Alumni
Since 2012 over 230 students have completed a Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities. Our alumni have found compelling ways to integrate urban humanities methods within their own academic, artistic, and professional practices. Here are just a few examples of alumni-led projects and initiatives that demonstrate the ways urban humanities lives on beyond UCLA:
2023-2024 Cohort
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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.
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Alexa Vaughn
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.
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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.
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Julie Wong
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sarah Zureiqat
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.
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Emma Fuller-Monk
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).
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Nils Jepson
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.
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Gabriela Cruz
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.
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Steven Carmona Mora
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.
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Benjamin Maries
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.
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Xen Pei Hoi
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.
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Ariella Ventura
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.
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Sarp Tanridag
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.
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Jacqueline Vela
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.
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Nidia Bautista
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.
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Leila Ullmann
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.
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Senna Hanner-Zhang
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.
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Tomi Jinhuang Chung
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.
UHI Alumni
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2013–14
Tokyo
Brady Collins
Jia Gu
Yang Yang
Aaron Cayer
KT Bender
Kelly McCormick
Gwyneth Shanks
Matthew Knauff
Devin McCutcheon
Sarah Walsh
John Lesiure
Deonte Harris
Darci Sprengel
Morgan Currie
Lyo Heng Liu
Mark Simpson
Kara Moore
Stephanie Odenheimer
Jeff Rauch
AK Muniam
Ruby Bolaria
Jadie Wasilco
Carla Salehin
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2014–15
Shanghai
Addie Schrodes
Leen Rhee
Emily Yen
Ellen Gerdes
Jonathan Banfill
Ji Eun Lee
Fang Ru Lin
Andre Comandon
Insky Chen
Claudia Huang
Sara Yoshida
Song Di
Kyra Bauman
Luis Ochoa
Noah Zaccalingi
Shen Gao
Melody Wu
Chi Dang
Cameron Robertson
Jenny Yu
Humberto Castro
Phoebe Brauer
Lucia Phan
Wanmeng Ren
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2015–16
Mexico City
Angelica Becerra
Kendy Rivera
Kenton Card
William Davis
Chantiri Resendiz
Maricela Becerra
Leigh-Anna Hidalgo
Teresa Monroe
Peter Chesney
Teo Wickland
Paul Kurek
Alejandro Ramirez
Andrew Ko
Devin Koba
Grace Ko
Jeannette Mundy
Ryan Hernandez
Heidi Alexander
Benjamin Kolder
Gus Wendel
Louis Monteils
Cat Callaghan
Lucy Lin
Paola Mendez
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2016–17
Tokyo
Nerve Macaspac
Chelsey Smith-Quinoz
Daniela Jimenez
Pradeep Kannan
Tatiana Sulovska
Marko Icev
Jacqueline Barrios
Ana Maria Duran
Ariel Hernandez
Cate Carlson
Caroline Watts
Josh Nelson
Clarissa Pluta-Brunt
Nick Bruni
Kenny Wong
Mark Kamish
Sai Rojanipirom
Andres Carasquillo
Sabrina Kim
Sarah Mercutio
Shine Ling
Ryland Lu
Sara Bond
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2017–18
Mexico City
Christian Duran
Esther Claudio
Max Greenberg
Hilary Malson
Kaelyn Rodriguez
Melanie Xu
Isabel Duron
Gaby Barrios
Izul de la Vega
Siqi Zhang
Xiangkun Hu
Daniel Greteman
Neta Nakash
Kevin MacDougall
Alex Abugov
Hiroshi Holloway
Cameron Phillips
Thomson Dryjanski
Alejandra Guerrero
Ryan Kurtzman
Aleli Balaguer
Aryeh Cohen
Claudia Bautista
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2018–19
Shanghai
Claudia Diera
Salvador Herrera
Zizi Li
Ellie Tse
Paula Thomas
Kate Taylor-Hasty
Melissa Peter (Rovner)
Zhiyin Lin
Annie Kao
Heather Tipton
Yushan Men
Ni Zhang
Rayne Laborde
Martha Kriley
Amy Zhou
Yidan Chen
Bertha Calderon
Alma Esperanza Villa Loma
Cassie Halls
Spike Friedman
Lennox Chaiveera
Naveen Agrawal
Taylor Dinehart
Jacinta Williams
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2019–20
Tijuana/Mexico City
Nylsa Martinez
Wesley Lin
Dax Walcott
Clayton McKee
Roya Chagnon
Cristina Vasquez
Kun Xian Shen
Fengyun Zhang
Adam Boggs
Lauren Mitchell
Ethan Ma
Manos Proussaloglou
Beatriz T. Torres
Christina Monzer
Andres Gonzalez
Zachary Zeilman
Tiffany Orozco
Cassie Hoeprich
Yiye Lin
Akana Jayewardene
Jenn Peterson Ruiz
Artin Sahakian
Lili Flores Rayzoga
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2020–21
Los Angeles
Jeremy Abbott
Gibson Bastar
Maha Benhachmi
Ben Bressette
Elise Chessman
Eliza Franklin
Carrie Gammell
Chris Giamarino
Andrew Gonzalez
Miranda Hirujo-Rincon
Miranda Hoegberg
Morgan Jacobs
Claire Nelischer
Cynthia Mari Orozco
Joaquin Peres
Xiuwen Qi
Jordan Rae
Andrés F. Ramirez
Nataly Rios
Celia Sànchez Zelaya
Samantha Solis
Victoria Tran
Yufan Wang
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2021–22
Los Angeles
Tyler DeMassa
Brittany Montano
Megan Riley
Rebecca Smith
Krystle Yu
Shona Paterson
Corinne Odom
Olivia Arena
Rocio Rivera-Murillo
Danielle Hanzalik
Amanda Gormsen
Emma Tran
Garo Susmanyan
Doğa Tekin
Katie Angen
Matthew Katz
Adam Lubitz
Karl Pascasio
Shweta Sundar
Kevin Amaya
Houwei Fu
Shane Reiner-Roth
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2022–23
Los Angeles
Evan Bruetsch
Anna Robinson-Sweet
Kay Wright
Natalie Marshall
Lilith Winkler-Schor
Sydney Anderson
Adelaida E. Rama Luna
Jo Dine
Jane Wu
Tamika L. Butler
Shaellen Franco
Montserrat Acosta Gomez
Sunny Chen
Wesleigh Gates
Marco Aguilar Gomez
Michael Buse
Lindsey Morris
Jocelyn Urbina
Alexander Shassetz
Pritam Dey
Ariège Besson
Mariana Estrada
René Escobedo
Sara Moya