Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque
Catalina Sofia Dansberger Duque is an inspired Colombian creative dedicated to the art of storytelling and its power to center the positive experiences of diverse people and communities whose voices are often missing or unfairly represented. She has written for local and national media outlets including Ms. Magazine, Huffington Post, Thrive Global, BmoreArt, and Baltimore City’s Cool Progeny. Catalina is the founder of Policarpa Media Studios which creates and produces media about underrepresented creative entrepreneurs whose work reflects and supports thriving diverse communities. She is currently a communications manager for the humanities and the social sciences at UMBC.
Viridiana Colosio-Martinez
Viridiana Colosio is a MA/TA student in the INCC at UMBC. She graduated from UMBC in May 2022 with a BA in Modern Languages and Linguistics with Honors with a Minor in Latin American Studies. She was awarded an Undergraduate Research Award for her project Bilingualism and Cultural Identity in the Latinx Community: A Raciolinguistic Approach to the Experience of UMBC Spanish-English Bilingual. Since September 22, she has been collaborating as a Research Assistant to the digital storytelling project Moving Stories: Latinas en Baltimore. She was born and raised in Mexico, and is a mother of 2 children.
Charlotte Keniston
Charlotte Keniston came to Baltimore in 2011 to pursue an MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at UMBC. As an Open Society Institute Fellow she ran community food programs in Southwest Baltimore. Charlotte has taught classes at UMBC in Food Systems, Photography, and Public Art, and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Language, Literacy, and Culture program, studying participatory visual research methods and social change and collaborating with Black Yield Institute. She is Associate Director of the Shriver Peaceworker Fellows program and is active in both the UMBC and International Digital Storytelling communities.
Annie Byrd
Annie Byrd is a Talent Acquisition Specialist in the Department of Human Resources at UMBC. She is an undergraduate alum in EHS Management and will graduate with a Master’s in Community Leadership in May 2023. Her interest in community leadership stems from her experience as a birth and postpartum doula in the Baltimore area and from her work in the Office of Equity and Inclusion and Human Resources at UMBC. Her academic projects include work on maternal and infant health parity through B’more for Healthy Babies, Family League of Baltimore, MOMCares, and the Baltimore Doula Project. Working and learning at UMBC has allowed Annie to develop her passion for job equity and reproductive justice.
Amy Tondreau
Dr. Amy Tondreau is an Assistant Professor of Elementary Literacy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She holds an Ed.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University, an M.Ed. in Reading from Rhode Island College, and a B.A. in Elementary Education and Communications from Boston College. She previously worked as a staff developer and writer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, as co-director of the Summer Literacy Clinic at Rhode Island College, and as an elementary classroom teacher. Her research focuses on teachers’ and students’ literacy identities, critical literacy in children’s literature and writing pedagogy, professional learning communities, and the cross-pollination of Disability Sustaining and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies in literacy teaching and learning. Her work has been published in forums such as The Reading Teacher, Action inTeacher Education, and Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education. She is currently co-authoring her first book, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Disability Sustaining Pedagogy in the Elementary Balanced Literacy Classroom, set to be published by Routledge in 2023.
Courtney Hobson
Joining the Dresher Center as Program Coordinator in 2017, Courtney Hobson works with the director to develop and organize scholarly events and programs for the UMBC community. This includes organizing the Humanities Forum, our public lecture series; CURRENTS, our lunch-time works-in-progress series for faculty and graduate students; social media campaigns; and other related tasks. Courtney also serves on the planning committee for the Women’s Center’s Critical Social Justice Initiative, as well as the Public Humanities Minor Advisory Committee.
Outside of UMBC, she works as a public historian and historical consultant, collaborating with organizations including The Southwest Partnership, Inc., Historical Research Associates, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Courtney is also a member of the National Council on Public History, where she currently serves on the NCPH-NPS Advisory Committee. In her spare time, Courtney is an amateur archer and clarinetist, collector of unread books, and constantly on the hunt for a good pub trivia. She lives in Baltimore, MD with her cat, Pepper.
Earl Brooks
Earl H. Brooks is a musician (saxophone) and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His research interests include African-American expressive culture, rhetoric and composition, and sound Studies. His book project, On
Rhetoric and Black Music (forthcoming with Wayne State University Press) explores the unique value of music within public discourse. Brooks is currently working on a podcast that explores flooding and other climate-change-related challenges for communities of color in Baltimore and beyond.
Kristin Putchinski
Kristin Putchinski is a graduate student at UMBC in the Intermedia and Digital Arts MFA program. With over 25 years experience as a songwriter, musician, composer and performer, she now shifts her focus to a new form of expression that incorporates her artistic background, her passion for performance, an openness to new ways of seeing and a drive to find the ways she can be useful in the community in which she lives.
Lydia Stamato is a PhD student in the Human-Centered Computing program in the Department of Information Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research explores community engagement with art, science, and technology through a lens of intersectional feminism and feminist science and technology studies as a means of expanding participation in technology criticism and futuring. Lydia works closely with the Baltimore Underground Science Space and contributes to theory and practice in sustainable human-computer interaction.
Aimee Pohl
Aimée Pohl studies oral history practice and the histories of social movements, housing, Baltimore, and public health. She is completing her Masters in Public History at UMBC, and works in the archives at the Jewish Museum of Maryland.
Michael Casiano
Mike Casiano is an assistant professor of American Studies and a core faculty member in the Public Humanities minor at UMBC. His work analyzes the relationship between policing, urban development, and race in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Since 2016, he has served on the board of Charm City Land Trusts, a community land trust located in East Baltimore, where he also lives.