katja vujić

After reading a great book, I often find myself curious about the experiences that helped inform and generate the author’s writing process. And I believe it’s valuable to acknowledge that even the most singular work of art is a product of the writer’s internal network of influences — their personal syllabus, if you will. That’s what inspired this series of Q&A-style author interviews that I conceptualized, pitched, reported, and wrote. Authors I interviewed include Robin Wall Kimmerer, adrienne maree brown, Akwaeke Emezi, and Emma Copley Eisenberg.

For this photo essay, I collaborated with photographer Sofie Vasquez to capture the spirit of New York’s Gotham roller-derby league. Over the course of a few months, Sofie and I visited multiple practices as the team geared up for an upcoming tournament. Along with interviewing Sofie about what inspired the project, I interviewed around twenty skaters about the Gotham community, the sport, and their own trajectories.

In collaboration with photographer Sabrina Santiago, I profiled Palestinian belly dancer Janelle Jalila Issis’s dance community, interviewing several of her students and taking her class myself. I also interviewed Sabrina about the inception of the idea and Janelle about her belly dance journey and her relationship to her cultural roots.

Tired of standard-fare summer reading coverage, I pitched a photo essay that would take a look at what New Yorkers are actually reading at the beach. Photographer Yael Malka and I took the ferry to Jacob Riis beach and found out, interviewing and photographing around twenty beachgoers throughout the day. While some noses were buried in new releases like Miranda July’s All Fours, many people were reading books that had been recommended by a friend or family member — and one was even reading a law textbook.

This series started on a busy October afternoon in Union Square. As photographer Ruvan Wijesooriya took portraits of New Yorkers we selected from the crowd, I and a few other reporters ran around stopping passerby to ask them to share their first-glance assumptions about the person being photographed. Afterward, I interviewed all of our subjects to get the truth, speaking with them at length about their lives and personal stories.

I collaborated with peers in my library and information science program at the Pratt Institute to create this LibGuide about Balkan Cinema. I handled the Former Yugoslavia tab and several sections on the homepage. This project involved intensive research about Balkan Cinema, and focused on connecting users to resources for their own further research.

This is an in-depth case study and report of community engagement practices on and offline for the Drawing Center in SoHo, prepared as part of my coursework at Pratt. I spent several weeks visiting the museum, attending programming, and observing the institution’s social media channels. Before submitting the final report, I also completed background research about the institution, followed by my research plan and methodology, followed by an initial draft of my findings and recommendations. I compiled these as well as all my observations into an in-depth analysis and report, and also included recommendations that I came up with based on what I observed and what I learned in class about community engagement methods.

As part of my coursework for my library and information science degree at the Pratt Institute,I wrote about fugitive libraries and how they have served and can serve the goals of liberation for organizers, including and especially by using their own knowledge organization systems. I researched fugitive libraries and their information organization systems as well as ideas like the library commons.