The membership of New York Folklore elected new representatives to its board of directors during its annual meeting on April 4, 2024. Now in its 80th year, New York Folklore has met annually to elect board members and officers, and to support the business of the New York Folklore Society.
Founded in 1944 with a cultural equity and social justice mission, New York Folklore is a membership organization that supports and promotes traditional and folk arts and culture in New York State. Largely a service organization that serves artists and grassroots cultural organizations that have folk and traditional arts and culture at their core, New York Folklore also supports documentation and programming in many regions of New York State. New York Folklore publishes a journal, “Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore,” and partners with many cultural organizations to provide opportunities and resources for folk and traditional arts and humanities programming.
The new board members, to serve a two year term from April 2024-March 2026, will represent the North Country and New York’s Southern Tier. They are the following:
Camilla Ammirati is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the First-Year Program and Interim Administrative Director of the Sustainability Program at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. Camilla received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia, where she focused on the relationship between domestic space and national belonging in late 19th and early 20th century American literature and music. She worked for several years as a folklorist and Director of Research and Programs at TAUNY (Traditional Arts in Upstate New York) where she conducted research and developed programs and exhibits highlighting the living traditions of northern New York’s North Country. Along with work in folklore and higher education, she has been active musician playing guitar and banjo as well as singing and writing music inspired by a range of American roots traditions. Her current teaching and research focus on the intersections between folklife and sustainability as encountered through practices and knowledge around local and regional foodways and related experiences and expressions of conscious ecological kinship.
T.C. Owens is a folklorist and videographer. For the past 15 years he has worked collaboratively to document, preserve and present the vital traditions of everyday people and their communities. He holds an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has worked at the Philadelphia Folklore Project, Media Mobilizing Project, and as a contract folklorist for the Northern Tier Cultural Alliance and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in Northeast Pennsylvania, where he grew up. He is also a director and producer of the documentary short, Our Side: The Other Atlantic City.