The Odyssey Project

To take part in the Odyssey Project, you must:

• Be 18 years of age or older.
• Read at an adult level. (We do a lot of reading in the program, so being able to read a newspaper in English is a good measure of reading readiness for this course.)
• Live at or below 150% of the Federal Poverty Guideline. (See the application for income guidelines, or refer to this link.)

Please also keep in mind that:

• You SHOULD NOT currently have a four-year college degree (B.A./B.S.).
• You DO NOT need to complete Federal Financial Aid Forms to participate.
• You CAN already have a two-year college degree (A.A./A.S.).
• You CAN join The Odyssey Project if you have outstanding student loans and student loans in default or owe money to a college.
• You CAN join The Odyssey Project if you have not completed your high school degree.
• You CAN join The Odyssey Project if you are undocumented.

We consider special circumstances if you do not qualify based on the above criteria, so please contact us at odyssey@ilhumanities.org and/or add a note to your application. 

The Odyssey Project First Year Course takes place in-person at:

• North Side: Uptown (Haymarket House, 800 W Buena Ave near Clarendon Ave)
• South Side: Hyde Park (Augustana Lutheran Church, 5500 S Woodlawn Ave)

For the Spanish Language course in Little Village (Instituto del Progreso Latino, 2520 S Western Ave), please visit El Proyecto Odisea.

Complete the Odyssey Project Application.

If you have more questions, please visit our FAQs section. If you would like to apply for the Spanish Language First Year course, please visit El Proyecto Odisea.

Dianna Calvente is a community advocate, educator, and wellness practitioner with more than 20 years of experience supporting underserved communities through education, case management, and trauma-informed care. 

As a Certified Yoga Instructor, Ayurvedic Health Counselor, and Compassion Inquiry Practitioner in training, she integrates mindfulness, holistic wellness, and trauma-informed practices to help individuals cultivate self-awareness, resilience, and emotional well-being. 

She is also a proud former Odyssey Project student, having completed her second year in December 2022. 

She is also pursuing a Master's degree in Acupuncture, reflecting her commitment to bridging community care with integrative healing while creating safe, supportive, and empowering spaces.

Wanda Obazee considers Illinois Humanities' Odyssey Project to be her found Community and Tribe and has met lifelong friends from all over the city of Chicago and credits Illinois Humanities as the reason.

She joined The Odyssey Project as a student in 2017 and has never left. Her 6 years of working for The Odyssey Project has been her most rewarding and fun positions she has ever worked. 

She is a lifelong admirer of how people use their imagination and creativity in navigating their way through this world and that people elevate and add value to their lives and others when they willingly and collectively suspend their beliefs through imagination and creativity. It keeps us in touch with our inner child.

Mateo Gonzalez graduated from Proyecto Odisea in 2014. 

Fun fact: the first time he took the existence of other religions seriously was when he read Hesiod's Theogony. 

Outside of Odisea, he works as a mold maker, which involves machining and designing.  He enjoys connecting with people and listening to their stories.

• Sheila Johnson, North Side Teaching Assistant
• Stephanie Banks, South Side Teaching Assistant
• Lucia Wrooman, Proyecto Odisea Teaching Assistant
• Rebecca Amato, Odyssey Project/Proyecto Odisea Director

Michelle Alexander is an American-Trinidadian poet and interdisciplinary practitioner. Her second poetry collection, Painstar, Starline, won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She has an MFA from Columbia College Chicago, where she was a Nathan Breitling Poetry Fellow. 

Her other honors include the 49th Parallel Award in Poetry, the Furious Flower Prize, the New American Prize, the Breakwater Peseroff Prize, and the Herbert J. Rubin Prize. She is the Benedetti Teaching Artist-in-Residence for MCLA + MOSAIC. Alexander is co-founder of Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine. 

Her poetry practice combines diasporic memory with constellational making, and her interdisciplinary practice brings poetry into conversation with film, sound, and collaborative research, using artistic experimentation to explore perception, memory, and collective experience.

Aisha Valiulla is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She specializes in cultural exchange, knowledge production, and literary culture in the medieval Indian Ocean and Indo-Islamic world.

She is an award-winning teacher, having won the Northwestern History Department’s Lacey Baldwin Smith Prize for Teaching Excellence in 2020 and the Weinberg College Graduate Teaching Award in 2023.

She holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and an MA in English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Adam Syvertsen joined the Odyssey Project/Proyecto Odisea in 2024. He teaches First Year Humanities courses on Chicago’s North and South Sides, exploring how stories about utopias and dystopias—from the late eighteenth century to the present—shape the way we imagine society, politics, and the future.

Drawing on literary studies, critical theory, and cultural history, he encourages students to connect historical texts to contemporary questions about social change and human possibility. 

Adam earned his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University in 2024, where he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English, before joining Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as a Postdoctoral Fellow in 2025.

On weekends, he can often be found watching samurai films at the Music Box Theatre, or sitting in a coffee shop pretending to understand what aufheben means.

Usdin Martínez is an educator and political scientist with experience teaching interdisciplinary liberal arts courses at Northwestern University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His teaching interests include political theory, environmental justice, land and natural resources, and Latin American politics.

Usdin holds an MA in Political Science from Northwestern University, a Maîtrise in Political Philosophy from Université Paris-Diderot (France), and BAs in Political Science and Economics from Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).

Allison Muscolino's teaching practice centers the belief that engaging with art transforms and informs the way we experience the world around us.

She first joined the Odyssey Project faculty in 2019 and is delighted to return to the classroom for the Fall 2026 semester.

As a gallery educator at the Art Institute of Chicago since 2008, Allison enjoys designing and facilitating learning experiences that build observation skills, encourage collaborative communication, and stimulate critical thinking and reflection.

She also loves stopping to smell the flowers, and tries to notice beauty wherever and whenever she can.

David Silverberg is an interdisciplinary scholar of South Asian studies and religion.

His research explores the intersections between climate change, capitalism, and subaltern politics in modern India.

In addition to his work in academia, David has been a yoga educator for over fifteen years.

Isabel Gabel is a historian of modern science, philosophy, and politics.

She has taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, where she is Associate Instructional Professor of History.

Lucy Biederman has taught Critical Thinking and Writing through the Odyssey Project since 2020.

She also teaches writing at College of DuPage and college access and readiness in the University of Chicago Collegiate Scholars Program.

She holds a PhD and an MFA in writing, and will complete UC Berkeley's Professional program in College Admissions Consulting in Fall 2026. Her peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Henry James Review, and her creative writing has appeared in Poetry, Plougshares, and North American Review.

Her book The Walmart Book of the Dead won the Vine Leaves Press Vignette Award and was published in 2017.

Raul Dorantes was born in Mexico, in 1968. He immigrated to the city of Chicago in 1986. Since then, he has been an active editorial board member of several literary magazines.

In 2010, his play De camino al ahorita was awarded the second prize of the national competition Nuestras Voces organized by New York-based theater company Repertorio Español.

Currently, Dorantes works as a professor of Latin American literature at Northeastern Illinois University.

Fabio Andrés Duque was born in Cartago, Valle del Cauca, Colombia, in 1974.

After living in Bogotá for twenty years, he emigrated to Chicago, where he has devoted himself to literature, creative writing, and the study of literary arts through the composition of prose, poetry, and participation in creative writing workshops.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Language and Culture from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and a master’s degree in Spanish from Loyola University Chicago. He currently teaches Spanish at Trinity High School in River Forest, Illinois, and serves as a Humanities Literature Instructor for Proyecto Odisea, where he explores Latin American literature, culture, and the humanities with adult learners.

In addition to his teaching, Duque has contributed to Chicago’s literary community as a writer and has been featured as a co-author in some literary publications. His work reflects a sustained interest in Latin American literature, cultural identity, memory, and the immigrant experience.

Elvia Mendoza received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research on the racial-sexual and gendered dimensions of state and juridical violence is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking.

Her extensive work with the exoneration efforts of four queer Chicana women (known as the San Antonio Four) falsely accused of sexually assaulting two young girls, and subsequently wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, sets the stage in her current work for investigating the ways in which the interlinking categories of race, sexuality, and gender are recalibrated through liberal discourses of state protection that rescript rationalities and practices of policing and surveilling Mexican/Chicanx subjects as a historical collective.

The integration of different forms of alternative texts, such as film, photography, paintings, drawings, and performance, are central to her research and teaching methodologies.

She is the field producer for Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio, an award-winning full-length film documentary based on the case of the San Antonio Four; filmmaker and producer of Nosotros Tambien Migramos, and other short film productions.

Eduardo Frajman grew up in San José, Costa Rica.

He is a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Maryland.

He teaches political science, philosophy, and humanities at Oakton College, the College of Lake County, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dr. A-M McManaman has been with the Odyssey Project since 2019.

They specialize in English Literature, and their research areas of interest include the history of the novel, Shakespeare studies, and queer/disability/mad theory.

As an instructor, their courses emphasize student empowerment through lived-experience narratives and a pursuit of a better world.

Rebecca Amato is an educator and historian whose work focuses on the intersections between cities, place, and memory, with a special focus on mobilizing the public humanities for social justice advocacy. She has been a practitioner and teacher of public history for more than 20 years. 

Her work has appeared in Radical Roots: Civic Engagement, Public History, and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism (ed. Denise Meringolo) and A People’s Guide to New York City, (eds. Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis, and Emily Molina), among others.

She holds a PhD in United States History from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Jojo Galván Mora is a doctoral candidate in History at Northwestern University. He is also Curator of Digital Humanities at the Chicago History Museum. Jojo's research focuses on the ways in which immigrants reshape cities and suburbs like Chicago. 

As an educator for the Odyssey Project/Proyecto Odisea, Jojo draws from his experiences as an immigrant and as a public historian, blending them with other interests like films, food, and cultural history to help students develop not only a deeper sense of themselves, but also the history that surrounds their everyday lives.

Analú María López (Huachichil/Xi'úi) is the Ayer librarian and assistant curator of American Indian and Indigenous studies at the Newberry Library. She helps steward the Indigenous studies collection while guiding library users through, connecting them with, and interpreting materials linked to the Indigenous studies collection.

She is interested in the preservation, revitalization, and instruction of Indigenous languages, decolonial theory (within libraries), and intentional community collaborations for access to materials within colonial institutions. She has published articles on Indigenous Librarianship, Archival theory, languages, and active learning with primary source materials, and other topics.

She has led hundreds of hands-on instructional sessions with rare books and other primary sources and co-curated exhibitions at the Newberry: “What is the Midwest?” in 2018 and “Indigenous Chicago,” in 2024 which she is also the co-Director of the “Indigenous Chicago” project, a multifaceted project exploring these histories, centering Indigenous voices, laying bare stories of settler-colonial harm, and gesturing toward Indigenous futures.

She holds a Master of Library and information sciences with a certificate in archives and cultural heritage resources and services from Dominican University and a Bachelor of Arts in photography with a minor in Latin American studies from Columbia College Chicago.

She began her career with the Newberry in 2004. After working for other libraries and museums in Chicago for thirteen years, she returned to the library in her current role in September 2017.