ANA FRANCISCO Finding Home and Taking it With You

BY P.M. CAMPBELL

Ana is thirty-seven years old, and with a PHD in Neuroscience & Social Sciences, she is a research assistant professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as well as an adjunct associate professor at Yeshiva University teaching a graduate psychology course. “I came to work in the Bronx…” she said, and while most would have ended the sentence there, she continued “[and] I was looking for a place to volunteer”, this was six years ago. Today, Ana spends her free time gallery and library sitting, doing home management for events, and attending workshops whenever possible. This is not new for her however, “volunteering has always been important to me” she says. She assisted at food pantries while studying in the Netherlands and has spent time providing psychological support to the houseless community in her home country of Portugal. Though she has been practicing neuroscience for about thirteen years, she has always enjoyed photography, and coming to the BDC allowed her to take that passion seriously. While taking a photojournalism class with Mike Kamber and Ash Gilbertson, Ana’s project came to focus on her work with people living with schizophrenia.

Pairing her photos with art, writing, and testimonies by those people, she says “I’m trying the best I can to tell their story to make people understand that we’re all human beings with different struggles”. It was during that class that Ana came to wrestle with her “frustration as a scientist” and recognize that photography “was really what [she] wanted to do”. Now, Ana has plans to not only return to the Netherlands to pursue a Masters Degree in photography, but to start a documentary center in Portugal. “I prefer to do it in my country” she says, describing her community in Lisbon as “similar to the South Bronx” in terms of access to resources. Though she first considered the life change a year ago, this last year has made many factors “less abstract”. Mentioning names like Mike Kamber and Maria Galindo, she maintains that they gave her the courage to do what she loves and “risk it, try it, and see what happens”. Though she thanks the BDC for this shift, saying “I don’t know how so many amazingly generous people come together in one place”, for the last six years she has been among the most giving. The BDC can only function because of people like Ana, who put their community first, and in doing so find what they love.