Announcing the 2022 Zabar Scholars

Since 2019, The League has been proud to work with Lori Zabar and the Zabar Family Foundation to award scholarships the three of the best and brightest preservation students from across the state. The League is excited to announce the recipients of this year's Zabar Family Scholarship: Emily Conklin (Columbia); Jeffry Iovannone (Cornell); and E.J. Shin (Columbia).

Many thanks to Lori Zabar and the Zabar Family for their generous support of the Zabar Family Scholarship program. Lori passed away earlier this year, but her generosity and support of preservation lives on.

Emily Conklin (she/they) is a writer and design historian currently pursuing an M.S. in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP. She interrogates preservation theory and storytelling in the built environment. Her work has been published in the New York Review of Architecture, The Architect’s Newspaper, and Surface, among others, and she currently edits both Pollinate and Columbia’s Future Anterior Journals. Follow her work via Instagram @conk_shell.

Jeff Iovannone is a public historian and historic preservationist from Buffalo, New York, and an MA student in Historic Preservation Planning at Cornell University. His areas of interest include: LGBTQ heritage preservation, connections between preservation, public history, and social justice, and the use of preservation planning to benefit historically marginalized communities. Iovannone is currently the president of Cornell's Preservation Studies Student Organization and the co-founder of Gay Places, a joint project with Preservation Buffalo Niagara, that documents and provides education around LGBTQ historic sites in Western New York. Editor’s note: Jeff was included on a panel the League hosted in 2021 focused on Preserving LGBTQ+ history. You can find the recording here.

E.J. Shin is a MArch student at Columbia University with a background in Civil/Structural Engineering from the State University of New York. Her broad spectrum of experience varies from construction support of the design-build project for Tappan Zee Bridge Hudson River Crossing, New York State’s large signature bridge, to presenting at an international exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Her design considers both qualitative and quantitative elements interested in structurally driven form-finding and experiential design based on spatial behavioral science.