Crystal Chen received her doctorate in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University in May 2017, where her research examined the intersections of literacy, teacher education, and urban and multicultural education. Her dissertation is entitled Critical Literacy as Common Ground: The Possibilities of African Immigrant Girls in New York City Public Schools and Community-Based Organizations. Crystal began her teaching career as a high school English teacher in New Jersey. In August 2017, she will be an assistant professor of English Education at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

Sierra Clouse is a wife, mother, Anti-Human Trafficking Activist, and IT Project Manager. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University. She’s passionate about bringing together the power of people and technology to shift the way we pursue success, community transformation, and social justice in the 21st century.

Gemma Mangione is a Lecturer in the Arts Administration program at Columbia University and a Consulting Analyst with Randi Korn & Associates. She hold undergraduate degrees in journalism and art history and a M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University.Her work connects practices illuminated through organizational ethnography with mechanisms of broader institutional and policy change. She principally interested in the cultural, moral, and political dynamics of legitimacy. To date, Gemma has explored this general theme by examining knowledge politics across humanities and health fields. Her current research compares programs for visitors with disabilities across art museums and botanical gardens and provides an ethnographic perspective on museums’ “health turn” as it gains traction in cultural policy. She has a sustained commitment to exploring how social scientific theory and evaluation practice can together help people make informed choices about the operations of cultural institutions and the values they contain.