The Board
Trustees
Melinda Hunt
Melinda Hunt, president 2016-2018, is an interdisciplinary artist and founding director of the Hart Island Project. She holds an M.F.A from the Yale School of Art (1985) and M.S. in Digital Imaging and Design, NYU (2007). She began working on Hart Island with photographer Joel Sternfeld in 1991. They published a book, Hart Island, Scalo (1998).
Melinda directed a film Hart Island: An American Cemetery (2008). She received awards from NYSCA in public art (1995), film (2000) and electronic art (2011). She received two Canada Council Interarts Awards for Artist and Community Collaboration (2008, 2009) and worked to develop a creative platform for an on-line community and database to collect the identities and experience of Hart Island. She launched the Traveling Cloud Museum (2012) produced in collaboration with Studio AIRPORT and Inspire Innovation in the Netherlands.
Paul Tackowiak
Paul Tackowiak, treasurer 2016-2018, graduated from Lehigh University with a B.A. in Architecture in 1982, and from the Yale School of Architecture with a M.Arch. in 1985. He is a registered architect in New Jersey and Connecticut. He has spent 25 years working for Bristol-Myers-Squibb in corporate architectural planning and interior design. Paul is a founding director of the Hart Island Project. He was born in White Plains, NY and currently lives in Basking Ridge, New Jersey.
Alan Hartman
Alan Hartman, secretary 2017-2019, is Assistant Professor of Italian and Spanish at Mercy College, where he is also the Program Director of Modern Foreign Languages. He holds a B.S. in Psychology and Spanish from Manhattan College (2003), a M. A. in Hispanic Studies from Boston College (2005), a M. A. in Italian Studies from Middlebury College (2006), and a Doctor of Modern Languages from Middlebury College (2014). He also serves as a Board of Trustees Member for the White Plains Historical Society and is a founding member of Caminando Por La Paz, Guatemala. His academic areas of expertise include Italian Fascist Period Literature, Italian American Literature, Latin American Contemporary Literature, and Cultural Studies. Alan resides in Riverdale in the Bronx.
John Yeagley
John Yeagley, trustee 2016-2018, is an instructional-design project manager, and vice-president of Twisted Preservation, a NYC-based cultural & museum consultancy. He holds an M.S. in Instructional Design from Philadelphia University (2001), a certificate in Project Management from NYU (2011), and a Russian Studies B.A. with a concentration in International Politics (1995) from Franklin & Marshall College.
John's areas of interest and experience include foreign languages, film, architecture & design, cycling, sustainability, LGBT history & culture, and a variety of social justice issues. He resides in the Upper East Side with his partner Franklin and their dog Yogi.
Advisory Board
JP Borum
JP Borum is a writer and teacher based on NYC’s Upper West Side. She holds a B.A. in Art History from The College of William and Mary, an M.A. in Art History and Criticism from SUNY Stony Brook, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Borum has authored contributions to art magazines including Artforum and Raw Vision; to art anthologies published by Harper Collins, Knopf, and Visual Aids; and to art encyclopedias published by Phaidon Press, Routledge, and Oxford University Press. She currently teaches writing at NYU, works as a consultant for NYC homeschool collectives and NY State STEAM initiatives, and is a founding member of the hack-education coalition Arcades Collective. Borum has received grants from Pen America, the Authors League Fund, CLAGS, and Change, Inc.
