Benjamin Heim Shepard

Benjamin H. Shepard, PhD, LMSW, works as Professor of Human Services at City Tech/CUNY. He has organized protests for leading social reform groups: ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power ), SexPanic!, Reclaim  the  Streets, the  Clandetine  Rebel  Clown  Army, Absurd Response, CitiWide Harm Reduction, Housing Works, More Gardens Coalition, Time’s UP!, Right of Way, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy the Pipeline, Resist AIM, Public Space Party, and the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York, where he is a chapter chair at New York City College of Technology. 

Shepard has authored or edited ten books: White Nights and Ascending Shadows: An Oral History of the San Francisco AIDS Epidemic (1997), From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization (2002), Queer Political Performance and Protest (Routledge, 2009), The Beach Beneath the Streets: Contesting New York’s Public Spaces (with Greg Smithsimon, SUNY Press), Play, Creativity, and Social Movements: If I Can’t Dance, It’s Not My Revolution (Routledge, 2011), Community Projects as Social Activism (Sage, 2014), Rebel Friendships: “Outsider” Networks and Social Movements (Sage, 2015), Sustainable Urbanism (Roman and Littlefield, 2017), Brooklyn Tides with Mark Noonan (Transcript, 2017), and Narrating Perspectives on Childhood and Adolescence (Columbia University Press, 2018). 

In 2010, he was named to the Playboy Honor Roll as one of twenty professors “who are reinventing the classroom.” He was trained at the University of Chicago School of Social Services Administration, the City University of New York Graduate Center, and the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. Today, he remains involved in organizing efforts around transportation, HIV/AIDS, labor, public spaces, environmental policy, and efforts around sustainability.