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    « BACK to Amy Zimmer's portfolio

    Amy Zimmer

    I did not immerse myself in some tiny, remote island society when I studied anthropology at Yale. I immersed myself in a very huge, very nearby island society-New York City. I was interested in how race and class struggles played out in art, public space, and youth culture, and for my senior essay (which won the Sapir Prize for Most Outstanding Anthropology Essay in 1998) I wrote about the social worlds of graffiti writers. I hung out with graffiti writers (from the Lower East Side, from the Bronx, from the School of Visual Arts), but felt a disconnect between writing about one group (graffiti writers) for another group (academics). I wanted my audience to be the people I was writing about; I wanted to be in dialogue with them, just as they were in dialogue with each other on the streets. Before returning to school to study in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program (which wonderfully addressed this issue), I worked in various fields trying, in some fashion, to bridge gaps between institutions and their "audience." I worked in the education department at the Museum of the City of New York, developing outreach for public programs, and I taught math to non-science majors for New York University's core curriculum. I completed the CRC program in December 2002, and am currently writing on community groups organizing to reform public schools for NYU's Institute for Education and Social Policy and am interning for WNYC's "The Next Big Thing."