Join us to celebrate Spring in The Bronx at the beautiful Van Cortlandt Park!
Van Cortlandt Park Alliance (VCPA) is the official nonprofit partner to NYC Parks in Van Cortlandt Park, working at the intersection of environmental stewardship, education, arts, and green space advocacy. VCPA provides free, year-round public programming in Van Cortlandt Park, serving more than 11,000 participants annually and reaching over 3 million park visitors.
We are thrilled to return for our second year to celebrate the season and connect with the Bronx community in this beloved green space.
Featuring:
Nature Walk at 2pm and 3pm
Tea Experiences from 3pm
Tea with Eduard Boguslavsky, Erika Houle, EunYoung Sebazco, Sara Shackett and Timothy Chacko
Garden herbal tastings
Odes to Common Things Poetry from 3PM
Reading with Henne Lena Van Campen, Justin’s Maki, Leah Kogen-Elimeliah and Meg Kaizu at 3:30 and 4:30
Writing with Robin Lampman
Washi Paper Making
with Michele Brody
FREE events. Space is limited. RSVP is recommended.
Bring your own tea cup.
Meet Nizar Gartit:
Nizar Gartit at Spring Blossom 2023. Photo by Katie Gee Salisbury
Nizar is a Moroccan culture advocate and the founder of the Women's Museum of Marrakech, the first institution in Morocco and North Africa dedicated to showcasing the history, culture, and creativity of Moroccan women.
His passion for preserving Moroccan heritage goes beyond museum walls. Nizar brings traditional practices to international audiences, notably through Moroccan tea ceremonies he leads in New York City. These gatherings offer a sensory experience rooted in ritual and hospitality, allowing people to connect with Moroccan culture in a deeply personal way.
In the contemporary art world, Nizar has emerged as a significant curator, with a portfolio that spans photography, painting, and multimedia installations. His exhibitions provide platforms for both emerging and established artists, encouraging artistic dialogue and celebrating diversity in expression.
Through his wide-ranging initiatives—blending tradition, innovation, and social impact—Nizar reflects a blend of vision and rootedness, all driven by a deep belief in the power of culture to connect and inspire.
Meet EunYoung Sebazco:
EunYoung Sebazco is a New York–based artist working at the intersection of ecology, ritual, and public space. Through plants, photography, and site-specific installation, she creates moments of pause — inviting audiences to experience the city as a living, breathing environment.
Trained in landscape architecture and horticulture, she works with layered, living materials to cultivate connections between human presence and the natural world. The Japanese tea ceremony is the heartbeat of her practice, extending into ceramics, floral design, and landscape interventions. Her work asks viewers to become co-creators — slowing down, paying attention, and recognizing the quiet life that surrounds them.
Meet Michele Brody:
Paper making at Summer Tea 2024, Photo by Katie Gee Salisbury
Michele Brody with Summer Tea 2024 participants. Photo by Katie Gee Salisbury
Growing up in a family of builders, she was inspired to construct forts from natural materials in the woods of 1970s Staten Island, suggesting a future inspired by nature and the built environment.
In 1994, Brody earned an MFA in Fibers and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, marking the beginning of a 30-year career as an independent installation artist. Grants and artist residencies awarded by respected institutions such as NYFA, NYSCA, LMCC, Pollock/Krasner Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, Skowhegan, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Wave Hill allowed her to maintain a full-time creative practice as a mixed-media environmental artist outside of traditional gallery markets.
Michele has created commissioned installations in France, Costa Rica, Germany, and Taiwan alongside national shows in Chicago, Indiana, Arizona, and Vermont. Collaborations with NYC exhibition venues showcasing her work include LES Tenement Museum, Hudson Guild, Bronx Museum, NY Botanical Gardens, and the artist-run spaces of JVS Project Space and AAA3A.
She is currently preparing for her Artist Studio Program Spotlight, solo exhibition at the Bronx River Art Center, as she concludes a 3-year Artist-in-Residence.
Michele will introduce the Japanese tradition of making washi paper from Kozo, or the mulberry tree. Participants will be invited to re-purpose the used tea leaves from the day’s tea ceremonies by adding them to the paper, which is then dried and used for the Odes to Common Things poetry writings by the community members.
Meet the poets:
Robin Lampman is a published poet and an educator with 35 years of experience teaching in universities, high schools, and elementary schools. She has a Master’s Degree in Bilingual Education and has taught literature in two languages in the public schools in New Mexico, Texas, and New York as well as at the University of Monterrey in Mexico and the American School of Madrid in Spain. She has also taught English as a Second Language to adults at the University of Texas in Austin and at the El Paso Community College in El Paso. Texas.
She produced a volume of poetry by eighth graders in East Harlem which was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and published by the Big Read. For the last several years she has been teaching writing classes for The Noble Maritime Collection. She developed and taught an adult class on Poetic Forms and taught classes on the reading and writing of literature in two languages.
Robin is Editor in Chief of Unspoken Word, an online international literary magazine, and she is Director of Poetry and Tea for Tea Arts and Culture.
Justin Maki is a writer and editor based in New York City. He is the poetry features editor for Brooklyn Poets and formerly served as an assistant managing editor for Asymptote, a literary translation journal. Originally from Colorado, he spent four years as a teacher in Osaka, Japan, before joining the NYC bureau of a Japanese news agency. He provides editing services for memoirs, manga, and novels in translation.
Henne Lena Van Campen is a writer originally from Staten Island, New York. She has published three chapbooks of poetry and is currently in-process of selling her first novel, Pneuma.
Leah Kogen-Elimeliah is a Moscow-born, New York–based poet, writer, educator, and curator. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of literature and creative writing at The City College of New York and is the founder and director of the WordShedNYC Reading Series. Her interdisciplinary work moves between poetry, performance, visual art, and film, exploring themes of identity, language, immigration, sexuality, and cultural memory. She has collaborated with independent artists across disciplines, developing cross-genre, multimedia projects that merge text, image, and movement. Her work has been presented at venues including La MaMa Experimental Theatre, Howl! Arts, Creative Time’s Red Stage, The New York City Poetry Festival, The Higher Ground Arts Festival, LatchKey Gallery, The Trops, and ROCA, among others. She is currently completing her poetry collection What to Pack in a Suitcase, developing a group art exhibition Notes from Daughters, and finalizing her experimental documentary film Good Girl.
Meg Kaizu is an artist and writer. She has published her poetry, fiction, essays, reviews and translation in journals and anthologies, and exhibited her artwork internationally. Having studied art and Russian at the University of Oregon, she obtained a Master’s degree in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Special thanks to:
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Private support is provided by City Parks Foundation and Partnerships for Parks through the NYC Green Fund.
