Our Team – University of Orange

MOLLY ROSE KAUFMAN (Co-Exec Director), is a community planner, journalist and youth worker. Her writing has appeared in YES! Magazine, Kinfolk Magazine and the New York Times. As a community organizer in Orange, NJ, she cofounded the University of Orange, a free people’s university, worked with residents and planners to write the Heart of Orange plan and codeveloped ORNG Ink, a youth-led, user driven arts collective. She has a BA from Hampshire College, an MS in journalism from Columbia University and was a 2016 Civic Liberal Arts Fellow at the New School. She currently serves as the University of Orange Provost & Program Director and is a Listening Consultant at HUUB.

AUBREY MURDOCK, is Head of School & Lead Designer for the University of Orange. Murdock is a graduate of the Design & Urban Ecologies program at Parsons The New School (M.S.) and Columbia College (B.A., Film Production). She focuses on the role of media and design within civic education and involvement. Her most recent work includes a short film outlining a history of discriminatory planning policies in the United States (The Domino Effect), University of Orange’s long term, site-based storytelling project: Hidden Treasure of Our Orange, and researching collaborative remediation and collective natural resource management proctices in her hometown of Casper, Wyoming.

KHEMANI GIBSON, UofO Academic Dean, is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, New Jersey with a B.A. in history, Pan-African Studies, and Spanish. A lifelong Orange resident, Khemani Gibson is a product of the Orange Public Schools system graduating from Orange High School in June 2010. During his college career Mr. Gibson was able to participate in many civic engagement projects that centered on improving education for minorities in urban communities. He is also a member of several national honor societies such as Phi Beta Kappa, Chi Alpha Epsilon, Phi Alpha Theta (History), and Sigma Delta Pi (Spanish). Mr. Gibson has studied in South Africa, The Dominican Republic, and Haiti learning of how race is socially constructed in those countries. Mr. Gibson is now a PhD student in NYU’s History program focusing on the African Diaspora. Mr.Gibson defines his personal goal as inspiring others to realize how they can be positive agents of change and progress in their local and global communities.

DR. MARGAUX SIMMONS is a composer, flutist, improvisor, and music educator. She studied with Cecil Taylor at Antioch College and Pauline Oliveros and Will Ogden at UC San Diego. She is a founding member of The Pyramids and has traveled, composed, studied and performed music extensively in Tennessee, Ohio, New York, California, Ontario and British Columbia, Canada, France, Holland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Jamaica, South Dakota, and New Jersey. She worked as Professor of Music at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA., 1987 – 2007, and as a Curator of The Museum at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, 2007 -2010. Since 2013 she has worked with the University of Orange, teaching UofO’s longest running community class, Music Theory, and co-directing the Music City project.

DOUGLAS FARRAND is a composer & musician working at the intersection of music, popular education, and place-based organizing. He is concerned with developing practices that invite us to explore our myriad processes of listening and embody a collective investigation of place, community, and personhood. He works as the Music City Co-Director with the University of Orange, and as Director of Sonic Explorations, a youth music education program in Orange’s east ward. He is a founding member of LCollective, a Brooklyn-based experimental music collective, alongside Teodora Stepancic, Assaf Gidron, Jesse Greenberg, and Matt Lau. He works closely with percussionists Ryan Packard and Christian Smith, filmmaker Evelyn Emile, poet & composer Porter James, and bassist Jeff Weston.

HOLLY BARSZCZ is a geographer, organizer and the UofO administrative manager. She began her work in Orange in our inaugural class of 2016 HUUB Fellows and returned the following year to serve as a Senior Fellow. As a HUUB Fellow she launched the ongoing Building Solidarity Potluck Series where community members come together to share in food, learning, arts activities and conversation. Holly is known around her town for excellent baking and all potluck-goers look forward to her treats.

RAY SYKES (Sykez) is an artist from Orange New Jersey. A part of a group called Soundbox Banditz as well as a duo DefNote and associated with fellow Soul Touchers He Who Shines Truly, Sykez music consists of all aspects of hip hop culture. Ray is a lead organizer with UofO’s Music City Festival and curates the Don’t Drop The Mic series, a bi-annual showcase of Orange’s hip-hop scene.

CESAR PRESA is a musician, organizer, farmer, and chef-extraordinaire. He makes music with illNomads and Yaya. He is a lead organizer with UofO’s Music City Festival, co-curates the Living Room Series, and runs the concert series “Soundscapes”, which features eclectic, off-the-beaten track sounds from Essex County and beyond.

DOMINIC MOULDEN The UofO is proud to announce Dominic Moulden as our inaugural Ernest Thompson Fellow for Program and Coalition. Dominic T. Moulden is a longtime resource organizer at Organizing Neighborhood Equity (ONE DC), a collectively-led organization that builds people power and economic and racial equity in Washington, DC. He is a frequent lecturer at various universities and conferences regarding equitable revitalization, cooperative economics, affordable housing, workplace democracy, community development, and public policy. Moulden is also a community-accountable photographer and social justice documentarian. A native of east Baltimore, his images celebrate Black love and resilience while providing uncompromising witness to the ongoing displacement of Afrodiasporic people in Baltimore and elsewhere in the Americas. His creative practice and organizing work are both dedicated to fostering a culture of health that includes art, joy, and radical resource redistribution. Dominic Moulden will lead our continuing 400 Years of Inequality work with the project “The People’s Platform for Equity: Finding What We’re For and Fighting for What We Love.”

Board of Trustees

MINDY THOMPSON FULLILOVE, MD, University of Orange Board President, is professor of urban policy and health at The New School. Prior to joining the New School in 2016, she worked for 26 years as a research psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and was a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College (AB, 1971) and Columbia University (MS, 1971; MD 1978). She is a board certified psychiatrist, having received her training at New York Hospital-Westchester Division (1978-1981) and Montefiore Hospital (1981-1982). She has conducted research on AIDS and other epidemics of poor communities, with a special interest in the relationship between the collapse of communities and decline in health. From her research, she has published Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It (2004), and The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place (1999). She is a co- author of Rodrick Wallace’s Collective Consciousness and Its Discontents: Institutional Distributed Cognition, Racial Policy and Public Health in the United States (2008). She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and monographs. She has received many awards, including inclusion on “Best Doctors” lists and two honorary doctorates (Chatham College, 1999, and Bank Street College of Education, 2002). Her work in AIDS is featured in Jacob Levenson’s The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS in Black America. Her latest book, Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities, was released in June, 2013.

Michele Racioppi, Secretary

Rachel Bland

Nupur Chaudhury

Stephanie Thompson

Donna Williams

University of Orange Inc. is a 501c3 tax-exempt organization, and donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.