Meet the scholars behind the Urban Humanities Initiative
Derrick Behm Josa is an urban planner and a DeafSpace engagement and design consultant. He is currently a PhD student in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles focusing his research on social infrastructures and community development, including how cities empower cultural production among Deaf communities through planning and design.
Previously, he worked at Gallaudet University Office of Campus Design and Planning as a project coordinator and taught the DeafSpace Design Methodologies course. In 2019, he received his Masters degree from the Urban and Regional Planning program at Georgetown University. Through his experience and work, Derrick believes that the "accessibility" framework needs to continue evolving, rethinking how people connect within places.
Derrick Behm Josa
Alexa is a first year PhD student in Architecture and Urban Design from Long Beach, California. She is a Deaf landscape designer, accessibility specialist, and recent Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Her work and research are centered upon designing public landscapes with and for the Deaf and disabled communities, using applications of the ADA Standards, Universal Design, and Human-Centered Design principles (e.g., DeafSpace) alongside lived experience and direct participation in the design process. Through her dissertation and a disability justice lens, she plans to more formally explore the historical, exclusionary, and inaccessible design of American cities. She received both her BA and MLA in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and has practiced in landscape architecture for the past five years.
Alexa Vaughn
Carolyn Park is a Korean/Spanish to English translator and PhD Student in Linguistic Anthropology. Her current research examines the multimodality of intercultural communication, specifically within the context of Korean and Mexican labor relations in Los Angeles. By focusing her study on everyday workplace interactions, she seeks to analyze the linguistic forms and embodied representations that come to be associated with unconscious cultural scripts.
Carolyn Park
Julie is a second year M.Arch student at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. She graduated with a B.A. in Architectural Studies with a minor in Visual and Performing Arts Education at UCLA. She is interested in learning more about how infrastures in the greater Los Angeles region affects its surroundings, as well as how any of these changes affect the housing market. Through joining the UHI, she hopes to research for potential design solutions to current urban issues, and discover spatial justice in design.
Julie Wong
Alejandra Rios is pursuing a Master of Urban and Regional Planning and a Master of Latin American Studies at UCLA. Her academic and professional interests center around transportation equity and mobility justice. She is currently researching issues of safety and gender in transportation, community engagement practices, and extreme commutes. Her non-academic interests include bouldering, dancing, photography and hiking.
Alejandra Rios
Yessel Garcia (she/her) is a first year MSW student with a concentration of Social and Economic Justice at UCLA. She completed her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley in Sociology and Global Poverty. Her experience growing up as a first generation queer Latina in La Puente, California has motivated her dedication to public service and social involvement. Her interests include, but are not limited to, live music, pottery, fashion, gender studies, immigration rights, tenants rights, social justice, and cultivating community. She also has a plethora of experiences working alongside a range of different grassroots organizations, and aspires to provide disadvantaged groups easy access to social services in an effort to create a society where food, healthcare, and housing are not seen as commodities but as basic human rights.
Yessel Garcia
Chendi Zhang (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include age-friendly public space, participation and community engagement, urban design, smart city and technologies, and Urban China. Prior to pursuing her PhD, Chendi studied and worked in the field of landscape architecture for ten years. Chendi was a landscape designer at OLIN, Philadelphia. And she also holds a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree of Science in Landscape Architecture from Beijing Forestry University. With her research concentration, practice experience, and design background, Chendi studies urban issues from a perspective of how planning and design processes can collaborate more tightly and efficiently to better respond to the demands of overlooked and misrepresented vulnerable groups and reduce spatial inequality in the built environment.
Chendi Zhang
Richard Kirk is an urban geographer and Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Geography. Before coming to UCLA, he received his B.S. and M.S. in Geography with minors in Anthropology and Applied Anthropology respectively from the University of North Texas. His research investigates questions concerning capitalist urban development, neoliberal urban governance, gentrification, urban marginality, and multiculturalism in Global North cities.
Richard Kirk
Max Kilman (he/his) is a graduate student beginning his first year in the UCLA-Sciences Po Dual Degree program. He previously received a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and French at Pomona College. Currently, he finds himself interested in experimental cartography and other visual representations of the historical and relational processes of city-making. In particular, he hopes to possibly study the political capacity of these media to help build public knowledge, sustain cooperative and regenerative systems of living, and provide new forms of data to policymakers.
Maxwell (Max) Kilman
Tzu-Yuan (Peter) Cheng is a second year M.Arch student at UCLA AUD. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from National Taiwan University of Science & Technology. He has previously worked in designing social housing for the city of Taipei. Apart from academic urban design projects he did during his exchange program at Cal Poly Pomona, he also took part in related conceptual competitions.
Tzu-Yuan Cheng
Sarah is a second year Master of Architecture student at UCLA AUD. She grew up in Orange County and earned her B.A. in Architectural Studies with a minor in Urban Studies at Boston University. Her time in Boston fostered interests in urban design and planning, as well as historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Through the Urban Humanities Initiative, she hopes to further engage with issues of affordable housing, spatial equity, and sustainable development and looks forward to collaborating with colleagues across various disciplines.
Sarah Zureiqat
Emma is a first year graduate student pursuing dual study of the Master of Architecture and the Master of Urban and Regional Planning at UCLA. They graduated from Wesleyan University in 2018 with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Emma focuses on community-led design and spatial justice. They are interested in the complex spaces where community forms and how structures of power materialize in the built environment. Emma is a big fan of women’s sports but also highly critical of mega-events and does not want the Olympics to come to Los Angeles (or anywhere).
Emma Fuller-Monk
Nils is a candidate in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) program at UCLA studying eviction and its contentions in Los Angeles. Before UCLA, Nils worked in Marketing at Los Angeles Metro, helping lead campaign communication efforts for the agency’s transit and housing projects in planning. He graduated in 2019 from UC Berkeley, with a double major in English and Society & Environment, where he founded the Leaflet – the first environmental publication in the UC system. Nils is from Van Nuys, California.
Nils Jepson
Gaby Cruz is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her main research interests focus on modern and contemporary dictatorships in Latin America, modern Latin American cinema, feminisms, gender studies, social movements, memory studies, migration, diasporas, and cultural studies.
Gabriela Cruz
Steven Carmona Mora (they/he) is a child of Mexican immigrants from Boyle Heights. In the past, Steven worked in the progressive tech industry, helping organizations across the United States use data and technology to enhance their campaigns and programming, and has also trained thousands of organizers and technologists with re:power. Steven is pursuing a Master's in Urban and Regional Planning, and works closely with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center.
Steven Carmona Mora
Ben is currently enrolled in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs in the Urban and Regional Planning Department. His research as a sociology major included the implications of urban living and the potential to develop sustainable community solidarity through the urban commons. Ben has previously worked with organizations that focus on community land trusts, community gardens, composting, and urban agriculture.
Benjamin Maries
Xen is a second year M.Arch I student at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. She previously received her Bachelor in Architectural Design from Monash University, Australia. Her experiences living in diverse countries across South-east Asia and Oceania have shaped her interested in the profound role of architectural expressions as potent symbols of cultural identity and heritage as it revolves around the complex intersection of urban development. Through her education, she looks forward to studying the urban context of Los Angeles and applying strategies for community-driven urban development.
Xen Pei Hoi
Ariella is a 2nd year MURP interested in the use and design of public space. They hold knowledge in green infrastructure, data analytics and community organizing. As a planner, they hope to create accessible and collaborative public spaces that foster models of community care.
Ariella Ventura
Sarp is a 2nd year PhD in Architecture. His research interests include the internal and forced migrations during the turn of the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire and the early Republic period in Turkey, falling within the realm of postcolonial migrations. He specifically focuses on both temporary and permanent migrant settlements, including migrant villages that were established as part of agricultural development and the internal expansion ambitions of the governments. His study delves into the spaces created within the complex interplay among the state, migrants, and other residents in the area. He participated in the Reyhanlı Community Center in Hatay, an architectural project for a community center catering to Syrian refugees in Turkey. His PhD research is supported by Fulbright.
Sarp Tanridag
Jacqueline Vela is a third year PhD student in the UCLA English program. She received her BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley with minors in History and Journalism and her AA in English and History from East Los Angeles College. Her research interests include Film, 20th Century US Literature, Chicanx/Latinx Literature and the memory recording and artistic expressions of women and families in metropolitan areas. Born and raised in South Los Angeles, she hopes to learn more about the complicated spatial history of her beloved hometown in an interdisciplinary context.
Jacqueline Vela
Nidia Bautista (she/her) is a fourth year doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Gender Studies with scholarly interests in aesthetics, protest, and hemispheric performance. She has worked as a journalist based in Mexico City and Los Angeles reporting on gender, labor, and immigration.
Nidia Bautista
Leila Ullmann was born and raised in San José and is pursuing a Masters in Urban Planning degree at UCLA’s Luskin School with a focus on community land trusts and other collective approaches to housing and development as anti-displacement strategies. With a background in community organizing, public policy, and dance, she is curious about how movement, expansively defined, can help teach us how we might design liberatory spaces and environments. She applies an explicitly abolitionist framework to all her work and plans to use her degree to build a world free of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. She is most excited to learn in community with the UHI cohort and to get to know LA through a lens of urban humanities. Before UCLA, she studied African American Studies and Dance at Princeton University.
Leila Ullmann
Senna Hanner-Zhang is second year Masters of Library and Information Science student at UCLA with a specialization in Archival Studies. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she has an undergraduate background in architecture having studied at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), eventually graduating with a BA in Architectural Studies from UCLA. Senna’s research primarily focuses on community-based archives and the placemaking potentials of archives and records. She looks forward to exploring the urban context of Los Angeles through design, memory work, and spatial justice as a part of the Urban Humanities Initiative.
Senna Hanner-Zhang
Jinhuang Chung, who goes simply by “Tomi,” is a first year Geography PhD student at UCLA. Her research interests broadly concern governance, placemaking, and racemaking in a neoliberal, multicultural world. Currently, she is particularly interested in the spatial assertion and promotion of Asian identity in the Untied States and its consequences for Black communities in particular. She has professional experience in the housing cooperative sector and the solidarity economy movement. Outside of academic and professional realms, she organizes around pan-Africanist and feminist causes. In all of her work, she is guided by a fervent, scientific commitment to self-determination and liberation. Her work is boundless and has brought her to many places, ranging from Los Angeles to Oakland to the Twin Cities to La Habana, Cuba. In her free time, Tomi likes hanging out with her 15 year old cat Coco and having philosophical conversations with loved ones.