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Meet Our Honorees

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  Jordan Casteel

  Jordan Casteel has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience.  

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  Jordan Casteel

  Artist

  Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience.  

  Casteel received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014).  

  In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled “Within Reach” at the New Museum, New York, presented in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. Other recent institutional solo exhibitions include “Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze,” presented at both the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20).  

  In recent years, she has participated in exhibitions at institutional venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017).  

  Casteel is an Assistant Professor of Painting in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University – Newark. The artist lives and works in New York.  
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  New York Anchor Women: Pillars of Courage

  Amanda Farinacci, Vivian Lee, Jeanine Ramirez, Kristen Shaughnessy & Roma Torre

   

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  New York Anchor Women: Pillars of Courage

  Amanda Farinacci is a veteran journalist who has covered NYC for the past 20 years. A lifelong Staten Island resident, she has covered thousands of stories in the borough intimately, including Hurricane Sandy, the police chokehold death of Eric Garner, and recently many stories about the pandemic and its impact on the city. She has produced many exclusive stories that have moved the needle, including legislative changes and criminal charges. She is a 5-time Emmy nominee and winner of several other industry awards.  

   

  Vivian Lee is an Emmy-winning TV journalist, public speaker and moderator. She anchored and reported for NY1 for 13 years on issues of vital local and national interest, including the coronavirus pandemic throughout the last year, Joe Biden’s election win, Pope Francis’ historic visit to the US, and Hurricane Sandy. Vivian also hosted an arts and culture show, “Spotlight New York,” focusing on the creative landscape of the five boroughs. Along with anchoring continuous live coverage of major breaking news stories, she reported for 25 years from the field on breaking news stories of the day in NYC and the Tri-State area. Vivian’s career in New York started at WNBC in 2002, where she was a general assignment reporter for six years. Before that she was CityTV Toronto’s Parliamentary Correspondent in Canada’s capital, Ottawa. She graduated with honors from Carleton University’s prestigious journalism program, and after stints as a reporter in Halifax and Ottawa, became evening news anchor in Calgary, Alberta. Before covering  national affairs in Ottawa, she filled in as anchor and reported for CityPulse News in Toronto. Vivian has received numerous awards recognizing her industry and community contributions, including a 2020 Emmy in New York, and the 2019 Lifetime Engagement Award from the Korean American Family Service Center in New York. She serves as a board member of KoreanAmericanStory.org. She lives in New York with her husband and two daughters. 

   

  Jeanine Ramirez has been a New York City journalist for more than two decades. She landed her first TV news job at WPIX-TV, where she was a field producer, writer and production assistant. Later she joined NY1 News in October 1996 where she was the Brooklyn reporter primarily responsible for covering the borough’s more than 2.5 million people as well as its schools, politics, religions and neighborhoods. She also was the lead reporter on many Latino issues and a weekend anchor. 

  In addition to covering stories in Brooklyn and around the city, Ramirez has traveled to Havana, Cuba, for a special series on New York area businessmen finding a new market on the communist Caribbean island; to Vieques, Puerto Rico, to cover the protests and arrests of New York legislators at the Navy’s bombing range; and to Santo Domingo and other cities in the Dominican Republic to report on the devastation caused by Hurricane Georges. 

  Ramirez had her first on air job at the NBC affiliate KWES-TV in Midland-Odessa, Texas. In Texas, she reported, anchored and hosted the weekly syndicated Latino music program Colores del Barrio.  

  Ramirez is a proud member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. 

   

  Kristen Shaughnessy was an anchor/reporter at NY1 for 26 years. She was named to Irish America’s Magazine’s Top 100″ list and was chosen as one of the “Top 50 Irish American Power Women and “Top Media 30”. She was also honored as Hofstra University’s Alumni of the Month. Prior to NY1, Shaughnessy worked as an anchor/reporter at WGNY radio in Newburgh, NY and at NewsCenter 6 in Poughkeepsie.  

   

  Roma Torre, a recipient of two Emmys and more than 30 other broadcasting awards, spent 28 years at NY1 where she was the channel’s midday anchor and chief theatre critic. Roma began her television career at Channel 2 News as a writer and producer before moving on to News-12 Long Island, the nation’s first 24-hour local news channel where she anchored, reported, and reviewed film and theatre. After five years at News-12, Roma returned to New York City, the first reporter hired at NY1, to become weekend anchor and reporter. She previously hosted the station’s award-winning political program Inside City Hall and contributes to NY1 On Stage, the channel’s weekly theatre program. Besides anchoring NY1’s Your News Now, Live At Noon, Roma’s great passion has always been the theatre. She has seen and reviewed more than 3000 productions, most of them on Broadway. Roma is a graduate of Tufts University. She co-produced a Netflix documentary about the inequities of health care for women in Africa narrated by Meryl Streep entitled Shout Gladi Gladi.  A colon cancer survivor, Roma is a staunch advocate of early screening while serving on the National Council of the Colorectal Cancer Alliance. In 2019 Roma was inducted into the National Academy of Arts and Sciences Silver Circle honoring her for lifetime achievement in newscasting.

   

   
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  Mónica Ramírez

  Mónica Ramírez is the daughter and granddaughter of migrant farmworkers. She is a long-time advocate, organizer, social entrepreneur and attorney fighting to eliminate gender-based violence and secure gender equity.

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  Mónica Ramírez

  Mónica Ramírez is the daughter and granddaughter of migrant farmworkers. She was born, raised and lives in a rural community in Ohio where her family settled out of the migrant stream. She is a long-time advocate, organizer, social entrepreneur and attorney fighting to eliminate gender-based violence and secure gender equity. For over two decades, she has fought for the civil and human rights of women, children, workers, Latinos/as and immigrants, specifically addressing the needs of farmworker women across the U.S.

  In 2003, Mónica created the first legal project in the United States dedicated to addressing gender discrimination against farmworker women, which she expanded to create Esperanza: The Immigrant Women’s Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In 2006, she launched a first of its kind national working group to address and prevent workplace sexual violence against farmworker women, which led to a national conference on this issue, the publication of a Best Practices Manual and helped inspire and inform the work of many advocates and lawyers around the country. Mónica served as a consultant on the documentary “Rape In the Fields” and she has written several groundbreaking reports on gender discrimination in the U.S. food industry, including “Injustice On Our Plates.”

  She has founded and co-founded several other major initiatives, including the Bandana Project, Justice for Migrant Women and Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. In November 2017, Mónica wrote the “Dear Sisters” letter on behalf of Alianza that was published in TIME magazine from farmworker women to women in the entertainment industry that sparked the creation of the global TIME’S UP movement.  Mónica also wrote and organized the Querida Familia letter to the Latinx community with Eva Longoria, America Ferrera, Diane Guerrero, Olga Segura and Alex Martinez Kondracke, which garnered the support of over 200 Latinx leaders and was published in the New York Times in the wake of the El Paso massacre in August 2019. Most recently,

  Mónica co-founded The Latinx House in 2019, which focuses on uplifting the power and contributions of the Latinx community through culture change and narrative work, as well as power building, education and alliance building. In 2020, she joined 9 other Latina leaders to co-found and launch She Se Puede, an organization aimed at uplifting and educating Latinas, while also amplifying their power, potential and many contributions. Mónica is recognized as a thought leader and prominent voice in the Latinx community for her long history as an organizer and her innovative approach to advocacy.

  Mónica has received numerous awards, including Harvard Kennedy School’s first Gender Equity Changemaker Award, Feminist Majority’s Global Women’s Rights Award and the Smithsonian’s 2018 Ingenuity Award. She was named to Forbes Mexico’s 100 Most Powerful Women’s 2018 list and TIME Magazine included her in its 2021 TIME100 Next list. Mónica is also an inaugural member of the Ford Global Fellowship.

  Mónica is a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, The Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law and Harvard Kennedy School. She lives in Ohio with her husband and son.
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  Sheri Sandler

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  Sheri Sandler

  Activist, Philanthropist and Founder of Reba Judith Sandler Foundation