The Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion celebrated the Class of 2022’s LGBTQIA+ graduates at the third annual Pratt Lavender Graduation. Creative director Rafael Castello, MS Communications Design ’08, who is a passionate supporter of LGBT elders through SAGE USA, was the alumni speaker.
The Daily Hub
A roundup of ideas and projects from around the Institute
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Associate Professor in the School of Information John Lauermann published an article “Mapping super-gentrification in large US cities, 1990–2020” in Urban Geography with his co-authors.
![A man with brown hear wearing a button up shirt smiles at the camera. He is standing in front of a blurred green background of trees.]()
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Jen Pawol, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’00, became the first woman to umpire a regular season game in Major League Baseball.
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Michelle Towse, BFA Photography ’91, was interviewed by Little Black Book about her career in film and what it takes to succeed. “Creative problem solving relies on the same principles regardless of implementation. The language is the same; sometimes, you just need to learn a few new vocabulary words.”
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Izzy Chavez, BFA Digital Arts (2-D Animation) ’24, had their work, Adam and Eve in the Kingdom of Animals, screened at the 2025 Annecy Festival.
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Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Information Bill Levay, MS Library and Information Science ’15, spoke at the Creative Operations Summit in New York, sharing how the New York Philharmonic Archives—and the digitized historical assets in our DAMS—play a vital role in marketing, storytelling, and audience engagement at the Philharmonic.
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Adjunct Associate Professor of Photography Matthew Leifheit was featured in The New York Times for his sound installation No Time at All, which played this summer at the New York City AIDS Memorial. The piece is composed of VHS tapes of gay men’s choruses made at the height of the AIDS crisis. “One of the most powerful ways to encounter an artwork is if you’re not expecting to have the experience of art,” said Leifheit of the installation in the West Village.
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Assistant Professor of Foundation Oasa DuVerney’s exhibition of works on paper, Into the Shining Dark at Welancora Gallery, was reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. “Bring[ing] together nine of DuVerney’s new and recent works on paper which together present her attentiveness to Black womanhood, lineage, community, and survival.”
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Gabriela Mestriner, MID ’26, was on the winning team at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) 2025 Wanted Design Schools Workshop. Students were “tasked with imagining innovative, systems-based interventions that could reshape how New Yorkers grow, access, prepare, and share food,” writes Laura A Des Enfants in Core 77.
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Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, MFA Fine Arts ’83, was featured in the “Overlooked” section of The New York Times. “Rotimi Fani-Kayode is, for me, part of a constituency of historically important figures who take the camera as a lens of liberation that they offer on the world,” Mark Sealy said. “They’re not necessarily about photography; they’re about that lens. They’re about a way of seeing.”
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