Advisory Board
As of August 1, 2019
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
