Art, justice, and research collide — join a dynamic, hands-on workshop and panel on creative methods for community knowledge and change!

Thursday, May 7, 2026
5:00 pm — 7:00 pm
Rooms 9206/9207

The arts play a vital role in how we understand and communicate the human experience. Beyond raising awareness of social issues or building community, artistic practices can also function as powerful tools for research — helping to investigate social realities, surface lived experiences, and communicate knowledge in ways that are accessible and meaningful to broader publics.

This University Worth Fighting For event explores the intersections of art, justice, and research, bringing together community activists, artists, and scholars whose work integrates creative practice with community engagement and public scholarship. The event will open with a participatory arts workshop led by Parent Power for Cultural Equity (PP4CE), a collective of Bedford-Stuyvesant mothers, caregivers, and grandparents conducting community-based participatory action research through their project Creative Pathways in Bed-Stuy. Drawing on their work documenting how creativity lives in everyday neighborhood life, PP4CE will guide participants through a hands-on activity exploring how creative mapping and storytelling can help communities identify cultural resources, surface unmet needs, and imagine more equitable futures for arts and culture.

The event will conclude with a panel that will share how they use artistic methods to address issues in local communities, communicate important research, and activate classrooms, cultural spaces, and public life. Together, they will reflect on how arts-based practices can expand how knowledge is produced, shared, and used in the pursuit of justice and collective well-being.

Light refreshments will be served during the event.

Panelists

Ash Marinaccio, Ph.D., is a multidisciplinary documentarian and visual storyteller working in theatre, photography, and film. She is dedicated to storytelling highlighting the socio-political issues defining our times and regularly works throughout the United States and internationally. For her work, Ash has received the Lucille Lortel Visionary Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women, a Drama League Residency, fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, NY Public Humanities, and National Endowment for the Humanities, been listed as one of Culture Trip’s “50 Women in Theatre You Should Know”, and is a two time TEDx Speaker.Ash is the founding artistic director of the United Nations recognized NGO Girl Be Heard and founder of Docbloc, dedicated to bringing artists across documentary genres together for live performance collaborations. She holds her M.A. in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance from the CUNY Graduate Center.

Britney Moreira, M.A., MPhil, is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she also serves as Assistant Director of the Futures Initiative. Her research examines criminal and juvenile (in)justice and its impact on Black adolescent development, with attention to the systemic neglect and isolation of Black youth within carceral systems. Grounded in commitments to justice, care, and collective power, Britney’s work employs critical participatory action research (CPAR) to center lived experience and challenge racialized and structural harm. She is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Futures Initiative Fellowship, and the Mellon Humanities PublicsLab Fellowship. Working alongside youth, families, artists, and community partners, her advocacy and scholarship are shaped by interdisciplinary, arts-based, and movement-oriented approaches to collective inquiry, creative world-building, and liberation.

Christopher Colón is a visual artist and scholar-activist from Brooklyn, NY. He is a Ph.D. candidate in the Urban Education program at the Graduate Center. He uses auto-ethnography and arts-based practices that serve as counter-narratives to help us rethink what education is and how to make sense of the world around us.

Caneia Brown is a Brooklyn-born advocate, activist, and community-based participatory action researcher committed to advancing cultural equity for families and youth. As a core member of Parent Power for Cultural Equity, she is a co-researcher on Creative Pathways in Bed-Stuy, a community-based PAR project developed in partnership with Cool Culture, the Public Science Project, and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Early Childhood Development Center. Through this work, Caneia has helped document how arts and culture live in Bed-Stuy—across generations, spaces, and everyday practices—while identifying what families need to access and sustain creative life in their communities. With a background in the culinary arts, she brings a deep belief in creativity as a form of care, expression, and cultural connection. As a mother of two, her work is grounded in a commitment to ensuring that all children have access to the kinds of cultural experiences that nurture identity, confidence, and possibility.

About Parent Power for Cultural Equity (PP4CE)

Parent Power for Cultural Equity (PP4CE) is a collective of Bedford-Stuyvesant mothers, caregivers, and grandparents who came together to understand how arts and culture live in their neighborhood—how they are remembered, practiced, and imagined for the future. Through their community-based participatory action research (PAR) project, Creative Pathways in Bed-Stuy, the group partnered with Cool Culture and the Public Science Project at the CUNY Graduate Center to gather stories across the neighborhood through interviews, art-sharing activities, community mapping, and a community survey. Through this work, Parent Power members became community researchers documenting how creativity lives in everyday life while identifying what families need to sustain and expand Bed-Stuy’s creative and cultural life.

This event is co-sponsored by Cool Culture, a NYC-based nonprofit that uses arts and culture to amplify the voices of families, advance equity, and strengthen historically marginalized communities.