Our Team
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Molly Garfinkel (she/her)
As Co-Director of City Lore and the Director of City Lore’s Place Matters program, Molly Garfinkel leads initiatives related to cultural resource management, public history, exhibition curation, public education, historic preservation, and traditional arts presentation. Her research explores Western and non-Western building traditions, theories of cultural landscapes, cultural policy, and histories of urbanism and city planning. Molly has published articles in the University of Oregon’s CultureWork broadside, Voices, The Journal of New York Folklore, University of Pennsylvania’s LA+ Design Journal, the Journal of American Folklore, and with the National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Research & Analysis. Her research into CETA’s impact on the cultural workforce began in 2017, and in 2021 she co-curated the exhibition, ART/WORK: How the Government-Funded CETA Jobs Program Put Artists to Work, with Jodi Waynberg. Garfinkel is a member of the NY State Board for Historic Preservation and a co-recipient of the 2024 NY State Historic Preservation Award for successful nomination of New York City’s Puerto Rican casitas to the NY State and National Registers of Historic Places. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia.
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Jodi Waynberg (she/her)
Jodi is a curator and arts administrator based in New York City. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Artists Alliance Inc, a Lower East Side non-profit dedicated to supporting the careers of emerging and under-recognized artists and curators through residencies in the LES Studio Program, exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, and commissioned projects through Public Works. Previous curatorial projects include The Real Estate Show, What Next: 2014 (New York, 2014), Peekskill Project 6 (Peekskill, 2015), “Shadow Cabinet” A Loyal Opposition Response (New York, 2017), Keep Me Nearby (New York, 2019), and ART/WORK: How the Government-Funded CETA Jobs Program Put Artists to Work (New York, 2021). In collaboration with historian Molly Garfinkel, her research focuses on the 1973 federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), one of the most significant post-war government legislations creating paid employment opportunities for culture workers that had a consequential impact on the nation as well as individual cities' and states’ arts ecologies. Jodi’s curatorial work has been featured in The New Yorker, WNYC, Artforum, Artnet, and Art in America, among others. Jodi has served as a visiting critic and speaker for The National Arts Club, El Museo del Barrio, New York University, Hunter College MFA Program, The New School, Pratt University, and Flux Factory. She serves on the executive committees of Essex Market Vendor Association and the LES Partnership. Jodi began her career in San Francisco as the Associate Curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the History of Art and Visual Culture program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Photo: Alex Aptsiauri)
Our Organizations
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Founded in 1985, City Lore’s mission is to foster New York City – and America’s – living cultural heritage through education and public programs in service of cultural equity and social justice. City Lore encompasses a Lower East Side gallery space, performances, lectures, the People’s Hall of Fame, a POEMobile that projects poems onto walls and buildings, and programs throughout the five boroughs.
We document, present, and advocate for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. We work in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history; preservation; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each, we seek to further cultural equity and model a better world with projects as dynamic and diverse as New York City itself.
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Artists Alliance Inc. (AAI) is a New York City-based nonprofit dedicated to fostering forward-thinking and experimental artistic practices. Through artist-centered programming—including funded residencies, paid exhibition opportunities, and public engagement initiatives—we provide a free and accessible platform to produce, experience, and explore contemporary art.
Rooted in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a longstanding epicenter for creative experimentation and cultural diversity, AAI supports emerging and underrepresented artists and curators while advocating for art-making that challenges how we experience ourselves and our communities. At the heart of our curatorial vision is a commitment to sustaining diverse artistic voices over time while remaining responsive to the intersectional social, cultural, and economic contexts in which art is created.
Since our founding in 1999 by a collective of local artists, AAI has operated with the core principles of counter-institutional and alternative art movements—prioritizing fundamental resources such as time, space, creative support, and funding for artists whom mainstream institutions often marginalize. By sustaining a space for risk-taking, critical dialogue, and artistic experimentation, we aim to empower artists and audiences alike, challenging conventional structures of cultural production and access.