Meet the 2025 Public Humanities Fellows and Partnering Organizations
The Latinx Project is thrilled to present the fourth cycle of the Public Humanities Fellowship program. Ten graduate students from New York University and area institutions will gain career experience with local arts and culture organizations. Fellows will develop collaborative, reciprocal projects and advance public humanities relevant to their creative and research interests.
This year’s fellows include João Victor Medeiros Azevedo, Carlos Ortiz Burgos, Fernanda Espinosa, Amalia Uribe Guardiola, Isabella Pereira Nikel, Pamela Santana Oliveros, Olivia Ortiz, Laura Assanmal Peláez, Tannon A. Reckling, Isabel Saavedra-Weis. Partnering organizations include El Museo del Barrio, LATEA at The Clemente, New York Narratives, New York Theatre Ballet, Queens Museum, The Latinx Project, Tatter Blue Library, Visual Aids, Voices of Contemporary Art, Word Up Community Bookshop.
As part of the program, fellows will participate in two online professional development sessions. They will engage with Dr. Ariana Curtis (Curator, Latinx Studies, National Museum of African American History & Culture) and Karen Vidangos (Senior Manager of Social Media at The Met).
The Public Humanities Fellowship is made possible with support from the Mellon Foundation.
Meet the 2025 Public Humanities Fellows:
João Victor Azevedo (NYU)
Partner Organization: El Museo del Barrio
João Victor Azevedo is a museum professional with experience at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He specializes in Family, Youth, and Access Learning & Initiatives, advocating for multilingual programming, community engagement, and inclusive exhibitions. He earned a B.A. in Spanish Language with a minor in Latin American Studies from Centre College and is pursuing an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Museum Studies at NYU. His research explores artists from the Grupo Frente (1952–1964) who challenged artistic autonomy through participatory, sensorial, and politically engaged art, focusing on Neo-concrete works like Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés (1964–1965) as resistance to Brazil's military dictatorship.
Carlos Ortiz Burgos (CUNY)
Partner Organization: LATEA at The Clemente
Carlos Ortiz Burgos is a Puerto Rican art historian and curator. He earned a B.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Art History from the University of Puerto Rico, an M.A. in Visual Cultures of the Americas from Florida State University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at the City University of New York. His research focuses on modern art in the Caribbean and his curatorial projects focus on the work of young artists. He is a 2023-24 recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Curatorial Fellowship at James Gallery and a 2025 recipient of the Ponsold-Motherwell Curatorial Fellowship at El Museo del Barrio. He currently seeks to engage in dialogues between artists living in the Caribbean and the diaspora.
Fernanda Espinosa (Rutgers University)
Partner Organization: Voices of Contemporary Art
Fernanda Espinosa is an oral historian and American Studies PhD student at Rutgers University – Newark. She holds a master's degree in oral history from Columbia University. She has held fellowships with the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities – Oral History Association, where she conducted projects on Latinx art. She is a co-founder and collaborator of Circular Projects, dedicated to working at the intersections of language justice, research, and oral history, and of CC1/19 — an itinerant visual art and oral transmissions collaboration. As a scholar, she is interested in departing from her oral history work to reframe art histories and the relationship between cultural institutions and artists, focusing on artists expanding and contributing to public discourse and to notions of well-being and health.
Amalia Uribe Guardiola (NYU)
Partner Organization: Queens Museum
Amalia Uribe Guardiola is a Colombian anthropologist whose work explores the intersection of museums, craft, oral history, and migration. She is particularly interested in collective textile-making practices as spaces where complicity, orality and materiality intertwine. She has collaborated with the artist Lina Puerta and collectives such as BordeAndo to design and lead sewing circles that center communal storytelling and creation.She has held artist residencies at the Magdalena River Museum (Honda, Colombia) and El Boga Casa Taller (Mompox, Colombia), where she explored the cultural and material significance of the rocking chair along Colombia’s longest waterway. Currently, she is pursuing a master’s degree in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at NYU, where she is also the coordinator of the Colombian Studies Initiative.
Isabella Pereira Nikel (Columbia University)
Partner Organization: Tatter Blue Library
Isabella Pereira Nikel is a Brazilian Ph.D. student in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research explores contemporary Latin American visual art in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how colonial and capitalist systems have pathologized marginalized bodies and lands to justify violence and dispossession. A central element of her work is the study of arpilleras—textile art born from political resistance in Chile. For her Public Humanities Project, Isabella is excited to draw on textile-making as a feminist practice to reflect on the overlapping crises in the Americas, weaving together craft, memory, and emotion to foster a creative process of reconnection with others.
Pamela Santana Oliveros (NYU)
Partner Organization: The Latinx Project
Pamela Santana Oliveros (she/they) is a Peruvian artist, director, and researcher pursuing her PhD in Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU. Her research explores the interweaving of staged and everyday performances in the Ballroom Culture of Lima, Peru. Her work and thinking are informed by her own dancing and self-identifications, and she is drawn to how people move and organize to respond in creative ways to gender, race, and class oppressions. She holds an MA in Choreomundus - Dance Knowledge,Practice, and Heritage. Her research interests include dance studies, gender and performance, and the intersections of aesthetics and politics in the practices of Latin American dance communities.
Olivia Ortiz (NYU)
Partner Organization: Word Up Community Bookshop
Olivia Ortiz (they/them) is a community educator, born and raised in Los Angeles County with Mexican and Salvadoran familial roots. As a current PhD student in Teaching and Learning at NYU, Olivia's work focuses on the ways communities in struggle engage in life-giving and -sustaining practices through intergenerational learning. They hope to steward these interests through a commitment to interdisciplinary work, growing in activist methodologies, and embracing the numerous contradictions present in qualitative research. In a practice of giving flowers, Olivia shares that their first teachers were their grandmas - it is through them that they carry lessons surrounding interdependence, relationships with the more-than-human, and a penchant for sweet treats.
Laura Assanmal Peláez (NYU)
Partner Organization: New York Narratives
Laura Assanmal Peláez is an educator, youth worker, community organizer, urban ethnographer, and Ph.D. candidate in Sociology of Education at NYU Steinhardt. Born and raised in Honduras, her research focuses on asylum-seeking South and Central American youth in NYC and students experiencing housing insecurity. She examines how immigrant, unhoused, and mixed-status family students navigate the city’s school and shelter systems. Laura earned her B.A. in Social Research and Public Policy with a Political Science minor from NYU Abu Dhabi. She has supported ENLACE at CUNY Lehman College and co-founded the New Neighbors Network, a mutual aid collective for newcomer, unhoused youth. Currently, Laura is an adjunct faculty member NYU Steinhardt and NYU Gallatin. Laura is also a researcher at the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools.
Tannon A. Reckling (SUNY Purchase)
Partner Organization: Visual AIDS
Tannon Reckling is an HIV-positive writer, curator, teacher, and arts worker. Tannon engages messy queer ontologies, hacked technologies, nuanced shadow labor. Reckling has been at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and more. Reckling has education from University of Oregon, University of California-Los Angeles, New York University, and more. Reckling has written for GAY LETTER, Frieze, e-flux, Gay & Lesbian Review, Manhattan Art Review, Visual AIDS, among others
Isabel Saavedra-Weis (NYU)
Partner Organization: New York Theatre Ballet
Isabel Saavedra-Weis (she/her/ella) is a doctoral student in the English and American Literature Program at NYU. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century multi-ethnic literature, with special interest in U.S. Latinx/Chicanx culture and theory, popular culture, folklore studies and performance studies. Inspired by her journalism training, she is deeply invested in accessible academia and public humanities. Through her Public Humanities fellowship, she will be working at the New York Theater of Ballet this summer to support community outreach programming and art education funding.
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About the Latinx Project at NYU
The Latinx Project at New York University explores and promotes U.S. Latinx Art, Culture and Scholarship through creative and interdisciplinary programs. Founded in 2018, it serves as a platform to foster critical public programming and for hosting artists and scholars. The Latinx Project is especially committed to examining and highlighting the multitude of Latinx identities as central to developing a more inclusive and equitable vision of Latinx Studies.