BPI Staff Biographies

Jocelyn Apicello

Jocelyn Apicello has been teaching public health courses with BPI since 2012 and is the Urban Farming & Sustainability Faculty Advisor. She helps the BPI gardeners grow in the BPI gardens at Fishkill, Taconic and Woodbourne facilities and works with alumni when they return home to keep land stewardship a part of their practice. She oversees BPI’s Community Engagement Stipend, which encourages and recognizes alumni’s important work in their communities. She also runs her own farm in the Hudson Valley where she trains new and diverse farmers skills in regenerative agriculture, self sufficiency and community organizing. She holds a DrPH from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health where she wrote about the public health impacts of gentrification in New York City.

Jermaine Archer

Jermaine Archer is a Program Associate for Schusterman’s Criminal Justice Grantmaking team.

He prides himself on struggling for the betterment of others. Having transformed from survivor-of-the-system to agent-of-change, he used his experience as a directly impacted person and advocate for criminal justice reform to advocate for clients during his time as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society. Aspiring to broaden his impact and scale his efforts, he expanded his professional work to include community outreach, advocacy and organizing with the aims of creating coalitions and empowering his community.

With an undergraduate degree in Behavioral Sciences from Mercy College and a graduate degree in Professional Studies from the New York Theological Seminary, Jermaine uses his education and experience to become a voice for the voiceless.

Travis Baird

Travis Baird is the executive director of the Maverick Capital Foundation (MCF). The purpose of MCF is to instill a culture of philanthropy in the firm (Maverick Capital) by educating employees on issues affecting the community and funding highly effective organizations that create opportunities for economic mobility. Travis directly leads the New York region’s grantmaking and helps guide the strategies for MCF Dallas and MCF San Francisco. He is actively engaging the boards of every city to make impactful and equitable grantmaking while thoughtfully focusing on our sectors of focus: education, postsecondary access and success, survival, workforce development, and criminal justice reform.

Before entering philanthropy, Travis was an entrepreneur running corporate wellness start-ups. He managed a team of personal trainers, vendors, and general contractors across the city servicing private businesses, luxury condominiums, and hotels.

Travis holds a B.A. in Political Science and government and a B.F.A .in Theater from New York University. He spent the earliest parts of his career as an actor performing at various off-Broadway theaters and across the country. Travis is a native New Yorker who grew up in Brooklyn and was raised by his mother, a former public school teacher who instilled a passion for being a leader and giving back to his community. He sits on the board of Beginning with Children, a charter management organization in Brooklyn that focuses on a community-driven approach to creating equitable outcomes for students. He joined the philanthropic sector in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial justice movement. Travis is committed to advocating for his community as he lends expertise and perspective from living through the issues philanthropy is trying to address.

Patrick Bannon ’21

Patrick Bannon is a justice-impacted person who spent over 31 years in the New York State carceral system. He holds a BBA in Advertising from Baruch College and also earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), where his comprehensive senior project examined the harmful effects of locker-room talk and its role in perpetuating discursive violence against women. An original member of the BPI Acting Ensemble, he continues to pursue acting opportunities in NYC, driven by a commitment to storytelling and social justice. Patrick’s journey is a testament to the transformative power of education and the human spirit’s capacity for growth and redemption.

Megan Callaghan

A cultural anthropologist whose scholarship and teaching focuses on Northern Ireland, Megan Callaghan was hired from the Bard faculty to lead BPI’s academic administration. Since 2011, she has worked with colleagues to add and expand degree programs across seven New York State prisons, developed partnerships with community-based institutions to create the Bard Microcolleges, and introduced the BardBac, a full-scholarship pathway for students to complete degrees on the main campus of Bard College.

Kathyrn Cox

Kate is Director of Development for the Bard Prison Initiative and has been with BPI since 2019. Prior to BPI, Kate worked as Capacity Building Advisor for the New York Council on Nonprofits and spent many years supporting community and national public radio and other story-telling endeavors. Kate completed a Masters in Social Work from Tulane University in 2017 and has 2 decades of experience across the non-profit sector- in philanthropy, capacity building, strategic planning, and project management. Kate lives in Rhinecliff, NY with her husband and son.

Amy Cox Hall

Amy Cox Hall is the Assistant Dean for BPI. Prior to joining BPI in 2022, she taught at Amherst College and University of North Carolina – Charlotte. A writer and anthropologist with specializations in Peru and the U.S., her research focuses on national heritage, photography, science, race, and most recently food. She is the author of Framing a Lost City: Science, Photography and the Making of Machu Picchu (University of Texas, 2017; Spanish translation, IEP, 2020) and editor of The Camera as Actor: Photography and the Embodiment of Technology (Routledge, 2020). Her second book, The Taste of Nostalgia: Women, Race and Culinary Longing in Peru, will be published by University of Texas Press in fall 2023.

Vanessa Estime

Vanessa Estimé serves as Assistant Director for the Yale Prison Education Initiative at Dwight Hall at Yale. She has worked in higher education, the judicial branch of state government, and non-profit community agencies in New Haven and Bridgeport (Connecticut) since 2011. Vanessa received her BS in Legal Studies from the University of New Haven, and MSW from Simmons College School of Social Work. She is a licensed social worker and certified childbirth educator and birth doula. Vanessa is delighted to be a part of the Yale Prison Education Initiative and support the movement of college in prison.

Madeleine George

Madeleine George is Director Admissions and has worked with BPI since 2006. She was the Site Director of the Bard program at Bayview Correctional Facility from 2006 until its closing in 2012, collaborated on the development of BPI’s writing and grammar curriculum, and helped launch all three Microcollege campuses, as well as the Bard Bacalaureate. She holds a B.A. from Cornell, and an MFA from NYU.

Jeffrey Jurgens

Jeff Jurgens is Continuing Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bard College and Faculty Chair of the Bachelor’s Degree Program in the Bard Prison Initiative. He is also the faculty lead for the OSUN network collaborative course A Lexicon of Migration, which has been taught at Bard College Annandale, Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard, and the American University of Central Asia since 2019. He specializes in topics related to migration, citizenship, public memory, urban space, and secularism among people of Turkish backgrounds in Berlin. More recently, he has examined the cultural and affective politics of “refugee crisis” in Germany and Europe since 2015. His publications have appeared in journals like Policy and Society, Transit, and Turkish-German Studies Yearbook as well as the edited volumes After the Imperialist Imagination (2020), Different Germans, Many Germanies (2017) and Walls, Borders, Boundaries (2012). Prior to his arrival at Bard, Jurgens received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan and taught at Pitzer College.

Natalia Guzman Solano

Natalia Guzmán Solano is a faculty fellow and assistant director of admission at Bard Microcollege in New York City.She is an activist-scholar who envisions knowledge production as a collaborative practice. Natalia is the granddaughter of Argenides Rosso de Solano and on her paternal side she comes from the line of Bertilda Franco. She lives on Canarsie Lenape territory in what is otherwise known as Queens, NY. In her scholarship, Natalia implements transdisciplinary methodological approaches as a way toward reparative justice in the academy. Natalia has used testimonio as an indispensable entry into decolonizing anthropological knowledge. This work largely focuses on themes of gender and water protection in the fraught extractive economies of north highland Peru. Natalia earned a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Sayra Havranek

Sayra Havranek is the Assistant Director of Institutional Advancement at the Bard Prison Initiative. A creative copywriter and development professional with a knack for decoding a brand’s DNA to identify and amplify its voice and image across platforms, Sayra has more than a decade of experience across the public and private sectors. She recently completed a Master’s of Public Administration at Marist College, where she also earned a bachelor’s of professional studies and graduated summa cum laude. Sayra is a member of the Pi Alpha Alpha and Alpha Chi academic honor societies and an active volunteer with numerous New York City-based social justice organizations.

Hannah Henry ’19

Hannah Henry is BPI’s Data & Research Assistant and Academic Advisor for the Biology Concentration while also tutoring and providing operations support at Eastern Correctional Facility. She graduated from Bard College with a B.A. in biology and public health.

Demetrius James ’17

Demetrius James is Program Director at the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership in Harlem, and an actor, writer, and educator who was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. After studying literature and the humanities, his interest in agriculture in urban areas was piqued after working in the Bard garden at Fishkill Correctional Facility.

Max Kenner ’01

Max Kenner is the founder and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative. A leading advocate for the restoration of college-in-prison, Kenner is also co-founder of the Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, and Bard Microcollege, which establishes rigorous, tuition-free college opportunity within urban areas in partnership with community-based Institutions. At Bard College, Kenner serves as Vice President for Institutional Initiatives and Advisor to the President on Public Policy & College Affairs. He has served on Governor Andrew Cuomo’s New York State Council on Community Re-Entry and Reintegration since its inception. He holds a B.A. in Historical Studies from Bard College.

James Kim ’21

Having previously worked as Lead Tutor and Student Recruitment Specialist and Program Coordinator, James is currently Program Director with the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library. After serving a twenty year sentence in prisons throughout New York State, James was released from incarceration in 2020. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2021 through the Bard Prison Initiative upon successful completion of his senior project titled: The Myth of Immigrant America and the Federalization of Immigration Control. Inspired by his experience with education in carceral settings, James believes in expanding access to quality education to overlooked and marginalized populations, and is deeply committed to addressing inequality and inequity in the current landscape of higher education in the United States.

Molly Lasagna

Molly Lasagna is a senior program officer at Ascendium. She is responsible for strategic grantmaking in support of Ascendium’s Expand Postsecondary Education in Prison focus area, which seeks to identify and scale effective strategies for ensuring that incarcerated learners have access to and success in high-quality postsecondary education. She joined the organization in 2022.

Molly comes to Ascendium with 10 years of experience working in service of incarcerated communities. In her most recent role, Molly served as executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative (THEI), a nonprofit organization that brings degree-bearing college programs to prisons in Tennessee. She was at the forefront of efforts to build a collective of Southern postsecondary education in prison programs and led the creation and growth of a statewide network of state agencies and institutions of higher education called the Tennessee Prison College Coalition. Prior to her role at THEI, Molly worked as a policy analyst on the educator quality team of the American Institutes for Research (AIR), where she co-authored the book “Improving Teacher Quality: A Guide for Education Leaders.”

Raised in New England, she earned a Master of Divinity degree from Vanderbilt University, a Master of Arts degree in urban education policy from Brown University, a Master of Teaching degree in secondary English education from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature from Columbia University.

Claire Lindsay ’21

Claire Lindsay, originally from Decatur Georgia, graduated from Bard College in 2021 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology and a focus on child development and youth incarceration. As Tutoring and Academic Resources Coordinator she supervises the peer tutors from Bard’s Annandale Campus who offer academic support across BPI’s six facilities. In addition, Claire tutors writing and orchestrates the delivery of books and academic materials.

Sheila Meiman

Sheila Meiman is an experienced advocate, practitioner, consultant, and analyst in the field of higher education in prison.  She has expertise in a range of topics in her field, including STEM education, financial aid, program creation and expansion, student and academic support, data, transfer and direct-to-work credentials, and technology. She has over a dozen years of experience as a program administrator, managed a first-round Second Chance Pell site, and has served as a mathematics professor for both campus and system-impacted students. She currently serves as the Prison Education Specialist at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA).

Meiman holds a BS from Carnegie Mellon University, as well as a Master of Science in Engineering from Purdue University.  She also holds a Masters Certification in Program/Project Management from American University. In their Vanguard Series, NJBIZ named Professor Meiman one of the Leaders in Higher Education in New Jersey.

Delia Mellis ’86

Delia Mellis is Associate Dean of the Bard Prison Initiative. A historian of race and gender in the United States, she has been a member of the BPI faculty since 2008 and joined its administration in 2011. An Associate of Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking, Delia holds a Ph.D. in United States History from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. from Bard College. Her recent publications include a chapter in the edited volume Reconsidering Roots: Race, Politics, and Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2017).

Jesse Miller

Aisha Ndiaye

Aisha Ndiaye has been a student with the Bard Prison Initiative since 2021 where she is studying to obtain her AA degree. She was released in April 2023 after being incarcerated for 4-and-a-half years. She will be continuing her college education this coming fall at the Bard micro college located in Harlem, New York. Given the opportunity of receiving an education while incarcerated Aisha learned the importance of education and how necessary it is when entering certain doors.

Jessica Neptune ’02

Jessica Neptune is Director of National Engagement and leads BPI’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison. She founded the Women’s College Partnership at the Indiana Women’s Prison. As an ACLS Public Fellow, she served as a policy analyst for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and with the Obama Administration’s Federal Interagency Reentry Council, co-leading interagency working groups on Children of Incarcerated Parents and Incarcerated Women. She holds a B.A. from Bard College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in American History from the University of Chicago. Her scholarship is on the making of the carceral state and the policies and politics at the nexus of race, poverty, addiction, and punishment.

Anthony Perez ’15

Anthony Perez is a graduate of the Bard Prison Initiative, having obtained a BA in Mathematics. In 2018, he went on to earn an MPS in Urban Ministry and Leadership from New York Theological Seminary. He was released in August 2023 after being incarcerated for 19-and-a-half years. He currently is the Full-Time Tutor for the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library, and he also serves as a Mathematics Expert for Outlier.ai training AI. He is currently enrolled in Columbia University’s Justice Through Code program learning the skills needed to become a Software Engineer and Data Analyst. Having experienced higher education while incarcerated, he truly believes in the redemptive power of education and its ability to transform the people who receive it and the places that host it.

Andrés Pletch

Andrés Pletch is Faculty Advisor to the BA Program for the Bard Prison Initiative. He teaches classes on Caribbean and Latin American history, as well as core-curriculum classes, such as First-Year Seminar and the Major Seminar in Social Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

David Richardson

David Richardson is BPI’s Site Director at Taconic Correctional Facility. In addition to teaching writing courses for BPI, he has led workshops through Bard’s Language and Thinking program, and he is a faculty associate of Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. David edits the NYC-based small press, dispersed holdings. He holds a BA from Haverford College and an MFA from UMass Poets & Writers.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein is BPI’s site director for Woodbourne. He has a PhD in American Studies from NYU and is writing a book about the history of university labor.

Rebecca Swanberg ’14

Rebecca Swanberg is BPI’s Site Director at Fishkill Correctional Facility and is a member of the writing faculty. She holds a BA in Written Arts from Bard College and an MFA from the University of Montana. A fiction and nonfiction writer, her work has been published or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Gulf Coast, Passages North, and other venues.

Dyjuan Tatro ’18

Dyjuan Tatro is the Senior Government Affairs Officer for BPI, and a legal reform advocate and strategist who has worked to bridge the gap between policy and practice. As an alumnus of Bard Prison Initiative, Dyjuan has leveraged his education and experience to shift public policy in favor of expanding college-in-prison. He has worked on successful, social impact campaigns in favor of Pell restoration at the national level and restoration of Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) grants in New York State along with other reforms at the municipal, state, and federal levels. He is an active member of the Fortune Society’s Board of Directors and serves as the Senior Adviser of Strategic Outreach at the DCCC, working on a number of issues at the nexus of politics, diversity, equity, and inclusion. He holds a BA in Mathematics from Bard College.

Jed Tucker

Jed B. Tucker is founding and current Director of Reentry & Research Scholar at the Bard Prison Initiative. A member of the BPI faculty since 2003, Tucker is an anthropologist who has researched, written, and lectured about college-in-prison and its effects post-release. His publications include an article in the Journal of African American History titled, “Malcolm X, the Prison Years: The Relentless Pursuit of Formal Education” (2017). He previously taught anthropology on the main campus of Bard College and at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Tucker holds a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology from Teachers College, Columbia University; an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University; and a B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

Robert Tynes

Robert Tynes is BPI’s Director of College-in-Prison Operations and a member of the faculty. He is a political scientist whose research focuses on child soldiers, African politics, online activism, hate as a political dynamic, and the effects of college-in-prison. He is also a faculty member of the Master of Arts in Teaching program at Bard. His book, Tools of War, Tools of State, examines how governments and opposing forces utilize children as a tactical innovation in conflict. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from SUNY-Albany, an M.A. from the University of Washington, and a B.F.A. from New York University.

Nikko Vaughn ’15

Nikko Vaughn is Associate Director of Education and Professional Advancement. In this role, he oversees and manages programs and activities related to students and alumni pursuing higher education and their chosen career in New York City and beyond. In addition, Nikko holds a joint position with the CUNY Baccalaureate for Interdisciplinary Studies (CUNY BA) at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he ensures a holistic approach to college counseling, helping students navigate the admissions process. To date, Nikko’s efforts have resulted in over 80 students completing their undergraduate, graduate, and professional education. Before this role, Nikko was BPI’s first TASC Teaching Fellow and helped to launch the BPI-TASC college prep program. Nikko earned his bachelor’s degree in Political Theory and History with significant coursework in advanced mathematics from Bard College. His senior project is on African American political activism was entitled The Formulation of a Black Polis: The Reimagining and Remobilization of Black Political Power.

Amanda Vladick

Amanda M. Vladick has been teaching writing classes with BPI since 2009 and has been a site director since 2011. She currently directs the campuses at Green Haven and Taconic.

Pamela Wallace ’87

Pamela J Wallace ‘87 started teaching with BPI in the Fall of 2012, and the following year she joined the team as the BPI Site Director at Coxsackie Correctional. She teaches Drawing and Art History, and is the Academic Advisor to the cohort at Coxsackie. An artist as well as an educator, Pamela shows her work nationally, and keeps up a regular studio practice. She previously taught at SUNY New Paltz, Mount Holyoke College, Columbia Greene Community College, and Dutchess Community College. A former Bard student herself, she earned her B.A. focusing in Sculpture, and holds an M.F.A. from SIU Carbondale.

Hannah White

Hannah White is the Reentry Program Coordinator for the Bard Prison Initiative. She began working for BPI in 2022, after finishing her Master’s of Public Administration degree at Auburn University.