Avi Alpert

Avi is from the United States, and graduated with a BA from Columbia University. His interest in reconstructing the debate around globalization “as a process that must be confronted and transformed in our daily lives” was provoked by his travels and his interactions with activists, artists, intellectuals, religious leaders, and community leaders in many parts of the world. He has interviewed Zapatista movement leaders in Chiapas, exchanged lectures on Western philosophy for tutorials in Buddhist philosophy with young Tibetan exiles in India, researched the life and times of African-American leader Fr. Paul Washington for a memorial jazz composition, and taught English to Latin American immigrants in Harlem. “Facing Monks,” his photo series, won Columbia’s 2005 Cross-Cultural Connection Photo Contest. Amongst several other languages, Avi can read classical and modern Tibetan.

Avi researched the history of intercultural contact, and the ways that patterns of thought and culture changed through those contacts. He also began several creative writing projects along these lines. He continued to pursue this dual interest in 2007-2008 as a Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he worked with other artists, critics, and curators on a number of projects. Those writings have appeared in Shifter Magazine, Performance Space 122, the Dia Center in Chelsea and a forthcoming piece will be in an exhibit at Third Guangzhou Triennial in China. Those projects were put on hold as he worked as field organizer for the Barack Obama U.S. Presidential campaign in Central Florida until the November election.

Avi researched the history of intercultural contact, and the ways that patterns of thought and culture changed through those contacts. Avi worked with Nancy Wright on the language editing of Reflections, Sauvé Scholars 2006-2007.