RCNY International Breakfast at the UN - October

Guest presenter at our RCNY Breakfast at the UN on October 22, 2026

Molly Garfinkel, Co-Director City Lore

City Lore, a 40-year-old cultural organization that "documents, presents, and advocates for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions."

Molly Garfinkel will present the work of City Lore, a forty-year-old cultural conservation and education not-for-profit. Based in the Lower East Side, and active throughout the five boroughs and across the United States, City Lore’s mission is to foster living cultural heritage through education and public programs in service of cultural equity and social inclusion. City Lore documents, presents, and advocates for New York City’s grassroots cultures to ensure their living legacy in stories and histories, places and traditions. The organization works in four cultural domains: urban folklore and history; historic preservation and neighborhood advocacy; arts education; and grassroots poetry traditions. In each of these realms, City Lore aims to further cultural equity and model a better world with projects as dynamic and diverse as the city and nation themselves.

As Co-Director of City Lore and the Director of City Lore’s Place Matters program, Garfinkel leads initiatives related to cultural resource management, public history, exhibition curation, public education, historic preservation, and traditional arts presentation. Her research explores Western and non-Western building traditions, theories of cultural landscapes, cultural policy, and histories of urbanism and city planning.

Molly has published articles in the University of Oregon’s CultureWork broadside, Voices, The Journal of New York Folklore, University of Pennsylvania’s LA+ Design Journal, the Journal of American Folklore, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in association with Princeton University Press and National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Research & Analysis.

Garfinkel is a member of the NY State Board for Historic Preservation and a co-recipient of the 2024 NY State Historic Preservation Award for successfully nominating New York City’s Puerto Rican casitas to the NY State and National Registers of Historic Places. She holds a B.A. in Art History from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia.