Workshop and Interactive Talk | Pay It Forward Volley by Hard to Read and SoiL Thornton

Ariana Faye Allensworth is an artist, designer, and cultural worker from San Francisco whose practice explores interwoven histories of land, power, displacement, and Black spatial memory. Since 2015, she has been a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a volunteer-run data visualization and storytelling collective documenting gentrification, dispossession, and housing resistance. In 2017, she helped found the collective’s New York City chapter. She is currently developing a site-specific curatorial project in Allensworth, California, a historic Black agrarian community in the Central Valley where her ancestors helped build the state’s only Black Freedom Colony in 1908.

Bench Ansfield is a historian of housing, racial capitalism, and twentieth-century U.S. cities. They are an Assistant Professor of History at Temple University and the author of Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City (W. W. Norton), which examines the wave of arson for profit that coursed through the Bronx and scores of U.S. cities in the 1970s. The book is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History and the winner of the LA Times Book Award for History, and it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2025 by the New York Times. Bench is also a longtime member of the veteran transformative justice organization Philly Stands Up.

Fiona Alison Duncan is an author, curator, and the founding host of Hard to Read, a literary social practice. Her books include Ex-Best Friends (2025), Pippa Garner: Act Like You Know Me (2023), and Exquisite Mariposa (2019), winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. Duncan is a founding member of the Estate of Pippa Garner. Hard to Read, Duncan's voice-driven social practice, was founded in 2016 to animate the literary arts, putting them in conversation with other fields from activism to fashion and performance. Originally from Canada, she is based between New York and Los Angeles.

Matt Hilvers is an artist from Chicago based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Gladstone (New York, 2026 and 2024); The Frame (New York, 2024); Jeffrey Stark (New York, 2020); Kunstverein Munich (Munich, 2020); Karma (New York, 2019); and Soft Opening (London, 2018). Recent performances at the Julia Stoschek Foundation (Los Angeles, 2026), the Center for Contemporary Arts Berlin (Berlin, 2025) and Performance Space (New York, 2022). Hilvers received his BA from Columbia College of Chicago and his MA from The Royal College of Art in London, UK. 

Marc Norman is the Larry & Klara Silverstein Chair in Real Estate Development & Investment, and Associate Dean of the Schack Institute of Real Estate at New York University. A renowned urban planner and a veteran in the field of community development and finance, Norman also is the founder of Ideas and Action, a consulting firm. Before coming to NYU in July 2022, he was an Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan where he also served as Faculty Director of the Weiser Center for Real Estate at the university’s Ross School of Business. A former Loeb Fellow, Norman also has extensive experience in the public, private, and non-profit sectors and has worked collaboratively to develop or finance over 2,000 units totaling more than $400 million in total development costs.

Brontez Purnell has been making music since the ’90s. He started in The Social Lies, a hardcore Afro-punk duo in Alabama in his teens, and later Gravy Train!!! He then went on to lead his long-running project The Younger Lovers and, most recently, the Brontez Purnell Trio. Based out of Oakland, CA, Purnell is also a writer, dancer, filmmaker, and choreographer (The Brontez Purnell Dance Company). He is the author of eight critically lauded books, including Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse, Since I Laid My Burden Down, 100 Boyfriends, and more. 

Cameron Rowland lives and works in Queens, New York. They have had solo exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation, Beacon, New York; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Établissement d’en face, Brussels; Artists Space, New York; and Maxwell Graham Gallery, New York. Rowland’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Secession, Vienna; Kunstmuseum Basel; 33rd São Paulo Biennial (2018); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum of Modern Art, New York. Rowland received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.

SoiL Thornton lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include: 8 Hours of Rest, The Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2026); candidate screening methods, Progetto, Lecce (2024); Choosing Suitor, Secession, Vienna (2023); and Decomposition Evaluation, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2022). 

Betty Yu is an award-winning socially engaged multimedia artist, photographer, filmmaker and activist born and raised in NYC. She is a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade, a cultural collective using art to advance anti-displacement fights. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum,Margaret Mead Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival's Interactive Showcase, NY Historical Society, Museum of the City of NY, Tenement Museum, Artists Space/ISP Whitney Museum, 2019 BRIC Biennial, Apexart,Pace University Art Gallery, Transmitter Gallery, 601 Artspace, Five Myles, Open Source Galleryand Squeaky Wheel Film and Media Art Center. Currently, she is the Deputy Director of Hunter’s MFA Integrated Media Arts program and is a Professor of emerging media and social practice.