Luana Ferreira Ph.D.

Dr. Luana Y. Ferreira began her career as a New York City public school teacher, working with school districts as a teacher, staff developer, and data specialist. An advocate for closing the achievement gap, she has also worked for Summer on the Hill, I Have a Dream Foundation, and Alianza Dominicana’s Summer Youth Employment program, all non-profit entities that support student success by focusing on disenfranchised bilingual populations. Dr. Ferreira was also a research assistant for the Research Institute for the Study of Languages in Urban Settings.

(RISLUS) in New York, where she helped develop and administer diagnostic tools to assess English proficiency levels of Spanish-speaking immigrant students and Students with Interrupted Formal Education (SIFE). She has led strategic planning and implementation of diversity and inclusion initiatives, presenting at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and the National Dominican Student Conference at Wharton. She obtained her Doctorate in Hispanic Linguistics from the CUNY Graduate Center and her published dissertation: Lexical Density, a Comparative Study between Spanish Print Media in the United States and Latin America, earned her acknowledgments from the Spanish Royal Academy, citing her work asessential research that contributes to the importance of Spanish as a linguistically unifying force. She has taught and presented at CUNY, Harvard University, Teachers College, Universidad de la Habana, and La Universidad Nacional de Bogotá. In 2015, Dr. Ferreira became an appointed Empire Fellow serving as a policy advisor for the New York Department of State where she enlisted stakeholders and leaders to plan, develop and execute outreach and community development focusing on language access. She sat on the Governor’s Joint Task Force for Exploited and Misclassified Workers, designing and delivering bilingual learning modules on business ownership and worker rights. Most recently Dr. Ferreira was the Director of Student Affairs and Career Services at the SUNY Bronx Educational Opportunity Center where she oversaw academic- to-employment pipelines for students wishing to embark in vocational trades pertaining to health services. Dr. Ferreira is also a research fellow for the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. She has a forthcoming publication entitled How Ideology Stifles Equity: Analyzing the Sociopolitical Context of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric and Its Impact on Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining Pedagogy. Luana is of Dominican descent and continues to live in Washington Heights, where she was born.