Clara Amenyo

Clara joined CUP in 2012 as a Program Manager. Prior to joining CUP she was an Analyst with Barclays Capital. Clara has a Bachelor of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and enjoys doing yoga and dance in her free time.

Pema Domingo-Barker

Pema is the Program Assistant at CUP. Previously she has worked in community based organizations stateside and abroad in the fields of art, design, and education. Pema attended the University of Washington and the University of the Arts London, and was a Public Allies NY fellow.

Christine Gaspar

Christine is the Executive Director of CUP. She has over ten years of experience in community design. Prior to joining CUP, she was Assistant Director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio in Biloxi, Mississippi, where she provided architectural design and city planning services to low-income communities recovering from Hurricane Katrina. She holds Masters in Architecture and in City Planning from MIT, and a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University.

She’s been a CUP fan since 2001, and a staff member since 2009.

Jeff Kasper

joined CUP as an intern and Weston Scholar from The City College of New York. He studies art and the social sciences, with an independent focus on the perceptions and aesthetics of cities. He is interested in exploring how visual media can illuminate obscured shared values among diverse groups of urban dwellers. Jeff frequently engages in various design, writing, research, curatorial, pedagogical, and public projects. He currently is a contributor to The City Atlas of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, as well as GreenspaceNYC. His work has been featured at venues including the Art Directors Club, Phoenix Design Museum, FIGMENT, PS Project Space, among others.

Lize Mogel

Lize Mogel is an artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography. She has mapped public parks in Los Angeles, future territorial disputes in the Arctic, and wastewater economies in NYC. She is co-editor of the book/map collection “An Atlas of Radical Cartography”. Her individual and collaborative work has been shown internationally including at the Sharjah and Pittsburgh Biennials, in “Greater New York” and “Experimental Geography”. She is also a grantwriter and development consultant, fundraising for art and social justice organizations for almost a decade. She has worked for CUP since August 2005.

Valeria Mogilevich

Valeria is the Program Director at CUP. She has been with CUP over five years creating design projects that break down the city’s complex systems to help people better participate in shaping the city. In partnership with high school teachers and teaching artists, Valeria has produced over a dozen experiential youth education projects. These projects have been featured in such venues as the Netherlands Architecture Institute and MoMA and such publications as City Limits, the New York Times, and Design Observer. She has presented on project-based learning and community-engaged youth education at the New Museum, NYU’s Steinhardt School, The Cooper-Hewitt, Pratt Institute, plenty of NYC public high schools, and educational institutions from Philly to Toronto. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in Modern Culture and Media. Valeria is also an independent film programmer and has worked with the Margaret Mead Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and Cinema Tropical. 

Maniza Pritila

Maniza is a student at Brooklyn College Academy. She is an intern at CUP and participated in the “$ Breakdown” Urban Investigation in the fall of 2010.  

Mark Torrey

Mark Torrey is CUP’s Program Manager for the Community Education programs: Making Policy Public and the Envisioning Development Toolkits. Previously he spent a good long while working as an Information Technology Specialist at the Harvard Graduate School of Design but then decided to firm up his understanding of the built environment by getting a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University. While at Cornell he completed a number of internships and projects focused on GIS and urban design including work for the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio and the Cornell Cooperative Extension. He wears his pants in the Highwater fashion, which most of the CUP staff find to be ridiculous, but he likes that it keeps his pants from getting caught in his bike chain.