explored the presence and movement of water through the site by recovering and revitalizing elements of the watershed to reveal the wetland processes in the region. She is currently working on WaterMarks, an Atlas of Water for the City of Milwaukee.
Eve Mosher is an artist and interventionist living and working in New York City. Her works use investigations of the landscape as starting points for audience exploration of urban issues. Recent work examines the complex urban waterways and utilizes radical imagination to explore future challenges and opportunities through creative collaboration with communities and professional practitioners. She is a co-founder of Works on Water, a cultural institution dedicated to supporting artists working on, in and with bodies of water and play:groundNYC, a 50,000 s.f. junk playground on Governors Island. Her work has been performed and shown across the US, and in Europe, the UK, Korea and Australia and has been profiled in international media including the The New Yorker, New York Times, ABC Nightly News, The Guardian, WHYY Public Radio, ARTnews, New Scientist, American Scientist, and Le Monde. Her public and community based artworks have received grants from New York State Council on the Arts and New York Department of Cultural Affairs, through the Brooklyn Arts Council, and The City Parks Foundation. Collaborative work has received support from The Kresge Foundation, The Compton Foundation, The Whitman Foundation, and Invoking the Pause.
Emmanuel is co-founder and Executive Director of the Sweet Water Foundation. Emmanuel's professional and academic work has involved explorations and investigations in such topics as architecture, urbanization, race/identity, gentrification, and most recently transformative processes of community economic development through intersections of food security and sustainable design innovation. While most of his early work was anchored in the field of architecture, Emmanuel's work has since explored the role of art and social praxis as a key component of urban design, urban farming, and sustainability with a particular concentration on the creation of a new paradigms for regenerative neighborhood development. Emmanuel was a Loeb Fellow in 2017 and currently is a Visiting Lecturer at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.
Debra Shore is a Commissioner on the Board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, first elected in 2006, and re-elected to a second term in 2012. Debra has been a strong advocate for cleaning up the Chicago waterways and for resource recovery, including the reuse of treated water and the generation of biogas. In recognition of her work, she received the Public Officials Award from the Water Environment Federation in 2013. Debra is immediate past president of the board of trustees for Congregation Sukkat Shalom in Wilmette and immediate past chair of the Board of Directors for the Great Lakes Protection Fund. She was the founding editor of Chicago Wilderness Magazine, is an active volunteer restoring prairies and oak woods, and was a founding board member of Friends of the Forest Preserves. Debra graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD with a degree in Philosophy & Visual Arts. She earned Master’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia College (Chicago). In 2008 she earned a Certificate in Executive Education from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Debra lives with her partner-in-life, Kathleen Gillespie, in Skokie, Illinois. She has climbed 42 of the 54 mountains in Colorado more than 14,000’ high.
Since joining Grist in 2013, Andrew has overseen special projects, including the Grist journalism fellowship and the Grist 50. He began his career as a music journalist. He was an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone, a deputy managing editor at VIBE, and the managing editor at Complex Media. In 2008, he switched his focus to sports and joined ESPN The Magazine as a senior editor. In 2012 he became a senior editor at Fast Company, where he oversaw editorial franchises like Fast Talk and the Most Creative People in Business. He is co-author of the book Racing While Black: How an African-American Stock Car Team Made Its Mark on NASCAR.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Michael Singer’s work opened new possibilities for outdoor and indoor sculpture and contributed to the definition of site specific art and the reimagining of public places. From the 1990s to the present his work has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape, and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological regeneration. Singer has also been engaged in the rethinking of infrastructure facilities and systems in the United States and Europe and co-authored Infrastructure and Community published by Environmental Defense Fund. Michael Singer has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He has had several one-person shows, most notably at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City and most recently at the Utzon Center in Aalborg and the Danish Architectural Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Ashley Sparks is a southern theatre maker, engagement strategist, and consultant. She has worked in urban and rural communities across the country with the award-winning theater companies Cornerstone Theater Company and ArtSpot Productions. With the Network of Ensemble Theaters she co-produced MicroFest USA, a national series that was part festival / part think focused on cross-sector collaborations in Detroit, Harlan County, New Orleans, and Honolulu. Ashley's engagement work includes collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council on their Energy Efficiency for All Project to incorporate story into their advocacy effort to increase energy efficiency resources in affordable housing. Ashley provides consulting on network development and facilitation for the Network for Energy, Water, and Health in Affordable Buildings (NEWHAB), this includes producing and design for NEWHAB’s Annual Convenings for advocates and implementers. She is a current A Blade Of Grass Fellow for her performance and dialogue experiment Good Old Boys. She is a member of Alternate ROOTS and Showing Up for Racial Justice.