Britney Moreira is a PhD candidate in Critical Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Assistant Director of the Futures Initiative, but her work moves far beyond any one title. Grounded in critical psychology and shaped by Black feminism, abolitionist thought, and participatory research, Britney studies how systems of carcerality and racialized neglect shape Black youth and communities—and how people create meaning, care, and possibility anyway. A recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Futures Initiative Fellowship, and the Mellon Humanities PublicsLab Fellowship, she brings together multiple worlds in her work: psychology, participatory action research, arts-based inquiry, policy, and even neuroscience, with training in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience as well as Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Michigan.
At the center of Britney’s research is a commitment to doing work with communities rather than on them. She has spent years as a research coordinator and facilitator with the Youth Justice Research Collaborative, a participatory collective that has brought together system-impacted youth, advocates, and researchers to study the harms of youth incarceration and push for more accountable responses to young people’s lives. Her current work on sustained isolation asks us to think beyond solitary confinement as a single event and instead understand how disconnection, surveillance, and abandonment travel across arrest, court, confinement, and reentry—reshaping relationships, emotional life, and even childhood itself for Black youth.
Britney’s work is equally invested in Black aesthetic life, cultural memory, and the creative practices people use to compose themselves and their worlds under pressure. As a participatory research consultant with Parent Power for Cultural Equity, she collaborated with Black caregivers on Creative Pathways in Bed-Stuy, a community-based study on arts access, intergenerational creativity, and cultural equity in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Working alongside caregivers as co-researchers, she facilitated training in participatory action research and guided the team through qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods data collection and analysis. She later authored and designed the project’s final report, translating the project’s findings into a resource for community members, funders, and policymakers while preserving its integrity as a rigorous scholarly study. The project asked not only where art lives in the neighborhood, but how it is remembered, practiced, fought for, and imagined into the future—treating poetry, mapping, storytelling, and everyday creative practice as forms of theory, evidence, and world-building in their own right.
These threads come together in Britney’s dissertation, Boundless in the Wake: Black Femme Becoming through Art in the Shadow of Carcerality and Gentrification, which explores how Black girls and women in New York City make self, space, and future through art amid displacement, criminalization, and structural abandonment. Across youth justice, arts access, public policy, facilitation, and teaching, Britney’s work stays rooted in the same question: what becomes possible when the people most impacted by injustice are recognized not as subjects to be studied, but as theorists, creators, and co-authors of the worlds they are trying to build?
