Megha Chopra is passionate about sourcing great food and championing small food businesses. In her current role at the New York City Economic Development Corporation, she is tasked with launching the New Essex Street Market, a historic community hub for affordable, accessible, and authentic food experiences. Previously, Megha was on the food team at Pret a Manger, and FreshDirect, where she worked with local food businesses to launch and develop new products. A lifelong New Yorker, Megha loves being a part of NYC’s vibrant food community and is committed to ensuring that we protect and support our city’s most vulnerable small food businesses – street vendors.

Mandira Ghai (she/her) immigrated from India to Pittsburgh, and a dosa cart led her to SVP in 2012.  She believes street vending represents the vibrancy of shared urban spaces globally and especially in New York City, and is essential in cultivating immigrant economic mobility and informing a more inclusive, compassionate cultural acumen.  With experience spanning tech, financial services, nonprofits, and higher education, Mandira is the inaugural project manager overseeing the Pinterest x Food52 Golden Recipe Contest, a call for diverse, sentimental recipes from around the country.  She serves as a career mentor for the Food Education Fund, was a research associate for the Museum of Food and Drink's latest exhibition African/American: Making the Nation's Table and a docent for Chow: Making the Chinese American Restaurant, and co-chairs culinary classes at the Park Slope Food Coop, where she is part of a group advocating for racial equity at the organization.  She is interested in the nexus between food, labor, access, and collaborative community empowerment.  

Andrew loves sharing how the city works, especially its waterfront, industry, and infrastructure. In addition to developing and leading tours, he consults with cultural institutions on operations, interpretation, and accessibility, and he oversees knowledge management for Turnstile, maintaining the archive, library, oral history collection. Much of Andrew’s work focuses on the past and present of New York’s waterfront, and he is an avid shipspotter, birdwatcher, and paddler. Andrew is a member of the New York Council Navy League, American Institute of Architects (Allied Member), and the US Naval Institute, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Street Vendor Project.

Julie Torres Moskovitz, AIA is an architect and founder of Fete Nature Architecture, PLLC (FNA) based in NYC. She began working with SVP in 2015 to help envision an exemplary commissary for the street vendor community. Her firm FNA is a vital, collaborative architecture firm whose process is founded in research and investigation of new ways to inhabit the urban fabric.  Julie is the author of a green architecture book and the architect of the first certified Passive House project in NYC. She believes that life happens in the streets and reflects the city’s spirit whether through street vendors, block parties, impromptu run-ins, or protest for environmental and social justice.

Kelebohile Nkhereanye (Kele) is a food street vendor, food justice activist, community chef and leader in East New York. Kele is an immigrant from Lesotho, Southern Africa, where she learned the values of street vendors as opportunities toward economic empowerment. Currently, Kele works as a Station Agent for NYCTA. She is a committed member of SVP supporting efforts advocating for street vendors to remind New Yorkers to think of vendors as small business owners who need to work to support their families. She graduated from MCNY with MPA, Hunter  College with Sociology and Women’s Studies.

Justin Pollack is a life-long patron of New York City vendors. He is a Managing Director at PineBridge Investment LLC, a global asset manager, where he focuses on private equity investments. Justin holds a B.S. from New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business. 

Fa-Tai Shieh has been very interested in food issues around New York City since moving to the Big Apple.  He currently works for city government as the Director of Citywide Procurement.  Among his various responsibilities, he provides food for inmates on Riker’s Island, source food for the City’s emergency food programs, and feed dogs and horses of NYPD.  Fa-Tai also teaches part-time in the Food Studies program at the New School.  He is an experienced farmer and is currently the President of the board  at Added-Value, a non-profit that manages a 3-acre urban farm in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Fa-Tai is an immigrant from Taiwan and while growing up worked in his father’s seafood restaurant in Washington D.C. 

Cheikh Boubacar Fall is a veteran street vendor living in New York City since 2003. He emigrated from Senegal to live in the US in 1990 where he worked for the New York State Unified Court System while serving as a busboy, food runner, and waiter at Carmine’s Restaurant. In 1998 he joined the United States Armed Forces as a logistic specialist with two deployments in Europe where he served with honor and distinction. He then joined the Air Traffic Controller Aviation School where he soon after joined Naval Air Station Lemoore in Fresno, California. After serving, Mr. Fall used his business drive to open up a street vending business in New York City. It was through this work that Mr. Fall became engrossed in supporting local communities through various activism avenues. He served as a board member of the Street Vendor Project from 2005-2011 and he has served on the board of directors of the Mouride Islamic Community of America since 2015.

Nick Gulotta is a passionate community organizer with deep roots in advocacy and impacting change through local government. Nick's activism began early when he organized students in support of halal school lunch for NYC schools. After graduating from Hunter College, he worked for nonprofits focused on human rights, environmental justice, and voting rights. At City Hall, he launched programs to support community organizations and helped lead the City's fight against the Trump Administration's Muslim Ban and family separation policies. He later served as the Director of Organizing for the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs where his team's nationally recognized campaigns connected tens of thousands of New Yorkers to safety net programs and free immigration legal services. Following the successful 2022 campaign to pass the NYC Racial Justice Commission's ballot proposals, Nick returned to government where he serves as a Chief of Staff in the City Council. He is also an adjunct lecturer at City College.

Sari Kisilevsky is a philosophy professor at Queens College CUNY who focuses on issues of ethics, business ethics, ethics of identity and immigration, and philosophy of law. She teaches classes in ethics, business ethics, feminism, and philosophy of law. She has organized workshops on philosophy of food and co-taught a class on Food and Identity. She has published articles in philosophy of law, just war theory, and Kantian political philosophy, and is currently researching ethics of punishment and ethics of food and identity. Sari’s work focusses on creating communities and economies that work for everyone and lift people up; she believes everyone has the right to work with dignity and participate in a community and economy that is built for their success. She has been working with the Street Vendor Project since 2019.

Liz is the Chief Operating Officer for The Marlow Collective and a co-founder of Women in Hospitality United, a non-profit organization dedicated to reimagining the hospitality industry. She sits on the Board of Directors of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, the NYC Small Business Services Hospitality Council, the Emma's Torch Culinary Council, and the Urban Justice Center's Street Vendor Project Advisory Board. She lives in Brooklyn with her dog, Gristle Trout.

Tatiana is an event producer, a community organizer, a senior team + project leader, an immigrant, and a mother. Her career has included leadership in community engagement, event planning + production, coalition building, policy + stakeholder-led advocacy strategy, partnership and resource stewardship, and program design + management — in issue areas spanning community-driven placemaking, local food economies + immigrant food ways, public market + street vendor advocacy, place-based sustainability + resilience strategy, and land + soil preservation. She has worked with City Harvest, the National Parks Conservation Association, American Farmland Trust, City Parks Foundation, and the Street Vendor Project, among other organizations. Tatiana now runs commonplace, her multidisciplinary events shop working to build community solidarity — through food, shared experience, and cultural practice. 

Krishnendu Ray is the Chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU. He is the author of The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016, Bloomsbury) and The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-America Households (2004, Temple University Press). He co-edited Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food and South Asia (2012, University of California Press). He is currently the President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society which is an international consortium of academic Food Studies programs. He thinks street vending is crucial to immigrant livelihoods and the liveliness of cities.

Cindy VandenBosch founded Turnstile Tours & Studio to create interactive and content-based experiences that foster engagement and interaction within and across communities in partnership with non-profit organizations in the neighborhoods of New York City. Cindy is passionate about offering experiences that are welcoming and accessible to people of all ages and abilities, and she has long been interested in socially-responsible business models, which led her to found Turnstile as a Benefit Corporation in 2012.