Urban Design Forum and The Architectural League of New York announce the 2024-2025 New City Critics Fellows.
We are excited to name Ellie Botoman, Ekemini Ekpo, Daphne Lundi, Anoushka Mariwala, Philip Poon, and Shirt as the newest cohort of New City Critics, a fellowship program empowering new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge how we design and develop our cities.
Our fellows this year – architects, journalists, artists, a city planner and a rapper among them — will be training a critical gaze on New York City over the next nine months. The fellowship supports six critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, networking, and the production of new critical projects. Through work to be published on a new vertical on Urban Omnibus, the fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities. The program is supported by an advisory board of leading writers, editors, and cultural producers — Garnette Cadogan, Dario Calmese, Alexandra Lange, Sukjong Hong, and Carolina A. Miranda — who also served on the jury to select the cohort. The program will be led by Ming Lin, Program Coordinator at Urban Design Forum, and Mariana Mogilevich, Editor in Chief of Urban Omnibus.
Sign up for updates from New City Critics here.
Ellie Botoman
Ellie Botoman is an environmental art historian based in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of NYU’s Experimental Humanities and Museum Studies programs where they researched the impact of climate change on cultural heritage preservation and possibilities for multisensory and multispecies collaboration in the design of exhibitions and institutional architectures. They have held roles at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Center for Architecture, and are involved in art-based environmental advocacy in Miami through Bridge initiative. Her art criticism and poetry has appeared in The Long Now Foundation and The Brooklyn Rail.
Ekemini Ekpo
Ekemini Ekpo is a Brooklyn-based journalist, researcher, and theater artist. All of these practices are different means to the same ends — catalyzing intellectual and emotional inquiry in others, and indulging her own. She is a recent participant of the Vox Media Writers Workshop, and a current resident actor at Mercury Store, a theater development lab in Gowanus. Also important to know: she was born and raised in Texas, and her people are from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.
Daphne Lundi
Daphne Lundi is an urban planner, policymaker, and artist. Her work has been shaped by the impacts of climate change. First and foremost as the child of Haitian immigrants, as a native New Yorker who experienced Hurricane Sandy, and as a former NYC public servant working land use policy in coastal communities in Brooklyn and citywide extreme heat policy. Most recently Daphne was a Public Scholar at The Moynihan Center at CCNY where her work explored the intersections between sci-fi and city planning, including developing the course “Reading the City Through Sci-Fi”, an urban studies course taught through sci-fi media.
Anoushka Mariwala
Anoushka Mariwala is an architectural designer, researcher and writer from Mumbai. In her work, she is interested in considering the body as site, producer and interpreter of place and object. She works primarily with paper and textile. Most recently, she has been thinking about land history and property formation and its entanglements with high resolution. She received a Master in Architecture from Columbia GSAPP and a BA in Architecture and Urban Studies from Princeton University.
Philip Poon
Philip Poon is an architect, artist, and writer. Informed by his background as a Chinese-American from New York City, his work as a registered architect, and his engagement with art and activist movements in Chinatown, his projects materialize issues at the intersection of space, race, and class. As Dimes Square Tourist, he leads walking tours of Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Shirt
Shirt is a multiform artist born and based in New York City. Working across writing, rap music, performance, video, photography, painting and sculpture, Shirt’s practice becomes a bricolage of language, sound and object wherein notions of authorship and publics are blurred to create a more expansive readership. Exploring modes of social study and critique through a deep investment in radical imagination and found practices, Shirt’s work often considers ways of unlearning and seeks to propose questions such as: Who gets to be called an artist? What is considered art?
Supporters
This year’s program would not be possible without the support of Critical Minded, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Joan Copjec, Paul Goldberger, Mark & Carol Willis, Nat Oppenheimer and Mary Margaret Jones.
We are also grateful to the founding donors of the program: Critical Minded, Mark & Carol Willis, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Graham Foundation, Thom Mayne, Moshe Safdie, Joan Copjec, Paul Goldberger, Eric Owen Moss, Zach Mortice & Maria Speiser, Tami Hausman, Stella Betts, Mary Margaret Jones, Nat Oppenheimer, Deborah Berke, Zach Mortice, Calvin Tsao, Rosalie Genevro, Mario Gooden, Lyn Rice & Astrid Lipka, Karen Stein and Vincent Chang.
Urban Design Forum programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
To learn more about supporting New City Critics, please contact Daniel McPhee, daniel@urbandesignforum.org.
About Us
The Architectural League of New York supports critically transformative work in the allied fields that shape the built environment. As a vital, independent forum, the League stimulates thinking, debate, and action on today’s converging crises of racism, inequity, and climate change, in service of a more livable and just world. Urban Omnibus is The Architectural League’s online publication dedicated to observing, understanding, and shaping the city. Urban Omnibus raises new questions, illuminates diverse perspectives, and documents creative projects to advance the collective work of citymaking.
Urban Design Forum connects and inspires New Yorkers to design, build and care for a better city. We are a member-powered organization of 1,000+ civic leaders committed to a more just future for our city. We believe the built environment—our neighborhoods, buildings, public spaces and infrastructure—shapes our city’s health, culture and economy. We bring together New Yorkers of diverse backgrounds and experiences to learn, debate, and design a vibrant city for all.