Alex Fella is a writer and researcher based in Norfolk, Virginia. His work broadly focuses on how the activities of financial firms create poverty in cities. He is the founder of CityWork, an organization that empowers nonprofits with community-focused research, data, and digital maps. Through his work, Alex brings new ideas to rethink longstanding place-based questions across the globe and the Tidewater region. His most recent projects include the Norfolk Gun Violence Dashboard (2022) which examines the relationship between gun violence and poverty in Norfolk, and Squeezed Out (2021), a multi-year investigation into the buy up of Hampton Roads' apartments by private equity firms. He is a frequent contributor to Norfolk Currents where he writes about affordable housing.

His PhD work looks at how joy helps us rethink our relationship to the natural world and he has worked widely on the relationship between cities and sacred land, including in the U.S Virgin Islands; Italy; China; and Mongolia. Alex is a 4th year fellow at the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. He earned his M.A from Yale University, where he holds a Master’s in Philosophy of Religion, and he will join Christopher Newport University’s faculty in the Spring 2023 as an adjunct professor of Anthropology.