2026-27 New City Critics

Urban Design Forum and The Architectural League of New York are excited to announce Dean Labowitz, Judy Park Lee, Zoe Voss Lee, Jasmine Liu, Tash Nikol, and Thandi Nyambose 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 — writers, researchers, dancers, book artists, and urban planners among them — will spend the next nine months training a critical gaze on New York City. The fellowship supports critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, networking and public events, and the production of new critical projects. With work published on a dedicated vertical on Urban Omnibus, the New City Critics fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities.

This year’s cohort was selected by committee members Garnette Cadogan, Marianela D’Aprile, Sukjong Hong, Adlan Jackson, Alexandra Lange, and Daphne Lundi. 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.

Dean Labowitz

Dean Labowitz is a writer and urban planner in Brooklyn. They use writing to explain planning processes to other queer and trans people, with the hope that demystifying and recontextualizing the current political moment can expand the collective imagination of what’s possible. Labowitz has had (almost) every kind of job, but lately works as a policy advisor for the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation. They love kites, bulletin boards, and the beach.

Judy Park Lee

Judy Park Lee is a civic designer, researcher, and writer living in Brooklyn. She co-designs public services with the communities they serve and the agencies that deliver them, improving the civic infrastructure that sustains a thriving city. Alongside this practice, she often looks to the fictional and fantastical — fables and fairy tales, imagined worlds and speculative artifacts — to enchant our view of urban life and point us toward more desirable futures. Her work includes the Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders, an archive of mundane yet wondrous bureaucratic objects exhibited in New York City and Brasília.

Zoe Voss Lee

Zoe Voss Lee is a writer, researcher, and urbanist whose practice is rooted in a commitment to shifting the loci of power in city decision making closer to the ground. To her, New York City is a place of paradoxes, and she is drawn to writing about the interstices where political, technological, and economic realities collide with collective possibility. She loves to encounter the city on foot, and through her work as a founding principal of GROUND3D, a community urban practice dedicated to bottom-up planning across the five boroughs. Born and raised in Manhattan, she now calls Brooklyn home.

Jasmine Liu

Jasmine Liu is a writer and editor from the Bay Area. Her work on literature, art, and film has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Reverse Shot, and elsewhere. She looks forward to investigating New York City transit infrastructure and the politics shaping neighborhood-level projects over the course of the fellowship.

Tash Nikol

Tash Nikol is a writer, design researcher, and book artist from the American South and the founder of the independent publishing project Grace Issues. Their work engages archives, materiality, and the environment through craft and community, centering Black and Indigenous traditions of survival, earth-keeping, and ingenuity. In 2026, they received the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award from the School of Visual Arts for their inquiry into the lineage of ironwork in the Gulf South while in the Design Research and Writing Criticism MA program.

Thandi Nyambose

Thandi Nyambose is an urbanist and dancer grounded in a global study of cities. She is interested in everyday movement, and has built a career designing and implementing equitable electric mobility programs across New York (and beyond). Her writing has appeared in Urban Omnibus, and she holds a Master of Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was born in Boston, and has lived in New York since 2014.

What the Fellows Are Reading

Dean Labowitz is currently reading “Movement Politics from the Inside Out: What Can We Achieve Politically If We Refuse to Fear The Prison?” by Cheryl Rivera for Lux Magazine, and Time Also Will Make It Interesting: Selected Journals by Red Jordan Arobateau.

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Judy Park Lee is currently reading Houses of Ravicka by Renee Gladman, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. 

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Zoe Voss Lee is currently reading East of Flatbush, North of Love: An Ethnography of Home by Danielle Brown, and Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco.

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Jasmine Liu is currently reading Septology by Jon Fosse, The Stories of John Cheever, and Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran.

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Tash Nikol is currently reading My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andrée Blouin, Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin, The Deep by Rivers Solomon, and Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks.

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Thandi Nyambose is currently reading High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing by Ben Auster, and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez.

About Us

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. 

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. The League’s online publication, Urban Omnibus, is 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. 

Supporters

New City Critics was launched through the founding support of Joan Copjec, in honor of Michael Sorkin. The fellowship is made possible through the lead support of the Mellon Foundation, with additional ongoing support from Critical Minded, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Paul Goldberger, Carol and Mark Willis, LEVENBETTS, Cathleen McGuigan and David Berridge, Nat Oppenheimer, Karen Stein, Calvin Tsao, and Siqi Zhu.

We are also grateful to the founding donors of the program: Stella Betts, Joan Copjec, Vincent Chang, Critical Minded, Rosalie Genevro, Mario Gooden, Paul Goldberger, Graham Foundation, Tami Hausman, Mary Margaret Jones, Astrid Lipka & Lyn Rice, Thom Mayne, Zach Mortice & Maria Speiser, Eric Owen Moss, Nat Oppenheimer, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Moshe Safdie, Karen Stein, Calvin Tsao, Mark Willis & Carol Willis, and Siqi Zhu.

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, contact Daniel McPhee, daniel@urbandesignforum.org.

In Memory Of

This program is founded in honor of Michael Sorkin, a longstanding Board Member of the Urban Design Forum and Architectural League. His death in March 2020 was a huge loss to the world of thinking and action in architecture and the shaping of landscapes and cities. He was a spectacularly good writer, fearless and funny, and adept at exposing and explaining the systems of power that create the built environment. We hope to honor one of his most important legacies: his generosity and care in encouraging the development of young thinkers and writers and designers around the world.

Program Identity by Manuel Miranda; Headshots provided by Fellows