Co-founder & Faculty
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.

Co-founder & Program Director

Peter Schmidt is a writer and organizer from Clayton, Missouri. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, 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.

Education 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.

Art Programs Coordinator

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. At SoRA, Haena is developing attentional practices for art and cultural spaces as well as the Visions of Attention archive.

Lab Coordinator

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.

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.  

Communication Coordinator

Mikayla (Miki) Greene is a PR and communications professional specializing in nonprofits and social impact work. Based in Brooklyn, she is a storyteller who loves using language to connect people and drive meaningful change.

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.

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.

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.

Facilitator

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.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Hi! We’re Olivia & Kyle, from the Chimeras Collective. We build community and orchestrate interspecies gatherings: immersive events designed to explore what human-nonhuman relations are and could be. We prioritize the fascinating, the disgusting, the whimsical. Our chimeric spaces ask: Can science be embodied? Can wonder be a practice? Can creatures be collaborators?

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Kathleen Quaintance is a PhD candidate in the history of art at Yale University and a practitioner and instructor of a range of textile techniques. She is interested in the history of technology, modern Luddism, and artisanal knowledge.

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.

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. 

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Swetha Regunathan is a writer and filmmaker based in NYC. Her work has screened at festivals internationally, including Aspen Shortsfest, Nitehawk Shorts Festival, True/False Film Festival, Tribeca, New Orleans Film Festival, and on platforms like NOWNESS, NoBudge, and Short of the Week. She has also had work published in Huffington Post, n+1, and other outlets. Starting Fall 2025 she will be Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies program at Haverford College.

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.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Richard studied acting at The Juilliard School where he discovered the world of clown and masks. His research in mask making took him to study with masters in the craft such as the Sartori Family and Matteo Destro in Italy and Ida Bagus Anom Suryawan in Bali, Indonesia. During the pandemic he resided in Wyoming to pursue his curiosity of horsemanship. He then served as a professor of movement at Syracuse University, specializing in clown, physical comedy and mask work. He will be CLOWNING at SoRA this Summer.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Cam is an educator, organizer and scholar working within the nexus of criminal justice reform, community justice and liberatory based pedagogy. Originally from Atlanta, Cam is now based in Brooklyn where he manages and facilitates training programs for justice impacted individuals at John Jay College. Cam is the co-creator of the Think Peace Podcast, which explores the intersection of neuroscience and peacebuilding.

Summer '25 Faculty

Jonathan Toews is an architect and founding partner at Davies Toews Architecture, in New York City. The firm was recognized among the 2019 Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the firm’s work has been published in the New York Times, ArtNews, Architectural Digest, Metropolis, Dezeen, and GA Houses. Jonathan has led Advanced Design studios at the Yale School of Architecture and runs Rabbit Rabbit, a gallery in the East Village. This summer, he will be teaching about the 8.5×11 sheet of paper.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Hearne Morrey is interested in intersubjectivity and is currently living in New York. She is a teacher and takes walks.

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.

Facilitator

Raiane Cantisano runs an Ontologically based, trauma-informed personal and professional development coaching company. She (her/hers) is also an actor/singer, with theatre credits including the Flea Theater, the Women’s Project (MTC) and Planet Connections Festival; she has performed in venues such as Rockwood Music Hall and Bowery Electric with her band, singing authorial Pop songs. Her vision for the world is that all people have access to their inherent worth, lead a meaningful life and commonly experience connected intimacy.

David Landes is a freelance drummer and performance artist.  After posts in Beirut, Shanghai, and Dubai, he now teaches at Duke University in the Writing/Rhetoric and Theater Studies programs.  His forthcoming book, Attention Literacy, explicates contemporary forms of attention that we experience but don’t have words for yet.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Dr. Jillian Marshall is an educator, author, musician, and visual artist based in Brooklyn. After earning a BA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Cornell University, she left academia in 2018 and moved to New York to pursue creative passions (alongside a more public intellectualism). Fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, Jillian centers her teaching practice around practical knowledge, scholarly attention to subjects not given (but deserving) of serious thought, collaboration, cross-cultural exchange, and a belief in the human spirit.

Summer '25 Faculty

Kyle Winston is an architect and teacher based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He instructs design studios in the School of Architecture at Northeastern and works for Schwartz/Silver Architects in Boston. In 2023, he co-led the UC Berkeley InArch program, and in 2022, taught in the Design Discovery program at Harvard. He received his MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he edited the journal Pairs. This summer, he will be teaching about the 8.5×11 sheet of paper.

Visual Communications

Shanaz Deen is a freelance photographer based in NYC and a resident artist at the Strother School of Radical Attention. She works as an advocacy fellow, organizer and documentarian at the Interfaith Center of New York.

Summer ‘25 Faculty

Andrea Bartoli, President of the Sant’Egidio Foundation for Peace and Dialogue is leading the Cooperative Nuclear Disarmament and Sustainability Initiative - CNDSI at Columbia’s Climate School where he is a Senior Research Scholar. He is also the Executive Advisor of the Soka Institute for Global Solutions - SIGS.