Stephen Duncombe

Stephen Duncombe

Research Director, Co-Founder

Stephen has more than three decades of experience as both a educator and an activist. With a PhD in Sociology, he has taught in the City and State Universities of New York and is currently a Professor of Media and Culture at New York University. He received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching while at SUNY and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and the University Distinguished Teaching Award at NYU.

An activist his entire adult life, he co-founded a multi-issue community activist group in the mid 1990s, the Lower East Side Collective, which won an award for “Creative Activism” from the Abbie Hoffman foundation. He was also a lead organizer in the international direct action group Reclaim the Streets.

Stephen is the author and editor of eight books, including Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the Cultural Resistance Reader, writes on culture and politics for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications, and is the creator of an open-access, open-source, web-based edition of Thomas More’s Utopia. His scholarly and activist work has been supported by, among others, the Open Society and Fulbright foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts, and he is currently working on a book on assessing the impact of artistic activism.

Steve Duncombe co-founded the Center for Artistic Activism with Steve Lambert in 2009.