Andrea Goodman, LMSW, Director of Adaptations Job Program
Andrea joined the Center for Special Needs in February 2015 as a job coach/developer. She has experience working with people of various ages and at various stages of life, including teens, young adults, and older adults. The common thread connecting all of her jobs is her passion for helping individuals maximize their independence and quality of life. Andrea holds an MA and an EdM in counseling psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a master’s degree in social work from Fordham University.
Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Amanda Suárez graduated from Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY, with a BA in Art and a minor in Still Photography. Among the numerous studio and fine arts courses she pursued during her college years, she was most inspired by those focusing on drawing and composition, specifically in charcoal. Amanda worked at the College’s Handwerker Gallery, and interned at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico. After moving to New York City, she gained more experience at various art venues, including the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, a contemporary art gallery specializing in Aboriginal Australian and Western art. Amanda is currently the gallery manager at Fountain House Gallery, a non-profit art gallery that provides an exhibition space for artists living and working with mental illness.
Yo-Yo Lin is a Taiwanese-American interdisciplinary media artist who explores the possibilities of human connection and embodiment in the context of emerging technologies. She uses intelligent projection/lighting, digital and hand-drawn animation, interactive objects, and lush sound design to create meditative “memoryscapes.”
Her work often examines human perception as a vehicle for self-knowledge and community growth. Lin is currently researching and developing methodologies in reclaiming and processing chronic health trauma. This work in progress, entitled “Modes of Embodiment,” is composed of a digital and physical toolkit that seeks to be an expressive resource and living archive of chronically ill and disabled bodyminds.
She has shown new media works at international art galleries (Human Resources, Lincoln Center, La Corte Contemporanea), music festivals (Coachella, Panorama), film festivals (New York Film Festival, SXSW), and public art venues. She has spoken at NYU Steinhardt, Rutgers University, and UCLA, and at art institutions such as EyeBeam, A Blade of Grass, and Movement Research. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives and works in New York City.
Ezra Benus is an artist, educator, and curator who addresses a range of themes—such as time, care, pain, and illness/health—in his art by drawing on his background and experience in Jewish studies, art history, and embodiment of disability. Benus engages the Self as a site where social, political, and spiritual forces collide through tapping into bodily knowledge and social constructions around values of normativity. He has presented works at The 8th Floor, Flux Factory, NYU Gallatin Galleries, and Dedalus Foundation. He was a guest curator at Gibney Dance and a lecturer and consultant at spaces such as Red Bull Arts in Detroit, Hunter College Art Galleries, Eyebeam, SUNY Purchase, CUE Art Foundation, York College, and Princeton University. Benus was an Erich Fromm Fellow at Paideia Institute in Stockholm and the first Access and Adult Learning Fellow in the education department at the Brooklyn Museum.
Susan Nussbaum (Writer, Producer, Interviewee) is a Chicago-based playwright, novelist and longtime disability rights and culture activist. She won Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for her novel Good Kings Bad Kings, also a 2013 Indie Best Pick and one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels of 2013. Her work as a playwright has been seen in many Chicago theaters, including Victory Gardens, Second City, Steppenwolf, the Goodman Theater as well as theaters around the U.S. Her play Mishuganismo was published in Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and Beyond Victims and Villains: Contemporary Plays by Disabled Playwrights published her play No One As Nasty. Nussbaum worked for many years at Access Living, a disability rights organization. For her innovative work with disabled teenage girls, Nussbaum was chosen for the 2007 Chicago Girls Coalition Woman in the Field Award, by the 2008 Utne Reader as one of 50 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World, and for the Chicago Foundation for Women’s Impact Award in 2015.
Kenneth Paul Rosenberg (director/producer/writer) has been making award-winning documentaries since medical school. While a medical student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, he also studied film at NYU. He co-produced and co-directed (with Ruth Neuwald Falcon) AN ALZHEIMER’S STORY, a film about a film living with Alzheimer’s Disease, filmed over the course of eighteen months. After his residency in Psychiatry at the Payne-Whitney Clinic at New York Presbyterian Hospital, he did a Fellowship in Public Health, during which he directed and produced THROUGH MADNESS, a film on serious mental illness, for PBS. While a practicing psychiatrist, Ken produced and directed films for HBO, including WHY AM I GAY?: STORIES OF COMING OUT IN AMERICA (Oscar Documentary Feature Shortlist), BACK FROM MADNESS, and DRINKING APART, and executive produced CANCER: EVOLUTION TO REVOLUTION (Peabody Award-winner). He is also the editor of medical textbooks and author of popular books including BEDLAM which was published by Avery/Penguin Random House.
Lowell Handler is a photographer, filmmaker, and author whose pictures have appeared in Life, Newsweek, Elle, U.S. News & World Report, The (London) Sunday Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s magazines, as well as many journals from Brazil to Japan.
Handler served as associate producer, narrator, presenter, co-writer, and photographer for the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary “Twitch and Shout,” which won the San Francisco International Film Festival and screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lowell also wrote a memoir of the same name, about his life with Tourette syndrome, (Penguin 1998). He has directed two short documentary films, (Terefu and Her Children, and Bernardo and Veronica), and released an eBook, “Crazy and Proud,” that includes a video he produced.
Handler is featured in Ric Burns new PBS documentary film Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, and in Sacks’ new posthumous book release Everything in its Place, (Knopf April 2019) which includes a chapter called “Travels with Lowell” that chronicles their trips together throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Terefu and Her Children, a short doc directed by Lowell is being distributed by WGBH on You Tube.
Mandi Frantz is a disability advocate, Influencer and Nonprofit Leader. She is the Executive Director of KEEN New York – Kids Enjoy Exercise Now, a nonprofit that provides free programs of fitness, fun and friendship to children and young adults with disabilities – accepting every child regardless of the severity of their disability.
Amanda is a leader in inclusion advocacy for people with disabilities. She was selected to attend the exclusive MIT Sloan School of Managements program LEAD20@MIT Leadership in the Digital Age, in partnership with the Ruderman Foundation in 2019.
Her motivational podcast “Find Your Beautiful: Life Through the Eyes of a Christian Disabled Woman” addresses some of today’s ugly issues affecting people with disabilities and encourages her audience to find their unique personal beauty.
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Quinn Else is a Director and VFX Artist from California. Drawn to stories about
unassuming people who are reshaped by sublime or uncanny events. Quinn’s films
have screened at numerous film festivals, including Clermont-Ferrand, AFI Fest
and Fantastic Fest. He was awarded the Loreen Arbus Focus on Disability Award at
the 40th College Television Awards.
