This project is dedicated to Bronx Community College and its borough of New York City. Specifically, we are focused on our college’s experience of the pandemic. Students and staff are prompted for submission and their work is given priority for curation.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic sent New York City into quarantine, Professors Susan Smith-Peter and Joseph Frusci at the College of Staten Island created a Facebook community page so that Staten Islanders could share their stories, as well as their digital photos and videos to show how the pandemic was impacting their lives. The project seeks to create an online exhibit and oral history repository on the history of the first wave of COVID-19 on Staten Island. The Museum of the City of New York chose 7 items from the Facebook page out of more than 20,000 submissions for their exhibit New York Responds: The First Six Months, which dealt with COVID in New York City.

In the spring of 2020, LaGuardia Community College students switched to remote learning. At the same time, they took photographs inside their homes and on the streets of New York City, wrote reflections on their photography projects, and completed COVID-related assignments for their classes. Their work documents food lines and BLM protests, and explores topics such as mental health, fear of deportation, racism, bigotry, and the story of a student who ended up relocating to South Korea to be with her family.

Photo by Josue Tepancal.

The New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) has a variety of different COVID initiatives, among them an effort to gather information through a health equity lens and an attempt to gather stories from fellows, members, and staff of the NYAM community to document their experience of the pandemic.