Re-Imagining Migration was founded in 2017 as a project of the UCLA Graduate School of Education by Carola Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, and Adam Strom. Verónica Boix-Mansilla, from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, led the development of the Re-Imagining Migration framework as part the collaboration with Carola Suárez-Orozco and Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, then at the University of California Los Angeles and Adam Strom at Re-imagining Migration.
Meisha Lamb-Bell
Director of Programs
Meisha Lamb-Bell is the Program Director at Re-Imagining Migration. Meisha is a dedicated educator with a profound commitment to expanding social impact through fostering equitable access to education, vital resources, and purposeful programming. As a Questbridge scholar, Meisha’s unwavering dedication lies in cultivating inclusive academic environments that not only ignite a lifelong passion for learning but also galvanize collective action. Throughout her academic journey at Brown University, Meisha actively engaged in endeavors aimed at enhancing college access and facilitating successful matriculation. After graduating from Brown, Meisha started her career in public finance, optimizing funding for the higher education and nonprofit team. Before joining RIM, she served as a classroom teacher where she prioritized student joy, community building, and illuminating and eliminating covert and compounding barriers to equity.
Sara Hnidi
Director of Communications
Sara Hnidi is a Syrian-born communications strategist, storyteller, and refugee advocate whose work sits at the intersection of migration, education, and human rights. As Director of Communications at Re-Imagining Migration, she leads the organization’s narrative strategy to shift how educators, funders, and communities understand belonging in a rapidly changing world.
Sara brings over a decade of experience crafting stories that humanize displaced communities and advance systems-level change. She has led communications efforts for the International Rescue Committee and the Community Sponsorship Hub, where she designed storytelling strategy for the State Department’s Welcome Corps program and trained hundreds of volunteers on ethical storytelling.
Fluent in Arabic and English, Sara holds a Master’s in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and a B.A. in International Studies from DePaul University.
Adam Strom
Executive Director
Adam Strom brings a unique blend of personal and professional dedication to education about migration. Growing up in a family whose roots trace to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and now married to the daughter of an Ecuadorian immigrant, his commitment to building empathy and understanding across differences is deeply personal. As an educator who taught first and second generation immigrant students, Adam co-founded Re-Imagining Migration to address a critical gap in education: creating learning environments where migration experiences are understood as fundamental to our democracy, where schools become models of inclusion, and where belonging drives academic success and thriving communities. After beginning his career in Hollywood, he served as Program Director at the Tenement Museum before joining the senior leadership team at Facing History and Ourselves. Educational resources developed under Adam's direction have reached millions of students in tens of thousands of classrooms worldwide, including books, lessons, and films on immigration, civil and human rights, genocide, and prejudice.
Karel S. Karpe
Development Consultant
Karel S. Karpe, Re-Imagining Migration’s Development Consultant, is a highly experienced nonprofit professional with a diverse background in the legal, corporate, and nonprofit sectors. After years spent as a corporate lawyer, Karel moved over to the field of nonprofit development and grants. Karel brings a skill set of donor engagement, grant writing, and foundation engagement. Karel assists in the development and execution of the philanthropic and engagement goals of Re-Imagining Migration.
Sara Ahmed
Director of Curriculum
Jessica Lander
Re-Imagining Migration Senior Education Policy Fellow and History Co:Lab Senior Policy Fellow
Jessica Lander is an award-winning teacher, writer and author. For much of the last decade, she has taught history and civics to recent immigrant students in a Massachusetts public high school and has won numerous awards for her teaching, including being named the 2023 Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year and one of the 2023 Top Ten national History Teachers of the Year presented by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; a 2023 MA Teacher of the Year Finalist, presented by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education; and a Top 50 Finalist for the Global Teacher Prize in 2021, presented by the Varkey Foundation. Jessica writes frequently about education policy and teaching. She is the author of Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education, recently awarded the 2024 George Orwell Award, presented to, "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse"; a coauthor of Powerful Partnerships: A Teacher’s Guide to Engaging Families for Student Success; and the author of Driving Backwards.
Michelle Bellino
Scholar-in-Residence
Michelle Bellino is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan Marsal Family School of Education. Her research centers on the intersections between education and youth civic development, with particular attention to contexts impacted by armed conflict and forced displacement. Across diverse settings, she explores how experiences with violence, asylum, and peace and justice processes influence young people’s participation in schools and society, future aspirations, as well as educational access and inclusion. Her work on transborder movement draws on ethnographic methods and youth participatory action research in contexts of origin, first asylum, transit, and “destination” sites. She is the author of Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition, numerous articles, and co-editor of (Re)constructing memory: Education, identity, and conflict. Currently, she is co-authoring a policy guide and online course for UNESCO on “Addressing violent pasts through education.”
Contact Us
To send us snail mail we are located at 50 Milk St, 16th Floor, Boston, MA 02109.
To reach us by email, write to us at info@reimaginingmigration.org.