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

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.  

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.

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. 

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
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.

Facilitator

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.

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.

Faculty

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

Fall 25’ Faculty

Maia Pujara holds a dual bachelor’s in Neuroscience and English and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches classes on positive psychology.

 Fall 25’ Faculty

Melody Serra is an educator, writer, and community weaver whose work explores the intersections of ecology, wonder, and storytelling. She designs transformative learning experiences from the American Museum of Natural History to grassroots youth leadership programs in the Bronx. Currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at St. Joseph’s University.

Fall 25’ Faculty

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.

Fall 25’ Faculty

Lawrence Berger has been developing a philosophy of attention for many years. His 2023 book The Politics of Attention and the Promise of Mindfulness spells offers a way to resist the fracking of attention. He has taught at the University of Iowa and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and currently teaches philosophy at Marist University with a focus on climate justice.

Fall 25’ Faculty

Hope Yoon is a New York-based writer and translator of fiction, theater, and video games from Seoul. She works as a narrative designer at LINE Games and is in residence at Soho Rep developing a new work of theater.

Fall 25’ Faculty

Sherese Francis is an experimental and speculative poet and interdisciplinary artist, workshop facilitator, editor, and literary curator. Her work has been published in several magazines and journals and won Inverted Syntax’s 2024 Aggrey Book Prize for Poetry for PollyNation: A Seminary of Self, which will be published in 2027.

Fall 25’ Faculty

Queenie Wu is a creative technologist & educator using cartography to playfully interrogate spatial data, and how they inform our relationships and memories of shared surroundings. Equipped with the medium of maps as a research process, she grows her practice as a current Steve Jobs Archive fellow, past member of NEW INC, and soon IMA Low-Residency grad at NYU.

Fall 25’ Faculty

Nicholas Miller is a Brooklyn-based multimedia performance artist, composer/improviser, and writer whose work is informed by mysticism and the Black American improvised music tradition. They have performed in art galleries, DIY spaces, jazz clubs, classical concert halls, underground caves, desert canyons, the Sundance Film Festival, and Westminster Palace. They studied music at University of Oxford, Utah State University, and University of Denver.