Custom Tour of New York City

Ara H. Merjian is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies and Art History at NYU. He received his B.A. from Yale University in the History of Art, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris, published by Yale University Press in 2014. He has taught at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and has held major fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), and the Stanford Society of Fellows. He has lectured widely internationally, and been an invited speaker at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the Académie de France in Rome, and Museum of Modern Art. He teaches courses on the French avant-gardes, Italian modernism, Neo-realist cinema, post-war art and politics, and Nietzschean philosophy and aesthetics.

Ethan Greenbaum received his MFA in painting from Yale University. He is a working artist who exhibits his work regularly in New York and abroad. He is a co-founder and frequent contributor to The Highlights (www.thehighlights.org), a website devoted to artist writings and projects. Ethan teaches art, design and art history at various universities in New York and the surrounding area including the Pratt Institute and Tyler school of Art. He also regularly leads tours in the Chelsea gallery district for Columbia University students. He is a recipient of the Barry Schactman Painting Prize and the Edward Albee Foundation Residency. Ethan lives and works in Brooklyn.

Cathy Kaufman is a trained chef and food historian with extensive experience in the food world in New York and beyond. After working as an attorney in New York for more than a decade, Cathy gained multiple degrees in cooking from Peter Kump's New York Cooking School and the School for American Chefs at Beringer Vineyards, California. She has worked in catering and restaurants in New York, and has been on the faculty at the Institute of Culinary Education. Since the late 1990s, she has written and taught extensively on the history of cuisine, including numerous articles for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. She is senior editor of the <i>Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America</i> and author of the recently published <i>Cooking in Ancient Civilizations</i> (Greenwood Press).