Animation and diagrams by Emily Brockenbrough.


RIKERS ISLAND EDUCATION PROJECT, bringing restorative justice in the form of creative arts classes to detained young men at the Rikers Island penal colony in Queens, New York. Hip-Hop Music Production and Neighborhood Planning.


Involvement since the January 2015 inception of the Columbia University Center for Justice’s Rikers Island Education Project with the “Beats, Rhymes and Justice” program. The hip-hop-oriented program was a response to New York City’s banning of solitary confinement for youth at Rikers Island.


Encouraged by the positive results of sharing my music production experience with a group of incarcerated young men empowered to tell their own narratives through hip-hop, I proposed a new program centered on architecture and social justice. “Building Justice”, a collaboration with Leah Meisterlin (Columbia GSAPP Urban Planning), Todd Rouhe (common-room), students from Laura Kurgan’s (Center for Spatial Research) #CLOSERIKERS studio, “Building Justice” centers on hands-on, collective decisionmaking, neighborhood design and modelmaking.