Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film and the Executive Director of UTLA and UTNY, where he is currently based. Author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), his other books include: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (California, 2014; 10th-anniversary paperback, 2024), which was named a Best Film Book of 2014 by the Huffington Post; Detour (British Film Institute, 2008); and Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (Columbia, 2009). The recent anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (Princeton, 2021), which he edited and introduced, was selected by playwright Tom Stoppard as a 2021 Book of the Year in the TLS.

Dr. Laura Brown (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 2015) is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Communication Studies and serves as Program Director for the University of Texas Semester in New York (UTNY). She teaches the Leadership & Urban Engagement course. Dr. Brown’s health communication research appears in Journal of Clinical Outcomes Management, American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. She currently resides in Manhattan with her partner and their Boston terrier.

Erin has been a professional actor since 1992 and a member of Actors’ Equity Association since 2001. In addition to her performance work, she has worked as a musical theatre educator, director, and choreographer. Prior to her role at UTNY, she worked as the Dancers Outreach Coordinator at The Actors Fund, where she made meaningful connections with thousands of artists and arts organizations in NYC and across the country, and served on the Dance/USA Service Council. Erin is a freelance writer and journalist whose work has appeared in publications across the country. She also leads the diversity, equity, and inclusion content for one of NYC’s prominent nonprofits. She holds a BA in Musical Theatre Performance from Weber State University.

Thomas Mellins teaches Modernism in American Architecture and Design: NYC. He is the co-author of three volumes in a book series on the architecture and urbanism of New York City: New York 1880, New York 1930, and New York 1960. Additionally, he has curated numerous exhibitions on the built environment for museums and cultural institutions nationwide. Most recently, he curated an online exhibition about Washington's Tidal Basin for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

In addition to his role at UTNY, Ed Salvato is also an Adjunct Instructor in Tourism and Hospitality at New York University’s Tisch Center of Hospitality. Ed co-authored the Handbook of LGBT Tourism & Hospitality Marketing: A Guide for Business Practice (Columbia University Press). Ed graduated cum laude from Harvard College with a BA in Applied Mathematics and received his MBA from Northeastern University. An avid cyclist, amateur photographer and passionate traveler, he currently resides in Upper Manhattan with his partner.

Abigail Levine is an artist working between New York and Los Angeles. Rooted in dance but moving across media—performance, text, drawing, sound—Levine focuses on the poetics of our bodies’ work, how we record and value it. Her ongoing Restagings series, with presenting partner Fridman Gallery, has been supported by a MacDowell fellowship, Bogliasco Foundation fellowship, Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grants, Atlantic Center for the Arts residency, New Music USA project grants, and the Center for Performance Research Mellon Artist-in-Residence program. Levine collaborated recently with pioneering electronics composer Alvin Lucier on a staging of his Orpheus Variations at ISSUE Project Room (2020) and performed with both Marina Abramovic (2010) and Yvonne Rainer (2018) in their retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. Levine’s critical writing has been published in Documents in Contemporary Art, Art21, Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and her creative works in Interim Poetics, Women & Performance, and Imagined Theatres. She is a contributing editor to the Movement Research Performance Journal. Before joining the UTNY faculty, Levine taught in the Dance Departments at Wesleyan University and Florida State University. Her latest work, Redactions, will premier at The Chocolate Factory Theater in June 2022.

Court Stroud is a writer, university adjunct, and media strategy consultant who has worked at Univision, Telemundo, TV Azteca, CBS, and several startups. He founded The Cledor Group, a boutique practice helping companies navigate today’s tumultuous media landscape. Past clients include firms such as Comcast, NBCUniversal (NBC, Telemundo, NBC Sports), Sony Entertainment Pictures, and BBC Studios. As an adjunct at Columbia, NYU, and his beloved alma mater, The University of Texas, Stroud has designed and delivered courses such as "Diversity in Media & Advertising,” “Digital Media & Advertising," and “Urban Communication." His byline appears in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Forbes, where he’s a contributing writer. Stroud holds undergrad degrees from UT-Austin and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Matthew Cronin lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA in Studio Art from University of Texas at Austin as well as a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Cronin’s process makes use of preexisting photographs which he reimagines through montage, multiple exposure, and alternate methods of capture. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Canada including The Visual Arts Center, Austin; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Back Gallery Project, Vancouver, and the NARS Foundation, Brooklyn. Cronin’s work can be found in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art’s permanent collection and in the archives at the Center for Creative Photography.

As an advertising Creative Director and copywriter for two decades, Jenine has worked with Fortune 500 brands, including Pepsi, Jaguar, McDonald’s, State Farm, The NBA on TNT, and more. Her experience has led her to win awards and work for two legendary creatives: the design visionary Milton Glazer and filmmaker and social iconoclast Spike Lee. She received an undergraduate degree from Parsons School of Design and an MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.  Jenine’s passion for writing extends beyond advertising. Her byline appears in The New York Times, The Detroit News, Forbes, Creative Non-Fiction Magazine, and more. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her daughter and Iris the Wonder Dog, a terrier-schnauzer mix. 

Avani Desai (BS, BBA '16) currently leads Brand Success for Archive, a tech company enabling fashion brands to participate in brand-owned resale. Prior to Archive, Avani led US Strategy & Operations for Depop. Avani is a 2016 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin (BS, BBA), and she earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2021. She began her career at Boston Consulting Group in the Fashion, Beauty, & Luxury group and went on to serve as the Chief of Staff at Bergdorf Goodman. Avani's experience in tech and resale in the fashion industry has led her to teach this course on sustainability for this industry.

Anisa Jackson (B.A., Geography University of Washington, 2015; M. Phil American Studies, New York University, 2022) is a writer and organizer of exhibitions and programs from Seattle, Washington and a PhD Candidate in American Studies at New York University. Their dissertation examines squatting movements in Harlem from the 1960s through the 1980s. They are a contributing author to Ghosts of Seattle Past: An Anthology of Lost Seattle Places (Chin Music Press 2017) and “The World We Became: Map Quest 2350, A Speculative Atlas Beyond Climate Crisis” (Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures & The Americas 2022). Anisa is a Urban Democracy Lab Doctoral Fellow (2022-23), Urban Doctoral Fellow (2019-2020), NYU Cities Collaborative Urban Public Humanities Summer Fellow (2021), they are also a member of the Anti Eviction Mapping Project and the Relational Poverty Network. They are a Curator-At-Large at the Aspen Art Museum.