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63 FIFTH AVENUE,
NY NY 10003

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography & Social Thought at the New School incubates advanced transdisciplinary research and practice at the intersection of social theory and design and fosters dialogue on related themes across the university.

Alyssa Velazquez and Theodossis Issaias

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Alyssa Velazquez and Theodossis Issaias

  • GIDEST 63 5th Avenue New York, NY, 10003 United States (map)

After school

Seminar attendees should prepare by reading the text linked here.

During their GIDEST presentation, Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez will reflect on public education as a contested civic infrastructure, shaped by long histories of disinvestment, segregation, and bureaucratic control. Approaching schools as shared public things—objects that mediate collective life—they consider how these institutions hold, and at times fracture, forms of belonging, responsibility, and conflict. At a moment when school closures, consolidations, censorship, and austerity are routinely framed as technical or managerial decisions, the project asks how these processes operate as political instruments that reorganize the city, redistribute risk, and leave enduring social afterlives.

Through after school, a long-term, situated research practice grounded in Pittsburgh, they examine schools as deeply contradictory spaces: sites of sorting and discipline, alongside spaces of play, care, refusal, and collective struggle. Unfolding through an exhibition, a book, and a series of public fora, the work tends to the right to public education and rethinks social reproduction, civic responsibility, and the conditions through which learning, solidarity, and political imagination are continuously rehearsed in common.

Theodossis Issaias is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art and Professor of Practice at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter.

He is co-founder of FATURA Collaborative, a research and design practice working across ecology, territory, and the domestic, in collaboration with geographers, legal scholars, and community organizations. Their work has been presented at the Venice Biennale and the Benaki Museum, among others.

Alyssa Velazquez is an assistant curator at Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Sinister Wisdom, Material Intelligence, and Burnaway. Past residencies include Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices 2024, City Books Writer-in-Residence, and as a Freshworks Artist at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA. Velazquez was awarded the 2026 Center for Craft Curatorial Fellowship. She is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

Velazquez holds an MA in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from the Bard Graduate Center.

Earlier Event: April 3
Manjari Mahajan