This public lecture will feature a conversation around art and the economy, featuring Institute Senior Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Natalie Diaz, Zia Khan, and Darrick Hamilton. Together, they will examine the relationship between art and capital, while reflecting on the role of data and discourse in the movement for justice and paradigm shift.
This event is part of the 2025 Henry Cohen Lecture Series, which will bring leading thinkers, changemakers, policymakers, journalists, and activists to the New School to present their perspectives and explore the intersections of race, social stratification and political economy that inspire economic and racial justice
Darrick Hamilton is a university professor, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School. Darrick examines social stratification and political economy in order to move policy and practice in fundamentally new directions that promote economic inclusion, social equity, and civic engagement.Â
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press), winner of the American Book Award, and Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award and Forward Prize. Diaz has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, Native Arts and Culture Fellowship, and both Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize and Hodder Fellowship. She is Professor at Arizona State University where she Directs the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry. She is the youngest ever elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Fellowship and is currently a Mellon Foundation Presidential Fellow.
Darrick Hamilton is a university professor, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy, and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy at The New School. Considered one of the nation’s foremost public intellectuals, Professor Hamilton redefines how an economy should work, identifies powerful opportunities for investment in human capacity, and propells collaboration alongside field leaders to advance the realization of economic inclusion, social equity and civic engagement for all people in the US and across the globe. One of the pioneers of identity group stratification, he has been profiled in the New York Times, Mother Jones, Bloomberg’s Business Week and the Wall Street Journal. He has developed and collaborated on transformative policy proposals that have shifted billions of dollars into the hands of people, inspiring legislative proposals at the federal, state, and local levels, including baby bonds, guaranteed income, and a federal job guarantee. Professor Hamilton was named a Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. He advises national and global leaders on economic policy, including the Joint Economic Committee and the Senate Banking Committee. Born and raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, he is a graduate of Oberlin College and received a PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina.
Zia Khan is the Chief Innovation Officer at The Rockefeller Foundation where he oversees the Foundation’s approach to developing solutions using novel technologies and techniques that have transformative impact on people’s well-being. He sits on a number of boards and advisory committees helping leaders apply innovation to achieve social change. Before joining the Foundation, he led the San Francisco office at Katzenbach Partners where he advised clients on leadership, strategy, and organizational performance and co-authored the book Leading Outside the Lines.