Director
James Lowry, Professor, Queens College, City University of New York
Advisory Board
SE Hackney, Assistant Professor, Queens College, City University of New York
Robin Margolis, XFR Collective
Obden Mondesir, Associate Director of the Barnard Archives and Special Collections
Jeanie Pai, Special Projects and Services Coordinator in digital research at the New York Public Library
Johnathan Thayer, Assistant Professor, Queens College, City University of New York
Annie Tummino, Head of Special Collections, Queens College Archives
Lori Wallach, Queens Memory Outreach Coordinator, Queens College Archives
Research Fellows
Amal Ahmed
Amal Ahmed is an audiovisual archivist and writer currently enrolled at Queens College (CUNY) in the Library Media Specialist program. She is a graduate of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Amal’s research explores the migratory realities of displaced film collections, particularly in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, addressing the need for decolonial praxis as part of the archival workflow. Amal is currently a research assistant and coordinator for student internships for the Faculty Organizing for Community Archives Support (FOCAS) at Queens College. She is studying the role of community archives as radical and critical pedagogical spaces for emerging LIS students to learn cultural competence and counter-archiving.
Riah Lee Kinsey
Riah Lee Kinsey, MS, MLS is a Black queer scholar, archivist, and educator. Trained at the University of Delaware and the City University of New York (CUNY), he is currently the Public Programs Manager at Lefferts Historic House in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, NY. Kinsey’s interests include Black and Queer historical subjects, reparative museum and archival practice, and the material culture of the enslaved. As someone who has often struggled to find traces of himself in traditional histories, Riah is dedicated to showing the expansiveness of what is possible to recover about the past while reminding himself and others that merely being present to continue the search is proof enough of the enduring legacies of all marginalized people.
Paige Laino
Paige Laino (she/they) will be completing their masters of Library and Information Studies at Queens College in 2024 with a certificate in Archives and the Preservation of Cultural Materials. As of this year, she is the Archivist for Robert Wilson and the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Center, after working as the Archive and Alumni Manager at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture for over a decade. She specializes in time-based media preservation projects and has worked with artists such as Daniel Bozhkov, and the estates of John Giorno and Chris Marker. In 2016, they co-curated Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay with Erin Thompson at John Jay College, featuring artwork sent from detainees at the controversial military prison, and wrote a related piece in The Paris Review. She co-founded and currently publishes The Tomorrow Archive with Cameron A. Granger and Rebecca Shippee, a periodic zine featuring previously unseen art and writing that fundraises for families evacuating Gaza.
Patrick McGee
Patrick McGee is a writer and researcher pursuing an MA in History and MLS in Information Studies at Queens College. His research involves the intellectual history of fascism, as well as the history of archival theory. He currently serves as an Associate Archivist with the CUNY Cultivating Archives and Institutional Memory project, and a Research Fellow with the CUNY Archival Technologies Lab. He is formerly a Teaching & Research Graduate Fellow with the Archives & Digital Media Lab at Dalhousie University, and a CUNY Information Literacy Fellow.
Alexandra Pucciarelli
Alexandra Pucciarelli is an archivist based in New York. She is also a PhD student in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Her research examines ethical archival collection practices with special consideration given to disability. She uses autoethnography and discourse analysis to examine phenomena related to spectatorship within information spaces. She is keenly interested in how the affective experience of looking at disquieting objects relates to power relations and how these objects have the metaphorical/actual ability to gaze back and what that says about the viewer. She has written for a variety of publications including Brooklyn Magazine, the Forward and Canvas8 on topics ranging from disability to popular culture to memory.
