jah elyse sayers (they/them) directs their creative energy toward liberatory placemaking through research, writing, artmaking, teaching, and building.

jah recently earned a PhD in earth & environmental sciences at the graduate center, cuny. they have been a graduate fellow with both the center for place, culture, and politics (CPCP) and the institute for research on the african diaspora in the americas and caribbean (IRADAC). they were the marilyn j. gittell dissertation fellow in urban policy (2025-26). their dissertation focused on embodied, enacted, and relational placemaking in tension with public-space planning, research, and policy, focusing on the rapidly changing landscape of people’s beach at jacob riis park. they prioritize poetic, participatory, and insurgent methods in their research, rooted in Black geographies, and argue against methods that conscript particular people to particular places, instead calling for attentiveness to embodied relationalities and mobilities as people make place. their research offers theories of placemaking, experimental methods of place-based study, and activated praxes of protecting a place and its constituent placemakers and methods toward liberatory ends.

they work as research associate with the place, memory & culture incubator and recently closed out work as managing editor with women’s studies quarterly, where they still serve on the visual arts editorial board.

they are the initiator and a member of the people’s riisearch group–a team of community-based researchers caring for histories, futures, and the now of riis and broader coastline ecologies–and the riis beach bloc association–a nascent civic group meant to encourage people who care about queer riis to share knowledge and resources and care for the beach and each other, together.