First debuting seven years ago, Brooklyn College on Wednesday reopened We Are Brooklyn: Immigrant Voices, a multimedia exhibition built from student interviews with immigrants and children of immigrants, many drawn from the students’ own families.
Produced by the Brooklyn College Listening Project, the exhibition features stories rooted in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Haiti, Pakistan, Albania, Grenada, Italy, and beyond. It first debuted on the CUNY campus seven years ago amid heightened national debates over immigration and identity. After traveling to five venues across New York City, the exhibition returns newly updated amid a political and cultural moment defined by questions of belonging.
Installed in the library, the re-opening event drew students, faculty, and staff into a space where storytelling feels immediate and alive. Each visual display is paired with a QR code, allowing visitors to listen to the original interviews on their phones. The result is an immersive experience, one where voices, accents, pauses, and emotions add depth and humanity beyond what text alone can convey, officials said.
Joseph Entin, the project’s current director and professor of English and American Studies, said the initiative bridges classroom learning with lived experience, positioning students not just as learners, but as knowledge makers.
“The Brooklyn Listening Project flips the educational script,” Entin said. “We sometimes think that college students are missing something, that they come to college to get what they lack. The Listening Project turns that idea upside down. It says: what we need at the college is what students have access to, what students know, what their families know, what their neighbors know. Through the Listening Project, students become experts. So this project is designed to allow you students to really bring the world to us, to show us what you know.”
Among those in attendance on Wednesday's opening was Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a Brooklyn College graduate, alongside his mother, Patricia, whose own immigrant story is featured in the exhibition.
Other speakers included organizers Jessica Siegel, professor emerita and the former director of the Listening Project and Jesús Pérez, the director of the Brooklyn College Immigrant Student Success Office, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and graduated from Brooklyn College in 1995.
The exhibit can be seen in the Brooklyn College library lobby, 2900 Bedford Ave., through May 15.
