Speaker Bios
Invitee |
Title |
Bio |
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UP AGAINST THE WALL: Agitprop Murals and the Fight for Working Class Power |
Mike Alewitz is a well-known mural painter working in the U.S. and internationally. As Artistic Director of the Labor Art and Mural Project (LAMP,) Alewitz has traveled throughout the world creating public art on themes of peace and justice. He has painted in South-Central LA, New York, Baghdad, Chernobyl, Mexico, Nicaragua, Northern Ireland, Israel, the Occupied Territories and numerous other locations. In 1999, Alewitz was named a Millennium Artist by the White House Millennium Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. In that capacity he executed a highly publicized series of murals painted in Maryland about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Alewitz has organized cultural initiatives for numerous unions and progressive organizations including the United Mine Workers, Jobs with Justice, Teamsters, Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, United Farm Workers and many others. He has spoken extensively on political and cultural topics and is the co-author of Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz. His work has been the subject of several documentary films. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at Central Connecticut State University, where he directs the unique community-based mural painting program. Alewitz was a student leader at Kent State University and an eyewitness to the murders of four students in 1970. He was a leader of the national student strike that followed the massacre and has remained a life-long activist in movements for social change. A former railroad laborer, sign painter and machinist, Alewitz is currently a member of United Scenic Artists, IATSE Local 829 and the CCSU chapter of AAUP. |
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Music, Movement, and the Spoken Word: Using Labor Arts to Organize |
Prior to coming the National Labor College, Elise was the program associate for the Union Minorities/Women Leadership
Training Program at the University of Michigan's Labor Studies Center. For over 18 years she served Michigan's trade
union community as both an educator and a cultural worker. A long-time member of the Industrial Workers of the World,
Elise organized Michigan’s first Latino Workers Leadership Institute and coordinated the Michigan Summer School
for Women Workers as well as the Black Men in Unions Institute. Her areas of expertise include Communication Skills,
Effective Committee Training, Leadership Training, Teaching Techniques, Labor History and Culture, Diversity Training,
Organization Development and “Arts as a Tool for Organizing”. |
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A visual history of workers lives |
Esther Cohen is Executive Director of Bread and Roses. She's been a book publisher, gallery curator, fiction writer, and teacher. At Bread and Roses, she uses all of these. |
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US Workers: Making a Scene |
Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design. Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts: Community Based Performance in the U S, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Art and Cultural Politics. As a professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts from the late 1980s until 2006, Cohen Cruz produced community based arts projects with students including one on community gardens, directed by Cornerstone Theater’s Sabrina Peck, and another on gentrification, co directed by Urban Bush Woman’s Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and NYU Experimental Theatre Wing’s Rosemary Quinn. In 2006 7, Jan co conceptualized and co initiated HOME, New Orleans, a collaboration of local universities, artists, and residents of four New Orlinean neighborhoods, experimenting with art’s role in the revitalization of “home” as dwelling, neighborhood, and the city itself. Cohen Cruz has been a freelance practitioner of Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed” for 25 years. Jan is a University Professor at Syracuse University and is writing a book on performance and social justice. |
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Art/Works - a database and book surveying American labor posters |
Lincoln Cushing is an author and archivist specializing in social movements. He is currently the Digital Archivist
for Kaiser Permanente’s Labor-Management Partnership. Previously he was the Cataloging and Electronic Outreach
Librarian at U.C. Berkeley’s Prior to working as a labor librarian Mr. Cushing was a member of a worker-owned union printshop (GCIU) for 20 years. He is also a designer, and has created graphics for the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Labor Party, U.S. Labor Against the War, and other labor groups. His cultural work includes serving as an organizer for the annual Western Workers Labor Heritage Festival and contributing to the 2003 statewide exhibit “At Work” sponsored by the California Historical Society and the California Labor Federation. His current project is Art/Works - American Labor Posters, a comprehensive illustrated survey to be published by Cornell University Press 2009. |
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Changing through Art: How Learning Photography Affected My Life |
Gert Danzy is a service worker at Syracuse University and a longstanding member of SEIU Local 200United |
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Strength From the Roots: |
Francisco Herrera is a cultural worker who uses music as a tool to raise consciousness and promote social change. He has been involved in community organizing, mental health and pastoral work for over 25 years in California, México and Central America. Currently, he presents workshops and performances for educators, community groups, and churches, and he has collaborates with various youth groups to promote leadership through cultural work and community organizing. These presentations and projects form the foundation for the work of "Trabajo Cultual Caminante" or "Cultural Work." |
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We Fight for Roses,Too: Music, Working Class, and Union Culture |
Tom Juravich is Professor of Labor Studies at the Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst. He writes regularly about work and labor issues and is the author of Chaos on the Shop Floor, Commonwealth
of Toil (with William Hartford and James Green), Ravenswood (with Kate Bronfenbrenner) and the editor of The Future
of Work in Massachusetts. He is currently completing a book based on interviews with call center representatives,
immigrant workers in fish processing, operating room nursing staff, and displaced industrial workers, At the Altar
of the Bottom Line. |
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Visualizing Labor Rights and Social Change in Documentary Photography |
Tamara Kay is Assistant Professor of Sociology. She received a dual B.A. in sociology and art theory and practice (with a concentration in painting) from Northwestern University in 1993. After graduating from Northwestern, she worked at the American Bar Foundation, the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago, and the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, D.C. In 1995 she worked as a volunteer HIV/AIDS educator in Guadalajara, Mexico. Professor Kay received her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 2004 and spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her work centers on the political and legal implications of regional economic integration, transnationalism, and global governance. Her research agenda stems from a commitment to better articulate how regional economic integration affects workers and labor movements. In particular, she is concerned with how labor movements respond to changes in the global political economy and to the creation and development of global governance institutions and international legal structures. She is also interested in how these changes in the international arena affect the relationship between social movements and nation-states. Professor Kay has published in the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. She is currently writing a book that addresses the nature of transnationalism in the context of North American regional economic integration. It explores why trinational relationships developed among some Canadian, U.S., and Mexican labor unions at the precise moment when regional economic integration reached its peak, and why the same staggering changes had little, if any impact on other unions. She is also working on a project that examines union strategies in the context of legal constraint, and the labor movement’s increasing use of strategies and discourses that focus on human rights. Professor Kay has worked as a consultant to the International Labour Organization, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the United Farmworkers of America. At Harvard, she has affiliations with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Transnational Studies Initiative. She teaches graduate qualitative methods and an undergraduate course on law and social movements. Future courses include globalization, political sociology, social movements, and “Photography and Sociology: Documenting Social Problems through Text and Image.” Professor Kay was raised in Harrison, New York, a small town 25 miles north of Manhattan where her family has lived for five generations and her great great uncle was mayor for 30 years. In addition to strong local ties, she also has strong transnational ties, holding both U.S. and Irish citizenship. An avid photographer, Professor Kay focuses on documentary and street photography and has shot projects in Mexico, Peru and Paris. Her work has been exhibited and used commercially. She also plays the French horn, flute and piano, loves to salsa and Irish dance, and is a dedicated, though very slow runner who hopes one day to run the Boston marathon. |
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A DAY'S WORK, A DAY'S PAY: New York City's Workfare Workers Fight for Economic Justice: A case study in using this documentary to build awareness and inspire action |
Kathy Leichter is a documentary film producer and director, media activist and one of the founders of Mint Leaf Productions, a production company that has been making and distributing films of conscience for over ten years. Kathy is currently in production on MOTHER LAND, an intensely personal film which documents Kathy’s journey of discovery and understanding as she strives for greater separation from her mother who committed suicide in 1995. Kathy recently completed the film, PASSING ON, about her tell-it-like-it-is grandmother, Elsa Leichter, an Austrian Jewish immigrant who lived to be ninety-one. Kathy produced and directed the award-winning PBS documentary, A DAY’S WORK, A DAY’S PAY about three welfare recipients who become leaders in the fight against workfare in New York City. The film received the 2001 Harry Chapin Media Award for excellence in projects addressing issues of hunger and poverty, was broadcast nationally on PBS and in Europe and has screened in film festivals throughout the world. Kathy is the Project Director of The Workfare Media Initiative, a media activism project which trains current and former welfare recipients to show A DAY’S WORK, A DAY’S PAY to community organizations, unions, students, communities of faith, policymakers, and others. Kathy recently was the co-producer of SPIT IT OUT, a documentary about a man who stutters and his journey towards self-acceptance. Prior, she produced the film, MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS: MIRRORS THAT BIND about the impact of the mother/daughter relationship on a woman’s body, sexuality, and self-esteem, which is being used by women’s and girls organizations and universities across the country. Formerly Kathy worked at WQED, the Pittsburgh PBS station, where she associate produced several social issue documentaries. Kathy is the mother of two sons, Otto and Theo. For more information please go to: www.mintleafproductions.com. |
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Who’s opening up the workshop? Worker writing and community publishing in Britain |
Nick Pollard, a senior lecturer in occupational therapy at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, has been actively involved in the worker writer and community publishing movement since the early 1980s, convening a writers' workshop in Sheffield and, from 1991-2007, editing the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers' magazine Federation. He has written book chapters and articles in academic journals on therapeutic applications of community publishing. Publications include A Political Practice of Occupational Therapy, edited with Dikaios Sakelleriou and Frank Kronenberg, appearing later this year. |
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Creating Workers' Performance Art: The Challenge, the Process and the Impact |
Marty Pottenger currently works out of Portland's (Me.) City Hall where she uses theater, media,
and oral histories to encourage people to think about issues, ask questions, and engage in dialogue with others
in their communities. This free event features excerpts from her solo performances as well as a discussion of her
current work, which addresses long-standing issues of discrimination and perceived prejudice within Portland's city
government and the school system, with the objective of increasing equity. |
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Visualizing the Invisible from Construction to the Fields |
Dr. Vivian Price started working in factories in the 1970’s and then went through an electrical apprenticeship with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Returning to school for a doctorate, she studied politics, labor, and film. She has published on gender and race in construction employment, and is presently Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills, where she also coordinates Labor Studies. Her films include Hammering It Out (2000) and Transnational Tradeswomen (2006), both distributed by Women Make Movies. She is presently working with Gilbert Gonzalez on a film about the historic Bracero Program. http://www.hardhatvideo.com |
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The Hidden Potential for Art for Expansive Labor Education |
Peter H. Sawchuk teaches and carries out research in the areas of labour studies, sociology and adult education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (Canada). Over the last decade he has focused on workers' learning in everyday life including the roles played by such things as computer technologies, work design, immigration, union culture as well as art. A former union educator for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers, the United Steelworkers and the United Food and Commercial Workers unions in Canada, Dr. Sawchuk has also worked as an unemployed workers organizer, a highschool teacher and press operator |
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Same title as Leichter’s |
Yvonne Shields is a chef for a Manhattan soup kitchen, and a former welfare recipient. A long-time anti-poverty activist, she is a board member of Community Voices Heard, part of the WORKFARE MEDIA INITIATIVE (WMI) which trains current and former welfare recipients to use the film A DAY?S WORK, A DAY'S PAY in their organizing. |
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Writing Groups and Labor Unions |
Ann Marie Taliercio has fought for the rights of working people in the hospitality industry for the last twenty years. In an effort to bring their stories of social injustice to the public she has been working with Dr. Stephen Parks of the Syracuse University Writing Department to collect and publish these stories. |
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The Art of Text Structure: Bakhtin and the Markham A Yard |
Helena Worthen is a novelist and playwright who teaches in the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois. Her teaching and research is shaped by a Vygotskian perspective on language, learning and development. Her PhD is from the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Education. She writes about the characteristics of learning created by workers on the job for the purpose of ensuring that they make a decent living and survive the job itself. |
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