Gina Luria Walker is Professor of Women’s Studies and the Director of The New Historia at the School for Public Engagement. She is a leader in the global initiative of Feminist Historical
Recovery and continues to publish and speak about the significance of documenting figures who were silenced by Misogyny and, therefore, missing from traditional narratives of the past. Over
four decades she has collaborated with scholars to discover, recover, and reclaim earlier women’s lives and production of new knowledge, beginning with her groundbreaking research
on Mary Hays (1759-1843), Dissenting autodidact and “inventor” of “female biography” as a new category of gendered historiography and historical analysis. To produce the first modern
edition of Hays’s Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrated and Celebrated Women from All Ages and Countries in six volumes (1803), the “lives” of 302 figures, Walker directed a
collaborative of 200+ scholars from 164 institutions in eighteen countries from 2009-214. With this community of knowers, she created The New Historia which The New School recognized as a signature initiative in 2016. She teaches Women’s Intellectual History at SPE and NSSR,
including “Enlightened Exchanges,” textual interchanges between male and female Enlightenment thinkers. This semester she is teaching “Becoming Visible,” a graduate UTNS course in which students from many university programs devise ways to experiment with the
norms and forms of the making of History itself and will represent legions of “unremembered
women” as newly visible, tangible, knowable, instructive, and inspiring.
In anticipation of the university’s Centennial, she and Ellen Freeberg offered courses in “Women’s Legacy at The New School” which became The Women’s Legacy Project that now includes Stefania de Kenessey, Cecilia Rubino, and Savanna Washington, supported by students and other faculty. The discovery of ten mostly unremembered “Founding Mothers” and dozens
of earlier feminists at the institution continues.

Cecilia Rubino is a director, writer and educator who has created theater pieces which have performed at Lincoln Center’s Walter Read Theater, The New Victory @ 42ndStreet, Jefferson Market Playhouse, the New York Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Her documentary film, Remembering
Shakespeare, which explores new ways of thinking about memory and Shakespeare’s words in our digital age screened in 2020 at the American Shakespeare Center and the New Haven Documentary Film
Festival. She has just completed a documentary play called The Beatrice Six which will be part of an HBO series directed by award winning filmmaker Nanfu
Wang. Rubino’s recent publications include: ‘If It Live In Your Memory’ in The Whirlwind of Passion:
New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare published by Cambridge Scholars’ Press; Viola Spolin & the American Improv Movement on Digital Theater ‘Drama Online’; and The Making of Remembering Shakespeare in the publication Altre Modernita. Rubino also wrote and directed From The Fire, which won the UK/Music Theater awards for best music, production and new musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival. She received her MFA in Theater from the Yale School of Drama. As an Associate Professor of Theater at Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts, she has directed the undergraduate theater program, and currently directs the Lang College Arts in Context Program. She also coordinates the Arts Education Lang - ‘I Have A Dream’ Harlem and Chelsea III Afterschool Programs. She has recently taught distinctive Civic Liberal Arts courses including: ZOOM PLAYS: Theater & Ecojustice Education and RE-IMAGINING SCHOOL: Through the Methods of Sekou Sundiata, Theater of the Oppressed and Exalt Youth. Rubino received the Lang College/New School Faculty Advisor Excellence Award in 2016, the New School’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2018 and was named a Mellon Periclean Faculty Leader in the Humanities for 2020-22.

Savanna has written, directed, and produced nearly two dozen shorts, as well as written, produced, and directed two narrative feature length films and two documentary feature length films. She was awarded a production grant from the Colin L. Powell Center's Korean Issues & Insights Endowment for her feature length documentary, “Playing Frisbee in North Korea.” The documentary premiered at the Woods Hole Film Festival on August 1, 2018 and enjoyed a successful festival run during 2018-2019 (Commercial Distributor: American Public Television World Wide / Educational Distributor: Kino Lorber). She was also awarded a Puffin Grant for her film work on urban greening and environmental justice, on which she will resume production in 2021. Savanna received her M.F.A. in Directing from City College in New York. While attending City College she was awarded a Colin Powell Graduate Fellowship, the first filmmaker to be honored. As a community activist and activist educator, Savanna has used her life to effect change. Ms. Washington has over 20 years experience as a writer, director, and activist. As part of her activism, she was the Founding & Managing Editor of the Adams Avenue Herald, a community newspaper in San Diego. Her most
recent activism was as lead strategist to defeat a one-billion dollar rezoning plan in Harlem in which she was successful. It’s the largest defeat of a private development by a tenant association in New York City history. She is a professor at The New School where she teaches production and pre-
production classes, as well as, “The Activism Toolkit,” a graduate level class on activism she developed. She is also an Associate Professor at City University of New York, where she teaches Video Arts Production, Screenwriting, and Intro to Contemporary Media. She resides in Harlem.

Composer Stefania de Kenessey has worked in a wide variety of genres, from chamber and orchestral to vocal and operatic. Her radical reimagining of Tom Wolfe’s classic novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (bonfiretheopera.com) created a leading role for an African-American female defense attorney and updated story all the way to the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. Described as ”caustically witty” by the Financial Times, it debuted at the Museo del Barrio in 2015. Her recent “Unorthodox”, a Klezmer-inspired electronic score about a young woman who leaves a strict Hasidic sect, was commissioned by the all-female Ariel Rivka Dance
company. Modeled on the book by Deborah Feldman and the subsequent Emmy-nominated Netflix series, the video version premiered at the 2020 Gershman Jewish Film Festival in Philadelphia.
De Kenessey’s music has been performed locally in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Joe’s Pub, and she is the founding president of the International Alliance for Women in Music.
For further information, please visit her website at www.stefaniadekenessey.com

Ellen M. Freeberg is Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Curriculum at the New School for Social Research. As Affiliated Faculty in the Politics Department she has taught courses on feminist theory, American politics, and civil liberties. Her publications include the monograph Regarding Equality
(Lexington Books), work and talks on contemporary political theory and most recently, research focused-
on women’s varied and often lesser-known legacies at The New School.

Julia Foulkes investigates interdisciplinary questions about the arts, urban studies, and history in her research and teaching. Professor Foulkes’s most recent book, A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (2016), examines what this legendary musical and film reveal about mid-20th century New York. She also curated an exhibition marking the 100th birthday of Jerome Robbins that focuses on his relation to New York; the acclaimed Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York was on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center from September 2018 to March 2019. (A digital version of the exhibition can be found here.) Her collaboration with the choreographer Netta Yerushalmy on a piece on Bob Fosse for Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in August 2018 and at New York Live Arts in March 2019. She is currently researching the rise of New York as a capital of culture in the 20th century.

With Mark Larrimore, Professor Foulkes researches and teaches about the history of The New School, which celebrated its centenary in 2019. They oversee a website devoted to exploring the unusual history and far reach of this institution. A 2014 exhibition, with Radhika Subramaniam, Offense + Dissent: Image, Conflict, Belonging, investigated three episodes when art roused protest at the New School. The exhibition brought forward the issues to today in fifty responses from faculty, students, and staff to an artwork or aspect of design that they encounter at the university every day that provokes them. In fall 2018, they initiated a vertical on the history of the New School at Public Seminar, the virtual intellectual commons of the New School. A podcast series, New Histories, launched in fall 2019 and a digital collection of essays was published as Realizing The New School: Lessons From the Past in 2020.