ESL Instructors

Founder and Director

Kim Andersen is the Founder and Director of Empire State English. She has a background in teaching English as a Second Language and Spanish.

Instructor

Linda Wien is an English as a Second Language instructor for Empire State English. She has a lot of experience teaching adults at all levels.

Instructor

Nina Fleishman has taught English as a Second Language in a variety of settings for more than 35 years. She joined CRLC and ESE in 2018.

Academic Program Coordinator

Sonya was born in the United States, but raised in South Korea until she returned to the States for her graduate school. She holds a BA in History and English language & literature from Korea, and earned her MA in TESOL from University of Pennsylvania.

As the daughter of foreign language instructors, Claudia spent parts of her childhood in both Mexico and France, and was trilingual by the time she was 12. Later on as an adult, she also studied in Paris and in Salamanca, Spain. Although Claudia began her teaching career as a rhetoric and writing professor specializing in

Tom Nygren has over ten years’ experience teaching ESL in a variety of colleges and universities, most recently at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to that, he spent three years teaching English at Sunway University in Malaysia. He worked with Afghan refugees in Pakistan for two years during the 1980s (he also spent part of