Co-founder & Director
Princeton University

D. Graham Burnett  is a New-York-based teacher, writer, and maker who has worked with the Friends of Attention since 2018. He trained in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, teaches at Princeton, and was a 2023 visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. He leads the non-profit "Institute for Sustained Attention" (501 c 3). dgrahamburnett.net

Co-founder & Program Director

Peter Schmidt is a writer and organizer from Clayton, Missouri. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, the New York Review of Architecture, and The New York Times. Since September of 2022 he has served as the Program Director of the Strother School of Radical Attention. You can read more about Peter’s work on his website.

Partnerships Coordinator

Jahony Germosen is a Bronx-based writer, facilitator, and education activist, born in the Dominican Republic. She earned her BA in English from the University of Mount Saint Vincent (2024), where her passion for exploring the meaning of language and attention in human life began to take shape. Guided by the belief that humans are inherently lifelong students and that the earth itself is our enduring classroom, Jahony's work is rooted in curiosity, community, and the transformative power of lifelong education.

Academic Dean

Henry Kramer is a Hudson Valley–based writer and educator whose work weaves imagination, deep attention, and experimental pedagogy to help repair our relationship with the more-than-human Earth. He holds MAs in Environmental Philosophy and Ecocritical Literature and a BA in the Psychological Dimensions of Religion. He teaches Religious Studies at Hunter College and serves as Academic Dean at the Strother School of Radical Attention.

Operations Manager

Amanda Nesci has over a decade of experience supporting arts and cultural nonprofits across operations and public engagement. She has held programmatic, curatorial, and administrative roles at a range of organizations including the Climate Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the National Lighthouse Museum. She holds an M.A. in Anthropology, specializing in Material and Visual Culture, from University College London and a B.A. in Psychology from New York University. 

Special Projects

Ingrid Jacobsen has scaled creative teams at BuzzFeed Studios, managed integrated campaigns at Comic Relief, and led sales and marketing for an engineering and manufacturing firm. Her film work includes projects premiering at Sundance and Cannes. A published poet whose work has appeared in The Offing and Rattle, Ingrid was a two-year SoRA student before joining the Institute for Sustained Attention, where she supports executive operations and strategic growth.

Resident Curator

Haena Chu is a Korean-born, New York-based contemporary art worker who seeks convergence between curatorial and pedagogical practices, with interest in alternative relationships to art that counter the logic of exhibiting and viewing. She holds a BA in Art History and Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and an MA in Museum Studies from NYU, and has coordinated exhibitions and artist programs at Art Center Nabi in Seoul, Korea and the Rubin Museum. At SoRA, Haena organizes exhibitions and workshops for the school's Sanctuary Gallery in DUMBO as well as collaboration with artists and cultural organizations. 

Program Administrator

María Paula Morera Núñez is a Costa Rican artist, educator, and administrator passionate about creating inclusive, creative spaces for learning and community engagement. They hold a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Costa Rica. María Paula has worked in administrative roles at Museo de las Americas and in education roles at the Clyfford Still Museum and the Denver Art Museum, where they developed and facilitated programs for diverse audiences of all ages.  

Lab Coordinator

Educator, designer, and eco-futurist graduated in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from Georgetown University, along with certificates in architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and permaculture from the Urban Permaculture Institute of San Francisco. She worked as Director of Experiential Learning at Minerva Project and now as the Engagement and Learning Lead at Biomimicry for Social Innovation where she helps leaders learn from nature to transform human systems.  

Education Coordinator

Kevin Terrell Madison is a teaching artist and pianist-composer. He believes in education and activism that centers long-term thinking and growth, laying foundations for structures that will last for generations. Kevin earned his D.M.A. (2024) in Performance-Composition from CalArts, creating music that operates at the sweet spot between the cerebral and somatic, seeking to uncover deep emotional worlds and create intentional time for attentional reflection. His music has been presented at Hamraborg Festival in Iceland, the Seoul Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Centre (Lithuania) and the Next Festival NYC.

Communications Coordinator

Lulu Abathra is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. She studied Radio/Television/Film and Contemporary Art at Northwestern University in Chicago. Her work examines the tensions between the personal and the political, as well as the relationship between the body and the state. She is particularly interested in collaborating with people who critically engage with and define culture.

Designer

Ali is a New York-based artist with a passion for image-making, experimental art, and game design. They are also a member of boshi’s place, a collective coworking and events space dedicated to building community for games and play, from a curatorial and creative perspective.

Managing Editor, The Empty Cup

Czarina Ramos is a neuroscientist and writer based in Brooklyn. She holds a PhD from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine where she studied the molecular basis of memory formation. Her work in science, art and political organizing interrogates the formation of the self within collectives and ecosystems.

Facilitator & Faculty

Quinn Marchman is a theatremaker and educator currently based in Harlem. He is the Uptown Community Educator with the Early Relationship Abuse Prevention Program where he works in middle and high school communities exploring the many dynamics of communication, boundaries and the beautiful struggle of being human. Formerly he has served as co-founder and Director of Education at the Black Actors Guild, teaching artist with Denver Center of Performing Arts and a fellow with National Arts Strategies.

Faculty
Princeton University

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University. His books include Senses of Style (Chicago UP 2018) and *A New English Grammar (dispersed holdings 2022); his essays and articles treat subjects from early modern prosody to player pianos. He is the founding director of Princeton’s Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities and an editor at large at Cabinet magazine.

Faculty
Wesleyan University

Sonali Chakravarti is professor of government at Wesleyan University. Her public writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Dissent, and The Boston Review. She is part of the Wesleyan team that received a Mellon Foundation grant, “Carceral Connecticut” (2022-2025), to study slavery, abolition, and punishment in the Connecticut River Valley.

Faculty
College of Mount Saint Vincent

Leonard Nalencz is an associate professor of English at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. His recent project Let’s Walk Together is a translation of Quechua stories and poems into Spanish and English (published with Trident Press in 2024). He has led practices of attention at the New School, the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, the Universita' di Milano, Parsons School of Design, and the School for Visual Arts.

Faculty
Filmmaker and Sundance Fellow

Alyssa Loh is a filmmaker and writer based in New York. Her film work has screened internationally and been supported by Sundance, TIFF, Fantasia, SXSW, and more. She holds an MFA/MBA (film) from NYU Tisch/Stern. She writes for outlets such as Artforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The American Reader. She co-created the film series Twelve Theses on Attention for the 2021 Glasgow International Biennial; the book version (text + film stills) was published by Princeton University Press in 2022.

Faculty

Jac Mullen is a writer, teacher, and former Executive Editor of The American Reader. He publishes regularly on his Substack, After Literacy.

Faculty
College of Mount Saint Vincent

Kristin Lawler is Professor of Sociology at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in New York City. She is author of The American Surfer: Radical Culture and Capitalism, and a co-editor of two forthcoming edited collections: Roll and Flow: the Cultural Politics of Surf and Skate, and Live Theory: the Stanley Aronowitz Reader. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for the Radical Imagination and of the Surf and Skate Collaborative at San Diego State.

Supporting Faculty

Nick is a Brooklyn-based organizer helping people build the lives they seek away from extractive digital technologies. He educates communities on attention activism, advocates for more robust tech policy, and hosts events around the country to foster deeper agency and connection.

Practice Coordinator, Facilitator, Study Corps

Connor has a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Edinburgh. Since high school, he has worked as a stagehand, construction laborer, engineering geologist, line cook, UberEats driver and SAT tutor. He is passionate about preserving the capacity for creative thought and self-reflection.

Study Coordinator

Eleanor Jasmine Lambert is a writer, actor, weaver and community-member based in NYC. Her work explores awareness to disrupt structures of domination and nurture liberatory spaces, and spans art, journalism, advocacy, and self-inquiry. She currently contributes to SoRA’s Visions of Attention archive.

Organizing Lead

Gwen Olton is a conflict worker, facilitator, group process designer, amateur artist, and roller derby player and coach. With a background in geological sciences, nursing, philosophy, and conflict transformation, they view deep attention as a prerequisite for justice and human flourishing. Gwen currently serves as a senior consultant on a statewide mental health grant and as a community facilitator. She is the author of a book on conflict transformation and is dedicated to fostering systemic, liberatory change.

Facilitator

Haja is a doctoral student in Clinical/Counseling Psychology at NYU Steinhardt where she studies the intersections of the education and carceral systems, with an interest in troubling the underlying assumptions of Social Emotional Learning. Haja sees attention as therapeutic and is excited to facilitate spaces for people to deepen their connections to self and others. 

Facilitator

Cam is a Brooklyn based educator and organizer working at the nexus of prison reform and movement building. He currently teaches organizations and practitioners how to develop restorative justice and violence intervention programs. Cam holds a MS in Peace and Conflict Studies and a BA in International Politics from George Mason University, as well as a MA in Diplomacy and Human Rights from the University of Malta.

Facilitator

Raiane Cantisano has been a SoRA Attention Lab facilitator since the project’s inception. She has a background in Ontologically based, trauma-informed personal and professional development coaching, and is an actor/singer, with credits including plays at the Flea Theater, the Women’s Project (MTC) and Planet Connections Festival; she has performed her music in venues such as Rockwood Music Hall and Bowery Electric with her band.

Facilitator

Eve Mitchell is a psychotherapist serving the Hudson Valley and New York City; she specializes in somatic treatment for PTSD. Her passion for attention directly intersects with her passion for the politics of care.

Study Corps, Lab Facilitator

Richard Dent IV first discovered the transformative world of clown and mask at the Juilliard School, followed by training with master artisans, including the Sartori family and Matteo Destro in Italy, and Ida Bagus Anom Suryawan in Bali, Indonesia. Now based in New York City, Richard continues his work as an artist, educator, and community steward.

Study Corps

Anna Beth Lane is a Brooklyn-based writer and thinker completing her M.A. in Media Studies at CUNY, where she focuses on complexity-based approaches to media architectures. She works as a writer and editor for mission-driven organizations and is the co-creator of Cybel, an experimental narrative project exploring technology and spirituality.

Study Corps

Cherilyn Tan is an embodied artist-researcher, facilitator, musician and community-centered designer from Malaysia, based in Brooklyn. She holds a BA in Urban Studies and Music from Brown University, an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons/the New School, and was most recently an artist-in-residence at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts.

Study Corps

Anha Mehta is a New York-based strategist working across healthcare and systems design. With a background in decision science and social psychology (UMass Amherst, MIT Sloan School of Management), she explores positive psychology, as well as the economics, neuroscience, and art of attention through literature and film. 

Study Corps

Ken uses technology to address social barriers. With a Bachelor's in Information Technology, and a Master’s in Library Science, they work as an Education Technician supporting students with print disabilities. Despite this, they like to think of themselves as a technician of the heart.

Study Corps

Samvit Sengupta is a second-year MFA student in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, The New School. With a background in physics, creative technology, and game design, his practice explores how storytelling, play, and systems thinking can engage with complex social and political realities. His current research examines surveillance capitalism, political polarization, and the attention economy, with a focus on how game design, world-building, and rituals can serve as tools for inquiry and collective reflection.

Summer 26’ Faculty

kyle Barnes is a brooklyn-based artist-researcher who uses community and computing as creative mediums, seeding ritual gatherings which facilitate practices of more-than-human collaboration. In past lives he's been immersed in the worlds of climate science, democracy reform, human-computer interaction, professional figure skating, and teaching.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Ashley is a Brooklyn-based product designer, writer, and community convener whose work lives at the intersection of technology, identity, and attention. She has spent over a decade designing at Google, Amazon, and Meta, building systems that shape how millions of people see and are seen online. She is the author of Letters to My Therapist, a forthcoming hybrid memoir and healing guide, and teaches from the conviction that noticing is a radical act.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Nick Lehane is a puppet artist and theater maker based in Brooklyn, NY. He works as an actor, puppeteer, designer, deviser and director in theater, television, film/video and performance art.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Yuliya Tsukerman is a Brooklyn-based puppeteer and myth-maker. Her ongoing project, Transmissions from the Ancient Forest, is a series of video poems and accompanying books in which a community of lesser gods tries to make sense of human suffering.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Malavika Kannan is a Gen Z writer whose nonfiction appears in New York Magazine, The Nation, Washington Post, and for an audience of 60,000 online. She's currently at work on her debut collection of essays, RAGE BAIT, a meditation on power, sex, and language for a generation raised by algorithms and authoritarianism, forthcoming from Atria. She's also the author of UNPRECEDENTED TIMES, a campus novel set during the Covid-19 pandemic, forthcoming August 18 from Holt.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Andrea is a philosopher trained in neuroscience (UGA, Humboldt Universität, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, currently with Universität Heidelberg). She has worked with NeuroCure (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin) and has been a guest researcher with the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig) and Northoff Lab (Ottawa). She is the author of numerous books, including Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind and Consciousness.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Katherine Guinness is a theorist and historian of contemporary art who teaches Critical Studies in the Department of Art at the University of Maryland, College Park. The author of several books, she is currently completing a project that uses contemporary ghost movies to describe the experience of disempowerment in the face of overwhelming technical and social systems.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Emma is co-organizer of the Simone Weil Catholic Worker in Portland, OR.  She graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in Religion. Her ethnographic fieldwork and thesis on self-governing “village” communities of folks living outside led her to Portland and to the Simone Weil House, where she has been ever since. Emma is also trained in Byzantine iconography, and now teaches Byzantine Drawing at the Classical Iconography Institute.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Bert received his Masters in Theological Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Since, his work has been organizing experiments in “a world where it is easier to be good,” to use the words of Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin. Before founding the Simone Weil House in 2019, this included starting a farm-to-table network and a low income grocery co-op, a trust economy public house, and a model for community-based zero interest lending.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Julian Chehirian is a multimedia artist and historian of science and technology. His collaborative installation The Neighbours, on Bulgaria’s Soviet-era labor camps, represented Bulgaria at the 2024 Venice Biennale. He is currently a Visual Arts Resident at Pioneer Works, where he is rebuilding late-nineteenth-century scientific instruments to investigate the laboratory origins of psychotechnics. His dissertation (Princeton University, 2026) traces the rise of art therapy and occupational therapy as twentieth-century practices of attentional retraining, on both sides of the Cold War divide.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Summer 26’ Faculty

Molly Gore is a filmmaker, writer, activist, and culture jammer working at the intersection of mischief, the imaginal, and social change. She’s been a core member of prankster activist collective The Yes Men since 2019, supporting environmental justice campaigns in leveraging more creative approaches to their mission. 
She holds a BA from Santa Clara University, a certificate in regenerative practice from The Regenesis Institute, and a decade of training in a living-systems approach to post-trauma growth. She works at the threshold between dying systems and emerging ones, drawing on frameworks of cultural midwifery and doula-ship to theorize and enact the work of transition.

Summer 26’ Faculty

Ron Broglio’s research focuses on how philosophy, art, and literature can help us rethink our relationship to the environment. He writes essays and books on how nonhumans create their worlds in relation to or at odds with human culture. Ron is Director of the Humanities Institute at Arizona State University.