Rev. Dr. Zorina Costello serves as the Director of Community Engagement for both the Center for Spirituality and Health (CSH) and the Center for Stress Resilience and Personal Growth at the Icahn School of Medicine. She facilitates the Multi-faith Initiative on Community and Health working with faith and community-based organizations where her role is to help with the integration of faith and health in the community. Dr. Costello is a staff chaplain and past interim clinical director of the Department of Spiritual Care at Mount Sinai Hospital and past preceptor to CPE residents and interns. Her role includes serving as the Director for M.I.C.A.H. ™ Project HEAL, which is an education, health screening, promotion and advocacy effort to engage congregations and communities in medically underserved areas surrounding the Mount Sinai Health System hospitals and throughout New York City. Project HEAL (Health through Early Awareness Learning) is one of the more recent efforts of the Center which began in 2017 by training representatives of congregations to teach a health education curriculum to raise awareness about the significance of health screenings and lifestyle management to improve the quality of health outcomes. She also provides consultation to Behavioral Oncology and the Tisch Cancer Institute to help increase cancer education and early screening.
Dr.Costello co-facilitates an Anti-Racism Task Force for CSH. Her specialty is Pastoral Care/Counseling, Liberation and Latina Feminist Theology where people are encouraged to actively engage with sacred texts using Postcolonial Theologies of liberation, womanist, and Latina feminism with critical analysis. She believes in social transformations that recognize and validate the perspectives of marginalized peoples, cultures and identities. She continues to teach within the Ichan school of Medicine and both “Centers.” Recently she has joined several teams at MSHS as a co-investigator/researcher.
Previously she worked at Texas Christian University, Brite Divinity School as the Director of the Counseling/Training Center in Fort Worth for the Department of Defense providing counseling to enlisted and civilian personnel and has had a private counseling therapy practice. As an ordained Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal denomination, she serves on the ministerial staff of Bethel AME Freeport Church. She is bilingual Spanish language-culture and of Puerto Rican heritage and she grew up in East Harlem, New York.