Ana Puente Flores is now in her third year at CUNY Law School, working with the Water Protector Lawyers collective, and has founded the Mazorca Collective. “The Mazorca Collective is a community of immigrants, Indigenous Peoples, and individuals from the Global South dedicated to reclaiming their ancestral memory. In a community garden in Queens we plan seeds to make herbal medicine, teach children about the earth’s cycles, have belssingway ceremonies for the moms of our community. By strenthening sovereignty through native seeds like corn and tobacco, we regain balance with the land we inhabit and thrive on.”

Christelle Jasmin (she/her) is now an American Studies doctoral student at Rutgers University-Newark. Her research utilizes a black feminist lens to theoretically and materially investigate intersections of critical animal studies and carceral studies. Her work is interested in the ways captivity frames the animalization of blackness and the racialization, or blackening, of animalsChristelle typically spends her summers working closely with THE KITE, an organization that offers politically informed creative writing courses to incarcerated students of New York City, largely working on projects related to college access and restorative justice. Currently, Christelle is preparing for examinations in the fields of Environmental Studies /Critical Animal Studies, 19th-20th century African American History, and Black Feminist Thought and Praxis. Christelle is a queer first-generation Haitian-American femme based in Brooklyn, New York.

Marie Medjine Antoine, working with Dr. Sheriden Booker, recognized for her work as a cultural worker with Rise St. James in Louisiana. Article HERE “Antoine couples a degree in sociology and Black studies with her passion for the arts. They advocate for divestment from polluting industries and investment in community-centered initiatives. “There really does need to be a divestment in the sense that these industries are funding the schools, the local economy, our politicians,” Antoine says. “It’s creating an environment where without these industries, we can’t survive.”

Anushani Alugarajah assumes the position of Executive Director of Adayaalam, local think tank in Sri Lanka with a focus on research amongst female ex-combatants, recently producing graphic stories from the 2009 Genocide (Mullaivaikal Resistance HERE). Her first published nonfiction appeared in Adi Magazine

Dalia Griñan is a PhD student in the Rutgers New Brunswick History department with concentrations in Atlantic/Diaspora and Gender histories. She graduated from City College of New York with a B.A. in Black Studies and Gender Studies in January 2019 and has worked at the intersections of anti-sexual and gender-based violence and anti-racism. Her proposed dissertation project applies methods from critical historiography and Black Feminist theory to study the experiences of Black women in nineteenth-century Cuba and Jamaica. 

Sharon Shaji was the Restorative Justice Coordinator at the New York Peace Institute, and received a J.D. from Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law cum laude in 2023, where she was head de novo editor of the Cardozo Law Review, a Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, a Public Service Scholar, and an E. Nathaniel Gates Scholarship recipient and ambassador. She received a B.A. summa cum laude from Macaulay Honors College at City College in 2018.  Ms. Shaji is the author of “The Due Process Owed to Noncitizens: Standardizing the Burden in § 1226(a) Bond Hearings with the Help of Hernandez-Lara and Velasco Lopez,” 44 Cardozo L. Rev. 1635 (2023).

Talia Arif was a leader in DRUM’s work with the Dignity in Schools Campaign, and worked with students and administration at Newtown High School to spearhead the setting up of a peer mediation and restorative justice program in order to change school discipline policies from zero tolerance towards alternatives such as restorative justice and peer mediation in all NYC high schools.

Janessa Waiters was a fellow, and the Fellowship Director at Beyond Identity before becoming a Rising Power Fellow at Collective Power for Reproductive Justice. Her zine chronicling her journey in care work will be released soon.

Rosaury Valenzua joined the Ford Foundation in 2023 after working for Safe Horizon, a New York City nonprofit that provides advocacy and support to survivors of abuse. Before this, she was an elementary school English teacher in South Korea. She was also an intern for Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, a Brooklyn nonprofit that provides immigration help and assistance.

*Note: for security reasons current work of our fellows working the Global South are not posted here.