Marisa Lemorande is Deputy Director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Marisa brings to the Institute many years of experience working with nonprofit, community, and cultural organizations concerned with social justice. By building robust alliances and developing effective communications and fundraising strategies, Marisa has shown leadership and creativity in supporting activists, artists, and scholars, both in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California. A graduate of UCLA, Marisa has served as Program Manager of the UCLA Center for Culture and Health. In this capacity, she managed large federally funded projects, including one of the most diverse and successful programs the NIH has supported over a 25-year grant cycle. Most recently, Marisa held the position of Director of Alumni Relations and Social Media for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. In this role, she implemented a dramatic expansion of the school’s alumni networks and led the most successful crowdfunding campaign in UCLA’s history. Marisa joins the Institute with a sharp analysis of socio-spatial inequality and a passion for community outreach, public scholarship, and policy advocacy.

Liya Kunnathuparambil is the Administrative Coordinator of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Having worked at UCLA since 2015, Liya has supported a vast array of programs and initiatives, while building and strengthening working relationships across campus. She has assisted in the development and coordination of national and international colloquia, while also facilitating the production of special events such as a weeklong public lecture series featuring Noam Chomsky.

Before joining the Institute, she was the Chair’s Executive Assistant at the UCLA Royce Humanities Group where she worked closely with French and Francophone Studies, Italian, Germanic Languages and Scandinavian Section, and the Digital Humanities program. In addition to providing direct support to the Chair, she administered all aspects of faculty recruitment, from managing applications through UC Recruit, to arranging travel and itineraries for prospective candidates’ campus visits. She also maintained departmental websites and listservs and managed the onboarding and visa process for visiting scholars and faculty. When serving as the Department Coordinator at UCLA’s Department of Linguistics, Liya managed day-to-day office operations and provided support to both Graduate and Undergraduate Student Affairs Officers by organizing the annual course schedule and being part of the team that coordinated large-scale departmental events such as the Open House for Prospective Students and Undergraduate Commencement Reception.

Liya earned her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at UCLA and has spent time volunteering with the YWCA’s Domestic Violence Program.

Zach Mondesire is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Anthropology, specializing in sociocultural anthropology. His dissertation project explores the independence of South Sudan, the newest country in the world, as an opportunity to think about the disappointments of post-colonial sovereignty, Pan-Africanism, and racial formation in Africa. His project has taken shape over multiple years of studying, teaching, and living in North/East Africa and the Middle East.

Rosanna Simons is a queer femme performer, translator, and scholar from the warm waters of Miami, Florida. She resides in Yanga AKA Los Angeles, the ancestral & unceded territory of the Tongva peoples. Rosanna’s intention is to cultivate queer & decolonial research, pedagogy, and creative practice. As a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Department of Chicana/o & Central American Studies, her interests include settler colonialism & decolonization, migration & choreographed movement, surveillance & documentation, queer temporalities & performance.

Rosanna’s current research examines state surveillance against undocumented racialized migrants in the United States. Invoking frameworks of queer of color performance, settler colonialism, and governmentality, she develops a theory called the documentation regimes and argues that it has evolved as a settler colonial technology of control to surveil racialized migrants in past, present, and future temporalities. Engaging queer migrant artists, Rosanna interprets how their performance, sculpture, and video artworks conjure pathways to protection, freedom of movement, and joy – beyond the state’s view.

Rosanna is a 2019-20 Sawyer Seminar Graduate Fellow. She is co-founder of the bozalta collective and co-editor of the online journal bozalta: arts, activism, scholarship. Rosanna has performed in Los Angeles, CA at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Hammer Museum, Highways Performance Space, Plaza de la Raza, Art Share LA, and Visitor Welcome Center; in Brooklyn, NY at Wild Embeddings Gallery; in Miami FL at The Club; in Tulsa, OK at Living Arts of Tulsa; and in New Orleans, LA at Art Klub and Ashé Cultural Arts Center. She holds an MA from New York University.

Veronika Zablotsky is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sawyer Seminar Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She completed her Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June 2019 with emphases in Politics, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, and History of Consciousness. Her research is focused on the politics of nation-state borders, migration, and forced displacement in global perspective. She is currently working on a book project that retraces the circulation of racial logics of property and dispossession between South Asia, North America, and the Middle East through a study of transregional displacement and political imaginaries in the Armenian diaspora. Her forthcoming publication “Unsanctioned Agency: Risk Profiling, Racialized Masculinity, and the Making of Europe’s ‘Refugee Crisis’” analyzes how visual technologies of risk profiling on the basis of age, race, religion, and sexuality produced the figure of the “single male refugee” as a new limit-case of humanitarian discourse.

Veronika presented her scholarship at numerous conferences, most recently as a founding member of the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania, and has had visiting affiliations at Columbia University, CUNY, San Francisco State University, and the American University of Armenia (AUA). She also served as a Research Affiliate of the International Solidarity Action Research Network (ISARN), an autonomous network of activist scholars engaged in the study of cross-border solidarity in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. She is the recipient of several awards, including an Andrew W. Mellon Public Humanities Fellowship in 2018, a Calouste Gulbenkian Armenian Studies Scholarship in 2017, and an Excellence in Teaching Award for outstanding mentorship at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2016. As a co-founder of the Berlin-based feminist of color collective Interstice, she co-edited the German-language anthology Decolonize the City! (2017) and co-authored a number of peer-reviewed articles on racial justice in Germany, where she grew up as a first-generation immigrant. For the past decade, she has organized with abolitionist, queer of color, and migrant justice movements across Europe and North America.