Noya Kansky
Staff
Program Manager
[email protected]
Noya is the program manager at Mesa Refuge. She began her career working in student services at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she was committed to broadening access to undergraduate research experiences for traditionally marginalized students in the STEM fields. Her work at Cal Poly also focused on creating more supportive infrastructures for undocumented students at the university. This work expanded beyond the university campus and into local community colleges and K-12 education.
Noya then completed her graduate education at UC Santa Cruz in the Feminist Studies Department, where her work engaged interdisciplinary frameworks to historicize various forms of Japanese American and Palestinian cultural production and how they indicate intersecting legacies of settler colonialism, indigenous histories, and survival.
Most recently, Noya worked as a pastry chef and cook in Oakland, CA. Her other creative pursuits include ikebana (Japanese flower arrangement), Danzan Ryu ju jutsu and aikido, home baking… and once in a while she’ll take a stab at the blank page.