Samantha DeNinno

Samantha DeNinno is a researcher, writer, and visual artist motivated by a central thesis: archiving as a radical act of love and remembrance. Born and raised on Long Island with family roots in Brooklyn and North Jersey, she is deeply, deeply captivated by New York, its public memory, its ecology, and its immigrant, working-class history. 

Her work is inspired by: cross-disciplinary methods, spatial mapping, and feminist, queer, & decolonial interventions in archives.  

Samantha has worked on several “critical/abolitionist university studies” projects. In 2020, she was a Research Assistant for Prof. Susie Pak of St. John’s University, for whom she cataloged material from the student newspaper on the history of St. John’s University. In 2026, she published “A Speculative Map of New York” for the Ambedkar Initiative. Grounded in the Black radical tradition, queer theory, and critical/abolitionist university studies, the speculative map/zine stages five years of student research from the “Race, Caste, & the University” and “South Asian Diasporas” courses at Columbia University. It is available for download here. More on the methodology behind the project can be found here. Her wider aim is to imagine abolitionist and collective futures through community archives and public history. She is currently thinking about the preservation of community archives during climate change. 

She has been employed by, interned with, volunteered at, and/or contributed research & copy-editing to the Ambedkar Initiative, ICLS (Columbia University), Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, The National Parks of New York Harbor & Amtrak, BYkids, Queens Memory Project, the American Museum of Natural History, and Borderlines (CSSAAME). 

She currently works in education administration & creative design at a music school and as a freelance consultant at the Ambedkar Initiative. You can find her here: samanthadeninno.cargo.site. 

Education:

Samantha holds a B.A. in History with three minors in Environmental Studies, International Studies, and Spanish from St. John’s University’s Honors Program. She was a member of the Skull and Circle Honor Society and was awarded the Silver Medal (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences), the GAAP Summer Research Grant, and the Italian Cultural Center Scholarship for Study Abroad. She earned her MA/MSc in International and World History from Columbia University & LSE in 2022.

A (incomplete) list of what she wrote about as a student (2017-2022): Zora Neale Hurston and the What America Ate archive (LSE), monstrous feminisms and ecology in “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night” (LSE), memory politics in zones of American militarization (Jeju, South Korea and the Mexico-USA borderlands) (CU), museums and colonial tourism as producers/reinforcers of racial and gender hierarchies (CU), sound in the mass intellectuality of interwar Harlem (CU), memories of “home” in Francophone cinema (CU), Santeria and Mariology in the Spanish Empire (SJU), African roots in American cowboy culture and cattle herding (SJU), public celebration as revolution/resistance in the Caribbean (SJU), American and European intervention in Iranian food culture pre- and post-1979 Revolution (SJU), and St. John’s University and the 1960s Catholic education crisis (SJU).

Her conclusive dissertation at Columbia & LSE focused on the “kitchen archive” - an ephemeral archive of performance, materiality, sound, and smell that affects notions of gender and diaspora.