Art, Community, and Self-Sustainability Conference 2026

Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo (she/her) is a Colombian artist, technologist, and educator. She is Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design. Cynthia’s research, through the DEED Lab, focuses on the role designers and entrepreneurs play in either extracting money and value from craft communities, or in co-creating sustainable futures with artisans and their children. Her artwork, centered around themes of time and transience, has been internationally exhibited and performed, including at The Kitchen, UCLA Hammer Museum, and the Museums of Modern Art in Bogotá and Medellín (Colombia). A Fulbright Scholar, Cynthia has lectured internationally on design, education, technology, and social practice, including a TEDx talk on redesigning higher education. Cynthia received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá) and a Master’s in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s ITP. She lives in one of Brooklyn’s smallest neighborhoods – Greenwood Heights.

Lyann Arias is an education and mental health professional with over a decade of experience supporting students and communities across K-12 and higher education. Her work focuses on helping individuals build confidence, navigate academic and personal challenges, and access opportunities that support long-term growth and well-being.

Lyann serves as a Youth Advocate Counselor with the Parsons Scholars Program at Parsons School of Design, where she supports young artists in exploring their creativity while developing social-emotional and academic skills. She also currently serves as Director of the TRIO SSS Pathways to Success Program at Lehman College, where she works closely with first-generation and historically underserved students to support academic success, leadership development, and college persistence.

Lyann is passionate about the connection between education, mental health, and the arts, and believes creative and cultural experiences can play an important role in fostering resilience, self-expression, and community connection.

Jin Zheng is a Brooklyn-based tattoo artist specializing in fine-line, nature, and Asian-inspired designs. Their work blends precision with storytelling, focusing on flow, composition, and skin as a living canvas.

Nadia Williams is full-time faculty at Parsons. She has collaborated on a range of university-wide social justice and access initiatives, and is continually impressed by the continuum of students who hold The New School accountable to social justice values. Her creative practice involves creating textiles as a practice of freedom, healing, and an exploration of her roots in México, Panamá and Jamaica. Among the work she has learned the most from has been collectively developing a framework for the Parsons Scholars Program through which the experiences of people of color from low income backgrounds are centered in the exploration of art, design and social justice. Nadia’s life was deeply moved by the people and culture of Mexico while living there for five years, and she’s excited to collaborate on creating the opportunity for PSP alumni to grow within a framework grounded in Mexican knowledge.

Shormi Uddin is a painter, Teaching Artist and Queens native. Her work deals with the patterns of life. Whether through design, routine or tradition – she is interested in what makes us comfortable and conflicted in what we inherit from family, land and culture. She wishes to express the energies that are changing and waiting to be moved, energies that exist around us and inside of us at the same time. The scenes and patterns present in her work are influenced by moments in quiet observation and worldly matters; when physical distance between people does not feel so empty. She is influenced by architecture, designs and scapes that have existed or repeated for centuries.

Currently a Teaching Artist with School Programs at the MoMA and HeyCurated, she teaches filmmaking and illustration to NYC teens with the Summer Youth Employment Program’s Project Based Learning Curriculum. She previously worked as a Museum Educator at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan for 6 years.

Priscilla Villacres is a practicing artist born and raised in Queens, NY. She is a first generation American citizen who received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City. Professionally, she works as a luxury glass, metal and plastic engraver.

Her work spans themes of family, self, class, and identity. She often works with her family archives, leaning on her Colombian and Ecuadorian roots. Found objects juxtapose drawings, engravings, paintings, and photographs. She builds altars, and displays chucherías and “trash.”

Villacres’ practice is largely based on archiving–preserving and building–and self portraiture. She pulls from her lived experiences as well as the lived experiences of her family matriarchs. She is working to break cycles, honor, and preserve the narratives of those she holds close to her, as well as her own.

Her work takes on a very kitsch and almost fully maximalist aesthetic, which borrows from immigrant and working class homes. The work is influenced by a particularly gendered sense of domesticity, which is central to her practice.

SAKINA PITTS| Principal
Transformative Leader| Change Agent| Principal Barrrzzz

Sakina Pitts is a fearless, thoughtful, and bold leader. She learned these
very principles growing up in Newark, NJ and being educated by the
Newark Board of Education’s public schools. Sakina has been the proud
appointed Principal of Chancellor Avenue School located in the South
Ward of Newark “Brick City” for five years prior to her becoming the
appointed Principal of Newark School of Fashion and Design in 2021. She
is an active member of the Educational Coalition “Off School Grounds”
(OSG) since its inception and collaborates weekly with like-minded School
Leaders around the country who are dedicated to closing equity gaps and
creating real change in the school-wide communities they are servant
leaders of across the nation. Principal Pitts is also an engaging public
speaker who is passionate about infusing Hip Hop culture into education.
She uses rap as an artform to connect the learning to the students’
sensibilities. She can be seen around her school building, in her
educational leadership forums, leading administrative meetings and
connecting with her community dropping lines. Any chance she gets, she
is quick to “spit barrrrzzzz”, especially in the name of education…ergo…Principal Barrrrzzzz.