Peace Center Team

Migdalia Garcia
Director
The San Antonio Peace Center

Migdalia (Mig) Garcia is the San Antonio Peace Center director. She leads with a spirit of collaboration and co-creation. Mig is a passionate peace and social justice educator and practitioner at Northwest Vista College.

Her borderland beginnings have shaped her intersectional approach to living, learning, and scholarship. The Center collaborates on various programs and initiatives that foster strong connections with the campus and community to cultivate compassion, challenge structural inequities, and promote our collective well-being and healing.

Migdalia serves as a board member of various organizations whose missions are to make the local and global community more compassionate and equitable. To center herself, she likes to read, travel, go outdoors, pet her dogs, and spend time with her family.

Neil Lewis
Academic and Campus Events Coordinator
The San Antonio Peace Center

Neil Lewis is a passionate educator and peacebuilder who has dedicated his career to helping others. He is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Peace and Conflict Studies program coordinator at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas. In addition to his faculty member role, Neil coordinates academic and community programming and facilitates Racial Healing circles and Active Bystander Training for the San Antonio Peace Center. Neil has an MA in History (UTSA 2000) and a graduate certificate in Conflict Transformation (St. Mary’s University 2017).

Neil is a strong advocate for justice, equality, and equity for all members of our diverse community. Neil has proudly taught at NVC for over twenty years and loves traveling, cooking, and painting.

Dr. Julie Moore-Felux
Learning and Development Lead
The San Antonio Peace Center

Julie Moore-Felux, PhD, is a dedicated peacebuilder and educator who is passionate about creating a more compassionate world. She is a professor of English at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio, Texas, and the lead curriculum developer for the CompassionateUSA project. Julie has a doctoral degree in Curriculum and Instruction from New Mexico State University and over 20 years of teaching experience in higher education.

Julie is a passionate facilitator who helps people cultivate compassion, justice, and authenticity in their personal and professional lives. She facilitates various communities of practice, such as Renewal and Wholeness, Racial Healing Circles, and Compassion Circles. Julie is passionate about creating safe and supportive spaces for people to connect with themselves and others, explore their inner wisdom and sense of purpose, and heal through circles and other group practices. She works with people in education, healthcare, faith communities, and other professional and community sectors.

Julie believes that education is a powerful tool for personal and social transformation. She is committed to using her skills and experience to create a more compassionate world.

Julie lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband, Thomas, and she is the proud parent of two adult children, Julienne and Alec. She enjoys creative writing, cooking, and wake surfing. Julie has a wicked sense of humor, cries easily and without embarrassment, and always tells it like it is.

Dr. Eric Castillo
Associate Vice Chancellor of Art, Culture, and Community Impact
Alamo Colleges District

Dr. Eric Castillo (he/him/él) is a second-generation Xicano from Yanaguana/San Antonio, Tejas, a social justice practitioner and scholar helping to produce a just, compassionate, and liberated world. He serves as Associate Vice Chancellor of Art, Culture, and Community Impact for the Alamo Community Colleges District and our local communities.

Committed to the lifelong practice of solidarity and peacemaking, he co-leads and co-creates opportunities where people can collectively flourish and work towards positive and sustainable social change. His community organizing background focuses on immigration, education equity, and racial justice. Through his office and the Peace Center, he co-facilitates racial healing circles, truth, racial healing, and transformation programs, along with various community-based projects such as the First Peoples Project and the Westside Black History Project.

Dr. Castillo received his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. He was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship recipient and Israel-Palestine Studies Faculty Fellowship recipient. He currently holds a Racial Healing Practitioner Fellowship with the National Compadres Network, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. His most recent publication, “Justice in Action: Decolonial and Anti-Racist Work Inside/Outside the Master’s House,” appears in the book Deconstructing Constructs of Whiteness in Higher Education: Narratives of Resistance from the Academy, published in 2022. His forthcoming article, “Myth and Monument in Old Town Albuquerque: SouthwestPietà and the War of Presiding Histories' ' will be published in 2024 in Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal.

Andrew J. Hill
Peace Center Fellow
The San Antonio Peace Center

Andrew J. Hill is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Philip's College in San Antonio, Texas. In the academic year 2023 - 2024, he is a Fellow in the San Antonio Peace Center at Northwest Vista College. In 2018 - 2019, he was a Fellow in the Global Studies Division of Stanford University as part of their Education Partnership for Internationalizing Curriculum.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Philosophy from St. Mary’s University and a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy from the University of St. Thomas. He earned the Doctor of Jurisprudence degree from the Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, which also awarded him the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center Community Service Award.

Hill has extensive higher education experience, including four years as the head of the Service Learning Center at St. Mary's University, where he was a Senior Lecturer of law and ethics in the Graduate School. During his appointment at St. Mary's University, Hill taught courses on international legal systems and international law & treaties for the International Relations program.

Hill also previously taught Philosophy and Ethics at Northwest Vista College, where he received the 2012 Excellence in Teaching Award in part for integrating into his courses the "Exploring Humanitarian Law" program developed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. While at Northwest Vista College, he was also part of the College’s International Education Committee, which received the 2012 College Service Award, and he helped to organize the 2013 Peace and Conflict Studies Summer Workshop.

He has received several grants, including two from the Public Education for Peacebuilding Support initiative of the United States Institute of Peace and one from the Lilly Fellows Program that funded the 2012 Lilly Fellows Program Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, which was held at the Corrymeela Peace Centre in Northern Ireland. This was the first time the annual Summer Seminar was held outside the United States, titled “Teaching Peace and Reconciliation: Theory and Practice in Northern Ireland.”

Hill is a long-time member and current President of the San Antonio Chapter of the Fulbright Association. He coordinated the 2020 Southwest Fulbright Symposium. Three times, he has been the Principal Contact for Academic Arrangements for the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at St. Philip’s College (2016, 2019, 2023). In 2022, he was named an Inaugural Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence Alumni Host Mentor, providing aid and advice to current program hosts. As part of this service, Hill presented at the October 2022 Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Workshop and the webinar “Alumni Impact: SIR Opportunities for Community Colleges and Minority Serving Institutions” in March 2023.

In 2022, Hill received the Global Learning Faculty Award from the Alamo Colleges District, and in 2021, he received the Teaching Excellence Award from the Philosophy Faculty of St. Philip's College. In 2018, Hill received the NISOD Excellence Award for teaching, a national teaching honor from the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, for his innovative teaching of Ethics at St. Philip’s College.

Vladmir Narsia
Fulbright Scholar
The San Antonio Peace Center

Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, Prof. Vladimir Narsia of Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia. The Fulbright SIR Program brings visiting scholars from abroad to U.S. colleges and universities, helping institutions diversify the educational experiences of their students.

Narsia is among more than 45 Fulbright Scholars and 1,000 foreign faculty and professionals who will teach and pursue research in the United States for the 2023-2024 academic year. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kutaisi State University (Tbilisi) and a law degree from Tbilisi State University. He also earned two post-graduate degrees: a Master of Theology (M.Th.) degree from Tbilisi Theological Academy and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree from Cardiff University (Wales, U.K.).

Narsia is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Canon Law at Ilia State University, where he is also the head of the Canon Law Centre. He previously held academic posts in Tbilisi at the Georgian American University and The Saint Andrew, the First-Called Georgian University of the Patriarchate of Georgia. During the academic year 2021-2022, he lived in Rome as a Russell Berrie Fellow at the John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Prof. Narsia is a recognized expert on ecumenical relations and interfaith dialogue and promises to be a valuable resource for the “Introduction to World Religions” (PHIL 1304) course and our campus-wide Interfaith Dialogue initiatives. He has taught courses on Religion and Law, Religion and Politics, Religion and Society, and Church-State Relationships in Georgia.