Archives, Displacement and the Struggle for Housing Rights

Join us for a conversation with Lynn Lewis, Maggie Schreiner, and Cynthia Tobar as they discuss the role of the archive in documenting the housing crisis, including resistance movements in the struggle for housing justice. This discussion will be moderated by Stephanie Neel, archivist at the Margaret Morton Archive.

About our panelists:
LYNN LEWIS

Lynn Lewis works at the intersection of community organizing, oral history, participatory action research and popular education. Working with Picture the Homeless for 17 years, she co-created PTH’s organizing methodology with founding members of the organization. She went on to document and preserve PTH's work, and was awarded an NEH Fellowship for The Picture the Homeless Oral History Project. Her book Women Who Change the World (City Lights, 2023) is a collection of oral history interviews with women changemakers. She is a graduate of the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia U and believes that wemust learn from past and current struggles for housing justice, to inform our organizing today.

MAGGIE SCHREINER

Maggie Schreiner is an archivist and public historian supporting movements for economic and racial justice through liberatory memory work. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where her research focuses on the history of queer and trans housing activism in New York City. Maggie is a long-time volunteer at Interference Archive, and was the lead curator of the exhibition We Won't Move: Tenants Organize in NYC, among other exhibits. She has led collaborative archival projects with Met Council on Housing, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, and CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Maggie is an adjunct faculty member in New York University’s Archives and Public History program and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

CYNTHIA TOBAR

Cynthia Tobar is an Ecuadorian-American documentary filmmaker, oral historian, and educator whose work builds transformative spaces for collective remembering and community-led dialogue around issues such as displacement, gentrification, and activism. Cynthia is the founder of , and has received Brooklyn Arts Council grants for her musical oral history projects ¿Dónde puedo ir? Searching for Home and American Icons. A graduate from Teachers College, Columbia University, her doctoral research examined the formation and impact of the student-led group Black Lives Matter in Higher Education. Her current Mujeres Atrevidas artist residency initiative seeks to amplify narratives of migration, resistance, and feminist care through community-based collaboration.

Space is limited. Please RSVP to reserve your spot.

Physical space of the Interference Archive is ADA compliant.

------------

This panel discussion is part of a series of public programs around the exhibition Through Padlocks, Behind Barricades: Margaret Morton's Glass House and the Squats of the Lower East Side.

explores the squatter movement on New York’s Lower East Side (Loisaida) in the 1990s. It features Margaret Morton’s photographs of life in Glass House, an abandoned glass factory at the corner of Avenue D and East 10th Street. Several dozen squatters made the building their home for sixteen months, until police evicted them in the winter of 1994. The exhibition presents Morton’s in-depth portrait of one squat, with an array of printed materials exploring the debates that arose over squatters’ rights.

On view at Interference Archive from October 17, 2025 through January 5, 2026.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Interference Archive