Biographies

Haitiana Munah Angerville is an alumna of New York University from Class of ‘22. She adores languages and lyrical literature in all of their undying glory—so much that she plans to receive a master’s degree for translation and interpretation in the near future; and she is currently dedicated to writing several poetry manuscripts to publish her first chapbooks as soon as possible. Haitiana is also preparing to work as a Special Education Associate for middle-schoolers in the 2023-24 academic year for Success Academy Charter Schools. Meanwhile, she strives to sustainably juggle her first full-time position with creative pursuits and passions that unlock and teach her about the intricacies of her own brain. On any given day, she could be listening and choreographing to her favorite songs, taking singing and piano lessons on LinkedIn Learning, drawing from her mind’s eye, cooking colorful cuisine, finally starting to read a book borrowed from the library weeks ago, researching cognitive science and world events, scrolling through Instagram and Facebook, or guffawing with loved ones.

Evalyn Bair is a 2023 graduating Art History and Spanish double major with a minor in Cinema Studies. After transferring to NYU in the midst of a global pandemic, she decided to leverage the instability of the world and take advantage of every opportunity the unique school and city has to offer. She has worked at a variety of New York City cultural institutions, such as Neal Meltzer Fine Art, Washington Square Park Conservancy, and American Ballet Theatre (current). Also very involved on campus, Evalyn is the NYU Grey Center Art History Library proctor, studied abroad at NYU Madrid in the fall of 2022 (Peer Mentor Fellowship), and wrote a Senior Honors thesis in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese on Spanish national identity with regard to the Prado Museum and Las Meninas (for which she received DURF funding twice over for, as well as receiving the titles of 2021 Seena and George Silbert Research Scholar and 2022 Robert A. Fowkes Research Scholar). Evalyn will also be awarded the Faculty Choice Award from the Department of Art History upon graduation. She is passionate about and involved in the performing arts, and had the lead role in a SAG film over the summer of 2022, to be released fall 2023.

Manuel Barrós (Lima 1993) holds a degree in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has published the collection of poems Tantalizing (La Apacheta Editores, 2022) and the essay La luz misma. Traducir a Cecília Meireles en el Perú (Fondo Editorial UCSS, 2023). He is the co-author of Un grito a la tierra. Arte y revolución en Chaski (Cusco, 1972-1974) (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2022). He has translated the work of various writers and poets in journals, and also A bandeja de Salomé / La bandeja de Salomé (Caos e Letras, 2022) by Adriane García; and with Óscar Limache, Doze noturnos da Holanda / Doce nocturnos de Holanda (Ediciones Andesgraund, 2016; 2018) by Cecília Meireles, and Na pata do cavalo há sete abismos / En la pata del caballo hay siete abismos (La Apacheta Editores; Editorial Cronos, 2021) by Clarissa Macedo. He works on the development and implementation of cultural policies related to the book industry and the promotion of reading. Contact: mfbarrosa@gmail.com

Mario Bellatin has already gained a status as one of the greatest living Mexican writers. Bellatin, who has been called “controversial,” “a cult writer,” and an “eccentric public figure,” is the author of dozens of intricate, compelling, and absolutely unique novels that have won numerous international literary awards, including the José Donoso Ibero-American Literature Prize, the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, the Premio Nacional de Literatura Mazatlán, the Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the Antonin Artaud Award, and the José María Arguedas Prize. Bellatin’s works have been translated into 21 languages. Previous books published in English include Beauty Salon, The Large Glass, Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction, The Transparent Bird’s Gaze, and Jacob the Mutant. He lives in Mexico City.

Iván Brea is a Dominican-Nicaraguan-American undergraduate student (senior) from El Paso, Texas studying politics & Spanish and Portuguese with a minor in Social and Public Policy at New York University. Profoundly focused on the concept of justice and its implications on the marginalized, he has interned and volunteered at a variety of nonprofits and is involved in many political, cultural, and social extracurriculars at NYU such as Latinos Unidos Con Honor y Amistad (LUCHA), where he currently serves as president. His academic work focuses on 20thand 21st- century Mexican and Greater Mexican literary, film, and cultural studies. Other research interests include border and migration studies, representations of religion, and postcolonial theory. Starting in the fall of 2023, he will be pursuing a Master of Philosophy degree in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

Mina Chen, or legally called Chen Xiyu, is currently studying as a freshman in NYU CAS. She is a Shanghainese with a passion for literature, art, and travel. Originating from her passion, Mina led the production of the documentary “Petrichor” and is currently working as a digital transcriber to help the Smithsonian Institution maintain, preserve, and disseminate their collections. She is also active on the Internet as a freelance author and translator, with past works including “Oak Snow” and “Bluebells”; and is currently working on a translation of Wang Zengqi’s work.

Iris Fitzsimmons Christensen is currently in her last year of undergraduate studies at Boston University where she studies Spanish and International Relations focusing on European studies and regional politics and cultural anthropology. She has been studying Spanish since she was a small child and hopes to continue her studies. She has become fascinated by the role of women in medieval Iberian epics and hopes the piece will be thought provoking and impactful.

Carina Christo is a junior at NYU studying Media, Culture & Communications with minors in both Spanish and Social Entrepreneurship. She’s originally from Massachusetts and currently at NYU Madrid, excited by the opportunity to practice and improve her Spanish.

Sam Cordell is a designer and photographer based in New York City. He graduated NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2021 with a major in Interdisciplinary Design, studying the intersections between cultural anthropology and the history of modernism in architecture and design. His photography featured throughout this issue of Esferas examines select architectural and topographic features of southern Peru, photographed in June of 2022. See pages 3, 13, 131, 235.

Kenzie Davidson is a junior at NYU studying Spanish and Politics. She also works as an Undergraduate Research Assistant for a Politics PhD student. She is from Santa Barbara, CA, and now lives in New York full time. She has a strong interest in writing, law, political issues in the United States, Latin America, and Spain, as well as minimizing the negative impacts we as humans have on our environment.

Isabel Fadhel Carballo is a junior in CAS majoring in Computer Science, planning on continuing to dental school. She is a proud native of Caguas, Puerto Rico with a passion for creativity, primarily through writing and photography.

Stephanie Farmer is a student in Media Culture and Communications with a minor in creative writing. After two semesters abroad she has developed a focus on global media and the power of storytelling across many different cultures. She expanded her language skills in Paris and Buenos Aires while learning to adapt to new settings. Stephanie hopes to nourish creative communities and continues to do so through her art magazine DAHA. She enjoys finding her voice in different creative mediums and exploring her story-telling practice in everything she does. Her most prized possession is her collection of over 100 tickets to various cultural and artistic experiences she has witnessed throughout her life. As a disabled, low-income first-generation college student, she fights to tell the stories of people who have struggled like her to be seen, heard, and appreciated.

Micah Feinberg graduated from NYU with a degree in Computer Science and Spanish, and works at the Dream House, caring for lower Manhattan’s longest running multi-channel drone. She is actively exploring the combinatorial potential of these various lines of work-study: programmatic interventions; hacking space; charting the intersections between the emotional and the electromagnetic. She is also an apprentice woodworker.

Brandy Garcia Velasquez is currently enrolled at the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University. As a child, she initially took up reading as a hobby, which led to some interest in writing. She is currently majoring in Medical Humanities, with a minor concentration in Spanish.

Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives and contests dominant visual culture through multiple approaches to documentation. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. Sofía has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Annenberg Media Lab at USC and the Flaherty Seminar, and participated in residencies such as Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal). She has exhibited in Documenta Fifteen, the Whitney Museum, the Queens Museum, ifa Galerie and Savvy Contemporary in Berlin, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and galleries like Km 0.2 and Embajada. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local, dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and transdisciplinary practices. She is currently a fellow of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative and the Cisneros Institute at MoMA.

Nadia Huggins (b. 1984, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) is a self-taught visual artist who works primarily with photography. In 2011, Nadia co-founded the visual arts publication ARC Magazine. Her photography was awarded the Festival Caribeen de l’image du Mémorial ACTe Jury Prize in Guadeloupe in 2015, and has been exhibited regionally and internationally. Some of her more notable exhibitions have been: Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, Museum of Latin American Art, California, USA, Jamaica Biennial, at the National Gallery in Kingston, Jamaica, 2017; Small Axe: Caribbean Queer Visualities in Belfast, U.K. in 2016 and Glasgow, U.K. in 2016; Fighting the Currents at Centro de La Imagen, Dominican Republic, 2016; In Another Place, And Here, Victoria, Canada in 2015; CONTACT Photography Festival in 2014: and Wrestling with the Image at Art Museum of the Americas, Washington D.C., U.S.A. in 2011. She currently resides in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Aldi Victoria Jaramillo is a Mexican American artist focused on editorial photography, archive and design. Her inspiration comes from Japanese fashion magazines, classic literature, as well as her family and culture.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist, performer and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-channel films, performance works and multiplatform projects explore familial, neighborly and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories.

She has been an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, and participated in residencies at Amant Foundation (NY), MassMoca (Massachusetts) , Fonderie Darling (Montreal), and Pioneer Works (NY, Upcoming). She has exhibited her work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, MX), TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife (Canary Islands), SeMa (Korea), The Flaherty Seminar, the Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, among other venues, festivals and performance venues internationally. She has taught interdisciplinary performance and film at Bard College, CalArts, and MICA. Natalia was born in Puerto Rico, developing her practice nomadically between Puerto Rico, New York, Montréal, Miami, Los Angeles and Germany, but is currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Bry LeBerthon (they/siya) is a journalist, editor, and poet born in Los Angeles and living in New York City. They graduated from NYU in Spring 2022 with a BA in Journalism and Asian Pacific American Studies, and aspire to amplify the voices of Asian Pacific Americans and other systemically oppressed peoples. As a part of the Philippine diaspora and a bicoastal resident, the dialogue between environmental humanities and migration studies has long been one relevant to their life and work.

Eduardo Lalo is a Puerto Rican poet, novelist, essayist, visual artist, and professor at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Lalo is the author of twelve books ranging from novels to photo essays. His second novel, Simone, has been awarded the prestigious Rómulo Gallégos Prize and was the first of his works to be translated into English.

Rolando André López Torres (b. San Juan, Puerto Rico) writes fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. His work has been included in Orca Literary Journal, Passages North, Off Assignment, and others. He is currently obtaining an MFA in Creative Writing at California College of the Arts. He teaches creative writing seminars through Grub Street Boston, leading workshops on poetry, fiction, and personal essays. His essay “A Name is an Unquiet City” was named a Notable Essay of 2021 by “Best American Essays.” He is a 2022 Puerto Rican Fellow & resident at MASSMOCA.

Eleanor Macagba (they/them) is a sophomore at Gallatin studying decolonial ecologies. They are a Filipino American writer born in New York City and raised between the city and agricultural France. Their identity and experiences translate to their interest in narratives of apocalypse and immigration, and issues of environmental and food justice as a whole. They are currently working with the non-profit One Fair Wage, and hope to continue doing work that supports and uplifts workers, especially workers of color and immigrants.

Gray Cooper Mahaffie (he/him) is a social work student pursuing his Masters in Social Work at University of Washington. He graduated from NYU in the Spring of 2022 with a BS in Social Work and a second major in Social Cultural Analysis. He is currently working at University of Washington Northwest Medical Center working with patients with life experiences ranging from memory problems, elder abuse, psychiatric disabilities, developmental disabilities, homelessness, state neglect, neglect by residential institutions, and substance abuse. He hopes to continue working in the Seattle area as an advocate and a partner of those fighting for the care they need in the healthcare industry.

Trace Miller is a CAS student studying comparative literature and economics. He was the former managing editor of the Washington Square News, NYU’s independent student newspaper. This story was written as the final project for the class Armas Secretas: Leer a Cortázar hoy taught by Lourdes Dávila.

Sophia Moore is a fourth-year student at New York University studying Journalism and Romance Languages, concentrating in Portuguese and Italian, as well as an accelerated Masters candidate in International Relations. She is currently in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on a Boren Scholarship for one year, and continuing work on her senior honors thesis on Cape Verdean diasporic communities.

Kayla Nappi is a graduating senior who studied Spanish and History, with a minor in Teacher Education. All around, she is passionate about education and is an aspiring bilingual childhood educator. Her academic work has focused on childhood bilingualism and Spanish learning. She successfully defended her thesis on elementary school Spanish dual language programs. During her undergraduate career, she served the NYU community through Liberal Studies student government, being a part of the First-Generation, Low-Income Partnership (FLIP), and Students for Sexual Respect (SSR) executive boards. She has worked in University Development throughout her entire undergraduate career supporting the behind-the-scenes of student philanthropy. When she isn’t in class, she is also working with her wonderful kindergarten students through America Reads and her NYCDOE Spanish Dual Language internship. Following her graduate degree at the Teachers College, Columbia University, she will continue to serve in public education as an Abby O’Neill Fellow.

Oscar Naters is a director, choreographer, visual artist, lighting designer, performer and founder of ÍNTEGRO. His work has always been oriented towards experimentalism and integration of the arts, and he bases his creations upon interdisciplinary work dynamics that incorporate media and languages. His recent interest lies in hybrid performances in which the creative process assembles elements from several cultures and different cultural sources. Naters received a Master in Fine Arts from the Institutul de Arte Plastice Nicolae Grigorescu (Bucarest, Romania), and an American Dance Festival Choreography Scholarship at Duke University in North Carolina. He studied at the Armando Robles Godoy Video and Cinematography Workshop (Lima, Peru).

Michel Nieva is an Argentine science fiction writer. He is the recipient of an O.Henry Prize. In 2021, he was named by Granta magazine as one of the best young writers in the Spanish language. He is the author of four books, which he describes as “gauchopunk,” a cyberpunk imagery inspired in the history of violence in Latin America against bodies and territories.

Olivia Ochoa is a junior at Cornell University, double majoring in Spanish and American Studies and minoring in Latino Studies. Originally from Chicago, Illinois, her MexicanAmerican heritage is of great importance to her. Committed to advocacy, activism, and community building, she is involved in the Cornell University Translator-Interpreter Program and is a Posse Foundation Scholar, among other things on campus.

Lorraine Olaya is a senior at NYU studying English with minors in Creative Writing and French. Based in Queens, New York, her work tends to focus on her identities and experiences as a first-generation Colombian-American and native New Yorker. She has been previously published in West 4th Street Review, The Roadrunner Review, Laurel Moon, the Washington Square News, and elsewhere.

Mahir Rahman is a second-year student at the University of Florida, studying Medical Anthropology and Spanish. Growing up in a low-income majority-minority community, as a Bengali American, his experiences, academic pursuits, and skills have led him to writing La femina poderosa to promote ecofeminism and indigenous rights. With future research interests in local migrant and Latin-American communities, Mahir intends to foster community-level discussions surrounding health, education, and social justice. His other publication includes, “Brotherhood, Male-Sexual Assault, and Homophobia,” which holistically analyzes college-sexual scripts.

Arnaldo Rodríguez-Bagué (they, them, theirs) is a researching artist-curator from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Their artistic practice is animated by a documentary gesture that centers itself on researching, appropriating, and transforming colonial, environmental, and techno-scientific representations and material-discursive practices historically enacted on tropical islands across the Caribbean Sea and the Archipelagic Americas into an array of Antillean critical fabulation. These Antillean critical fabulations are mostly articulated through context-specific essay-like installations composed of videos, images, texts, and maps. Rodríguez-Bagué’s art practice’s documentary gesture extends to performance-based curatorial practices that center on documenting, archiving, and commissioning Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latinx performance and visual art practices in order to embark on an exhibition-making practice.

Rodríguez-Bagué holds a BA in Anthropology and a MA in Cultural Management and Administration from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Currently, they are a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). Their doctoral dissertation’s curatorial research platform, titled Caribbean-yet-to-come, explores the speculative relations between performance, materialism, and territory across Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the Archipelagic Americas in a geo-historical time marked by ongoing settler colonialism and climate change. Along with Ramón Rivera-Servera and Pepe Álvarez, they are cocurator of the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative 1 (2018-2020) and 2 (2020-2022).

Daniela Sandoval is a senior at New York University double majoring in Public Policy and Spanish. Born and raised in New York to Mexican immigrants, she is passionate about her Mexican roots. She is one of the Co-Presidents of the Mexican Student Association (MexSA) and is an Engagement Committee Member at the NYU Undergraduate Law Society. Her interests are in law, community building, and poetry.

Vanessa N. Sevilla is a junior at NYU majoring in Spanish and Linguistics as well as minoring in Creative Writing in Spanish at the College of Arts and Science. After showing interest in writing after having taken a creative writing class with the Spanish department, she has continued to write works in Spanish and focused on improving her Spanish and writing skills. Since choosing her major, her main focus has been to translate for people and once having graduated, she wishes to pursue a career in translation or any work that involves using her Spanish skills.

Hannah Siegel is a senior at New York University, majoring in sociology. She is also pursuing minors in French studies, social and cultural analysis, and creative writing. Hannah is a published poet, with previous work appearing in Outrageous Fortune and forthcoming work in brio. She is currently writing her senior research thesis on transgender and gender non-conforming practices in Judaism.

Laura Torres-Rodríguez is an Associate Professor of Latin American Studies at New York University. Her areas of research and teaching include Mexican Literary, Film, and Cultural Studies; Asian-Latin American Studies; Border Studies; Transpacific Ecologies and Poetics; Archipelagic and Decolonial Thinking; Feminist Aesthetics; and Marxist theory. She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia [Transpacific Orientations: Mexican Modernity and the Specter of Asia] (2019). In 2020 the book won the first prize for the LASA Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities and received an honorable mention for the 2019 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. She is the Director of Undergraduate Studies and a team member in the Cross-Currents Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab (2021-22).

Tito Leite (Aurora, Ceará, Brasil, 1980), is a monk and author of the books of poems Digitais do caos (Selo edith, 2016) and Aurora de cedro (7letras, 2019). Dilúvio das almas (Todavia, 2022) is his first novel. He is curator of Gueto magazine.

Carlo Yaguna (Colombia, 1995) is a graduate student in the master of Literature and Creative

Writing in the Universidad del Norte (Barranquilla, Colombia). His collection of short stories Primer cuaderno was published in 2021 thanks to a district award.

Quan Zhou is an author, illustrator, educator, graphic novelist and digital product designer. She studied in Madrid and received her degree in the United Kingdom. She has published her illustrations in El País digital. In 2015 she published her first graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce:Una auto-biografía chino-andaluza (Astiberri). In 2017 she published Andaluchinas por el mundo. In 2018 she illustrated Nuria Labari’s El gran libro de los niños extraordinarios (Editorial Silonia). In 2020 she published her first graphic essay Gente de aquí y Gente de allí. She publishes articles and illustrations in Eldiario.es, El País, Verne and Vogue. She hosts the podcast “Movidas Varias” produced by Plan H Media. In Spring 2024 she will be the KJC Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization at NYU-KJCC.