About The Super Power of Me

Our Background

The Super Power of Me brings photography and creative writing together to explore a deceptively simple question: Who gets to decide how another person is seen?

The project began in New York City in the summer of 2020, when photographer and poet Karen Zusman began photographing young people she encountered while documenting the Black Lives Matter Justice Rides following the murder of George Floyd. Riding with the bicycle protests through all five boroughs, Zusman found herself increasingly drawn to the children watching and participating in this moment of social reckoning. She began making portraits of them, curious not only about how they appeared through her lens, but about who they understood themselves to be.

The project's name came from the Ghanaian-American father of four children Zusman photographed at Coney Island that first pandemic summer. After receiving the photographs, he wrote to thank her for “giving my children the living proof they really are the super powers they believe themselves to be.”

After the portrait series received the Leica Women's Foto Project Award, Zusman began inviting the young people she photographed to participate in free poetry and creative-writing workshops. What began as a portrait series evolved into a collaboration between two forms of representation: Zusman's photographic portrait of a young person and the young person's written portrait of themselves.

The writing does not explain the photograph, and the photograph does not illustrate the writing. Each offers a different way of knowing the same person — one made from the outside, the other from within. The space between them is where The Super Power of Me lives.

As one young participant, Haneen, later described the experience, the project “lets you see yourself from your own eyes, not from someone else's eyes.”

The first series of portraits and poems became a large-scale outdoor exhibition in Brooklyn's Dr. Ronald McNair Park in 2022, created in partnership with the New York City Parks Department. At the opening celebration, participating young people read their work before a public audience. The exhibition and SPOM's poetry workshops were featured in The New York Times, and the opening was covered by ABC News.

In 2023, Zusman presented The Super Power of Me as a keynote speaker at the Xposure International Photography Festival in the United Arab Emirates. The project's reception there helped open a new chapter, extending SPOM beyond its origins in New York and into collaborations with young people across cultures and geographies.

In 2026, House of Wisdom and the United Arab Emirates Board on Books for Young People invited The Super Power of Me to Sharjah for a special edition inspired by The Dice Player: Mahmoud Darwish, an exhibition honoring the legendary Palestinian poet. Drawing on Darwish's explorations of identity, memory, belonging, homeland, love, and becoming, participating students wrote about their own lives before sitting for their portraits. Their words became part of the encounter between photographer and subject rather than something added afterward.

Today, The Super Power of Me creates collaborative experiences in which young people use photography, poetry, and creative writing to explore identity and participate in how their stories are represented. Rather than offering a single answer to who a young person is, the project creates space for complexity, contradiction, imagination, and change — for who they are, what has shaped them, and who they are still becoming.

Our Team

  • Karen Zusman

    CREATOR and PHOTOGRAPHER

    Karen Zusman is the founder and creative director of The Super Power of Me. A New York-based photographer, poet, and educator, her work explores questions of authorship, representation, and how we understand and portray one another.

    Zusman received the Leica Women's Foto Project Award for The Super Power of Me. She is also a Pulitzer Center grantee for her multi-media reporting on human trafficking in Southeast Asia and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University's School of the Arts.

    Her photography has been exhibited at Fotografiska New York, the Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography, Leica Galleries, and Xposure International Photography Festival in the UAE. In 2022, Leica Camera selected one of her photographs as the face of its The World Deserves Witnesses campaign. In 2023, she delivered the opening keynote at Xposure, and in 2026, House of Wisdom and the United Arab Emirates Board on Books for Young People invited her to create a special edition of The Super Power of Me in Sharjah inspired by the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

    Zusman also co-founded myME: Mobile Education Project, which provided non-formal education to more than 20,000 working and out-of-school young people in Myanmar before the 2021 military coup.

  • Julie Kelman

    EDUCATOR (New Americans)

    Julie Kelman is an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher at Bayonne (NJ) High School. She holds a Masters of Science in Education from The University of Pennsylvania. She has been teaching ESL to high school, middle school and adult students for more than 20 years combined. Julie strongly believes that the desire to communicate drives second language development, and provides her students with opportunities for exploration and self-discovery to enhance and enrich their English acquisition. The last semester of each school year, Julie focuses on reading, responding to and reciting poetry. The Super Power of Me deepened this unit, as each student wrote an original poem through weekly Super Power of Me zoom sessions, and class discussions. “Working with Super Power of Me gave me the opportunity to be the kind of teacher I value most: One who facilitates learning by following students’ interests.”

  • Kellie Diodato

    EDUCATOR (NYC Youth)

    Kellie Diodato is a native New Yorker currently residing in Brooklyn. Kellie is currently a middle school educator at an independent school in Spanish Harlem. She has earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Theater at Marymount Manhattan College, and is currently a Master of Fine Art in Poetry candidate at Columbia University School of The Arts.

  • Hudhaymat Soud

    PROJECT ASSISTANT  (Global Youth, Zanzibar)

    My name is Hudhaymat Said Soud, and I’m 22 years old.  My study and passion is in the medical field. I've participated in an exchange program in the USA from the KL-YES (Kennedy Lugar Youth Exchange) program where I spent a year learning about several things including how I could grow as a person for both me and my community. I spend most of my free time volunteering in my society and I love exploring the world by learning new things. For me, Super Power of Me is a necessary Project for the young African kids as well as all the kids across the globe because the project inspires people to express themselves, an issue that is still a challenge for the African people. I also love this project because it's full of positive energy.

  • Abuu Sharif

    PROJECT ASSISTANT  (Global Youth, Zanzibar)

    My name is Abubakar Mohamed Sharif, I’m 22 years old and live in Stonetown, Zanzibar in Tanzania. My degree is in geography and history from Mwalimu Nyrere Memorian Academy. I also am a business entrepreneur with my own tailoring shop, creating custom clothing with my employees. I liked working with Super Power of Me because in order to build suitable future for our generation we need to see and embrace the power of our children. Super Power of Me is the first project to come to Zanzibar that gives our children a chance to speak for themselves. That’s why I’m so passionate about this project.