Monday, October 5, 2020 | 5 pm (CT)
Opening Plenary
Join us for the opening session of IA’s 2020 Collective Creative Engagement as we kick-off a month dedicated to radically re-imagining and re-building the world in which we live. The session will feature performances by Sunni Patterson, Tarriona Tank Ball, and Dance For Social Change Teen Company, and an Opening Keynote by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Welcomes from Erica Kohl-Arenas, IA Faculty Director; Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes, Chief Executive Officer, Ashé Cultural Arts Center; Brian Edwards, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Tulane University; and other members of the IA consortium. Emceed by Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye.
This event is free and open to the public and will be live streamed on IA’s YouTube channel.
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 | 6:30 - 8 pm (CT)
‘Botanica’ conversation series*
The Neighborhood Story Project and the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange present a series of conversations sponsored by Louisiana Folklife. October 6 – November 24, every Tuesday (except Nov 3, election day) at 6:30pm CDT until 8pm CDT.
Botanica is a multi-racial/ethnic collaboration that pulls together storytellers, scholars, herbalists, museums, artists, and gardeners to cross-pollinate knowledge of ethnobotany across communities in south Louisiana. The project is designed by The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange and The Neighborhood Story Project to honor the life work of our collaborators, and to share their knowledge with the region and beyond.
At the heart of this project is the idea of reciprocal sharing—introducing traditional Indigenous knowledge of plants that Houma communities have been preserved in gardens with the region, and for healers in other communities to healing plants within the bayou communities.
It is our hope that this project will create bridges between communities who have been segregated from one another to create long-lasting relationships. The work will include oral histories, portraits, photographs of plants and their healing properties, and recipes.
Thanks to Jonathan Mayers for creating a beautiful series of artwork to accompany our conversations.
Part 1: A talk with Monique Verdin, director of the Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange
OCT 6
Register here.
Thursday, October 8, 2020 | 6 - 7:15 pm (CT)
Agitators, Policymakers, and Dismantlers in New Orleans*
Women and Movement #7: Agitators, Policymakers, and Dismantlers will be a panel of three women who are shaping change in various forms in New Orleans. Featured panelists: Lisa D. Alexis, Director of Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s Office of Cultural Economy, Jennifer Williams from DismantleNOMA and Alternate ROOTS, and the Music and Culture Coalition of New Orleans program coordinator Hannah Kreiger-Benson. This event will be moderated by filmmaker and Tulane professor Angela Tucker.
This event is organized by the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. Join this session here.
*Cross-promoted event. Free and open to the public but may require a separate registration.
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Arlene Goldbard
Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, consultant, visual artist, and cultural activist whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics and spirituality. Her blog and other writings may be downloaded from her website: www.arlenegoldbard.com. She was born in New York and grew up near San Francisco. She currently lives in Lamy, NM, with her husband, the sculptor Rick Yoshimoto. Her two newest books on art’s public purpose—The Wave and The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future were published in spring 2013. Prior books include New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development, Community, Culture and Globalization, an international anthology published by the Rockefeller Foundation, Crossroads: Reflections on the Politics of Culture, and Clarity, a novel. Her essays have been published in many journals. She has addressed many academic and community audiences in the U.S. and Europe on topics ranging from the ethics of community arts practice to the development of cultural policy. She has provided advice and counsel to hundreds of community-based organizations, independent media groups, higher education institutions, and public and private funders and policymakers. Until 2019, she served as Chief Policy Wonk of the US Department of Arts and Culture and President of the Board of Directors of The Shalom Center.
A Scribe Called Quess?
A Scribe Called Quess? aka Michael “Quess?” Moore is a poet, educator, actor, playwright, activist and organizer in that order. He is a 2-time national poetry slam champion and founding member of Team SNO (Slam New Orleans), New Orleans’ three-time national poetry slam championship team. His poetry has been published or featured by Pluck!, Peauxdunque Review, Maple Leaf Rag, Nike, Congo TV, Balcony TV, Button Poetry, Write About Now Poetry, Spotify, Mic, Ford Foundation, Redbull and other platforms and earned him honors from the mayor and city council of New Orleans. He has shared stages with greats like Saul Williams, Jessica Care Moore, The Last Poet’s Abiodun Oyewole, and many others.
His poetry led him to the classroom where he served for eleven years as an educator having served as an English teacher, Humanities teacher, Instructional Coach, a Librarian and Poetry teacher. His work as an educator has been highlighted on NPR in the Voices of Educators series as well as taken him to Oxford University to speak on school reform.
As a theater maker he has written for and acted in several plays including productions with Junebug Productions (Voices from the Back of the Class, Lockdown, Gomela), ArtSpot Productions (Rumors of War), Urban Bush Women (Summer Leadership Institute 2009), and other esteemed outfits. In 2014 he was awarded a residency at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center as a part of the inaugural class of the DISTILLERY, where he work shopped his first stage play, “Crossroads.” He debuted his one-man show, “Sleeper Cell,” based on his second book, in the Fall 2017 In Fringe festival.
In recent years, his art has more deeply aligned with his principles by way of activism. As his work as an artist and educator has always explored issues of social and racial injustice, his activism has offered the perfect opportunity for his arts and pedagogy to take action.
In 2015, he co-founded Take Em Down NOLA, a coalition dedicated to the removal of white supremacist monuments in New Orleans as a part of the greater push for racial and socio-economic justice. For his contributions to the Take Em Down NOLA work, he was awarded the 2017 Urban League Courage Award. He has featured in the NY Times, Trinidad & Tobago’s Kwame Toure Lecture Series, and several other platforms promoting Take Em Down NOLA’s work.
In May of 2016, he published his second collection of poetry, Sleeper Cell, through Next Left Press. The book can be found on Amazon.com as well has his website www.ascribecalledquess.com. He is a 2018 Hewlett 50 Commissions Award winner along with PolicyLink and the lead, curating artist of PolicyLink’s “We the 100 Million” production set to debut in Fall 2020.
Caron Atlas
Caron Atlas is director of Arts & Democracy, which cross-fertilizes arts and culture, civic participation, and community change. She also directs Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts NY (NOCD-NY), a citywide alliance revitalizing NYC from the neighborhood up. NOCD-NY was a primary partner on NYC’s first cultural plan, CreateNYC. Caron teaches at New York University and Pratt Institute and serves on the Civic Engagement Commission Participatory Budgeting Advisory Committee and the PBNYC Citywide committee.
Previously Caron worked at Appalshop, the Appalachian cultural center and directed the American Festival Project, a national coalition of activist artists. Caron has consulted with Animating Democracy, Pratt Center for Community Development, Network of Ensemble Theaters, Urban Institute, and several foundations.
Caron is co-editor of Bridge Conversations and Critical Perspectives, and contributor to Toward a 21st City for All. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Warren Weaver Fellow and is a Coro Leadership NY alumnus. She received her BA and MA from the University of Chicago.
Janet Sula Spirit
Nana Sula Spirit… Woman of Peace is a Singer, Songwriter, Author, Entrepreneur, Artist, Producer, Birth Doula, Professor and Priestess of Light. She was initiated in Ghana, West Africa as a traditional healer in 2007 and has studied African Spiritual Traditions since 1985. In 2014, Sula Spirit authored and produced the Book & CD Project entitled Spirit of the Orisha – a Yoruba Song preservation project. Sula was the sacred song instructor for two years at the Ifa University in Washington, D.C. Nana,Sula is Founding Priestess of the Temple of Light – Ile de
Coin-Coin – a Temple of power for the elevation of souls located in the Musicians Village in New Orleans Louisiana. Sula holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree with distinguished honors in African Studies and English Literature from Rutgers University in New Jersey (1994). She has traveled extensively throughout Africa and the Caribbean and has been a volunteer with Operation Crossroads Africa participating in community development projects on the Continent since 1991. She is a Singer/Songwriter with the World Beat/Reggae band Zion Trinity and recently recorded her solo CD in Tanzania, East Africa entitled “A Journey Within”. In addition, Sula Spirit is a Mardi Gras Indian Medicine Queen with the Mandingo Warriors – the Spirit of Fi-Yi-Yi, a member of the Mardi Gras Indian Queens of the Nation Society and a Board Member of the Congo Square Preservation Society
Sunni Patterson
More than a poet, more than a singer, more than an emcee–it’s not just what she says; it’s how she says it. Emerging from the musical womb that is New Orleans, artist and visionary Sunni Patterson combines the heritage and tradition of her native town with an enlightened modern world view to create music and poetry that is timeless in its groove.
Armed with an engaging story, voice, and presence, Sunni has been the featured performer at many of the Nation’s premier spoken word venues, including HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and BET’s Lyric Cafe. She has also shared her work on the Arsenio Hall Show, TEDWomen (Momentum 2015), and on several international stages. Inspired by her words, Beats by Dre commissioned Sunni to provide the soundscape for tennis great Serena Williams’ workout (wireless beats) commercial, and the congratulatory piece for Williams’ third US Open win (Congratulations Serena ft. Sunni Patterson).
As a highly sought after lecturer, workshop facilitator, and performer, she deliberately uses art as a tool to recognize, address, and eliminate all forms of oppression. She has trained under great scholars, allowing her to become a Certified Professional Life Coach (CPC), a certified instructor of Chi Kung (Qi Gong) and Tai Chi for Health, and a diligent student in the healing and spiritual arts. Believing in the transformational role poetry and spoken word plays, Sunni’s mission is to aid in the awakening, the revival, and the remembrance of our gifts and voices.
Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye
Educator, entertainer, emcee, and New Orleans native Frederick “Wood” Delahoussaye has propelled through the elements of artistry, socially engaged interdisciplinary projects and entertainment for almost two decades.
He serves as Artist in Residence and Artistic Director for the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, a nonprofit organization that creates and supports programs, activities and creative works emphasizing the contributions of people of African descent in Central City New Orleans, as well as Lead Artist for Junebug Productions’ Homecoming Project, a community-based, storytelling performance series that marries artistic practice with a commitment to maintaining the essential relationship between culture and progressive social change through engagement with New Orleans communities that have been historically oppressed and exploited. He is a featured performer in KM Dance Project’s Distorted Images and Taken, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center’s Big Easy Award-winning The Origin of Life on Earth. He is a member of the New Orleans Youth Open Mic (NOYOM) executive committee and former poet mentor for Imagining America.
Wood is a published author, poet, and featured writer for publications including Offline Magazine, VIBE, and the Southern Cypher Artists Cooperative, of which he served as Executive Director. He was associate producer and writer for Cox Television Productions’ Spoken, and director of the ACT I Black Theater Festival productions, The Color of Self and Change Gon’ Come and Poetic Panther Productions’, The Motherland Before They Came. He served as Director of Operations for Project Future for the Youth, Inc., Musical Coordinator for Ebony Square Cultural Center and is the Founder of Lifeline Entertainment Group.
He is a recipient of the Asante Foundation’s Cultural Ambassador Award for Performance Art, National Performance Network Mentorship and Leadership award, Archdiocese of New Orleans’ Servant Leader Award, a Puentes Public Leader Fellow and Mellon Foundation Community Engagement Fellow, to name a few.
Mina Para Matlon
Mina Para Matlon is an arts organizer, researcher, attorney, artist, and cultural equity advocate. Inspired by the spatial and temporal bridge building work of traditional knowledge bearers, Matlon’s research interests lie in the intersecting areas between arts and community development, with her practice particularly focused on supporting local and Indigenous communities who seek to protect and leverage their cultural assets. Since 2017, she has served as the managing director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (IA), a national consortium of scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers who imagine, study and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Prior to joining IA, she served as the director of research for Dance/USA and was the co-founder of the Canadian-U.S. advocacy collective Plural, in which capacity she served as principal co-investigator and lead author of Figuring the Plural, a landmark study examining the characteristics, needs, and support structures of Canadian and U.S. ethnocultural arts organizations. Her previous work has spanned both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, including positions within higher education, corporate law, domestic and international legal aid and policy organizations, and small to large arts, media, and cultural institutions.
Matlon has trained in dance, theater, photography, and the fiber arts and holds degrees from Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been appointed to the boards and advisory committees of arts organizations based in New York, Illinois, Oregon, and California and has served as a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Matlon currently serves on the board of directors for California Humanities, the advisory board of Pepatian, a South Bronx-based multidisciplinary arts organization, the leadership team of the UC Davis African American Faculty and Staff Association, and the editorial board of the American Journal for Arts Management. She is a Robert Wood Johnson Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Fellow.
Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang is the Vice President for Narrative, Arts and Culture at Race Forward. A national leader in narrative and cultural strategy, Jeff co-founded CultureStr/ke and ColorLines. He was named by The Utne Reader as one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” and by KQED as an Asian Pacific American Local Hero. He has been a USA Ford Fellow in Literature and the winner of the Asian American Literary Award. He was recently named to the Frederick Douglass 200.
His books include Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, and Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America). His latest, We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation, was named the Northern California Nonfiction Book Of The Year, and the Washington Post declared it “the smartest book of the year.” In May 2019, he and director Bao Nguyen created a four-episode digital series adaptation of the book for PBS Indie Lens Storycast.
Tarriona Michelle Ball
Tarriona Michelle Ball (aka Tarriona Tank Ball) is cool. That’s it. She’s the person you want to be your friend. Aside from being a nationally award-winning poet, decorated singer, and once or twice theatre performer, she is pretty much the girl you should go out to eat with. Ball’s early years were spent in church performing poems to a small congregation and singing with her sisters. Later she developed a love for performing and joined a poetry group called NOYS (New Orleans Youth Slammers) which turned out to be apart of a bigger story in HBO’s hit show, Brave New Voices.
She later left the youth slammers and joined the dynamic poetry slam team, Team SNO where they won countless trophies. This group of people combined Ball’s love for music, poetry, and performing all in one thus molding her into the powerful performer she is today. After winning their last National Championship together, Ball knew that she accomplished everything she needed to with Team SNO and it was time for the next chapter in her life, The Bangas.
Every Sunday night Ball would attend a special open mic in New Orleans that would open her up to a world that she never knew. This world was full of storytellers, neighborhood griots, and musicians, this place was called Black Starr books and cafe where Tarriona’s gifts and stories were celebrated. Deciding to take her spoken word and music on the road was the next step for Ball and the musicians at this open mic. The rest is the history being made today: Tank and The Bangas won the NPR Tiny Desk concert in 2017 and has since toured Internationally, released their debut album with Verve/UMG, and has been called one of the best live band’s in the world. Most recently Tank along with her band The Bangas snagged their first Grammy nomination.
Asali DeVan Ecclesiastes
Mother, daughter, educator, organizer, author, event producer, performance artist, and community servant. Most know her by her many pursuits, but the way this writer knows herself and the world around her, is through her exploration of the word. Embedded in the cultural soil of New Orleans and watered by the writings of her literary idols, Kalamu ya Salaam, Sonia Sanchez, and Toni Morrison, Asali has grown to bask in the sun of her literary heritage—from the sages who transformed pharaoh to God in Ancient Khemet to the Spy Boys who chant the way clear for Big Chiefs on Carnival Day. Ms. Ecclesiastes excitedly brings her deep roots in New Orleans’ indigenous culture to her work as the new Executive Director of Efforts of Grace and Ashé Cultural Arts Center.
Prior to joining Ashé, Ms. Ecclesiastes served as Director of Strategic Neighborhood Development for the New Orleans Business Alliance, where she designed equitable development strategies for high impact neighborhoods—empowering resident leaders and making bold commitments to address entrenched disparities. She became devoted to this mission as the Claiborne Corridor Program Manager for the City of New Orleans’ Mayor’s Office, where she advanced place-based projects and secured funding within six priority areas: economic opportunity, cultural preservation, affordable housing, transportation choice and access, environmental sustainability, and safe & healthy neighborhoods.
Before her brief life in government, Ms. Ecclesiastes worked as Congo Square Coordinator for N.O. Jazz & Heritage Festival, Artist Relations Director and Empowerment Seminars Author for Essence Music Festival, and Executive Producer of Tremé 200 Festival, N.O. Juneteenth Festival, Tremé/7th Ward Arts & Culture Festival, and Akoben Words-In-Action Festival. She has taught in New Orleans public schools, universities, and prisons, and continues to utilize her spoken and written word as a platform for societal change through art and social justice for all humanity. Asali has toured nationally with the critically acclaimed, “Swimming Upstream”, a play she co-wrote with a cohort of extraordinary NOLA women, exploring life in New Orleans following the post-Katrina flood and produced by author of the Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler.
The author of two TED Talks and chosen as one of the 300 most influential citizens for the City’s Tricentennial, Ms. Ecclesiastes is a 2019 Tulane University Mellon Fellow who counts among her honors President Obama’s 2012 Drum Major for Service Award, the New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian Council’s 2013 Queen’s Scribe Award, and Essence Magazine’s 2018 Excellence in Service Award.
Ms. Ecclesiastes is a graduate of McMain Magnet High School and Vanderbilt University, where she earned Bachelors of Science in English Literature and Secondary Education, with minors in Biology and African Diaspora Studies—a program she co-founded at the university with her sisters of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.
As she embraces her new role as Executive Director of Efforts of Grace and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Asali holds the wisdom of Zimbabwean author Matshona Dhliwayo who proclaims, “To help people takes strength, to inspire people takes wisdom, to rule over them takes virtue, but to elevate them takes love. The real power of a leader is in the number of minds she can reach, hearts she can touch, souls she can move, and lives she can change.”
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar earned her B.A. in dance from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and her M.F.A. in dance from Florida State University. In 1980 Jawole moved to New York City to study with Dianne McIntyre at Sounds in Motion.
In 1984 Jawole founded Urban Bush Women (UBW) as a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring the use of cultural expression as a catalyst for social change. She has created over 34 works for UBW, as well as for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and others. Her collaborations include Compagnie Jant-Bi from Senegal and Nora Chipaumire. Her company has toured five continents and was selected as one of three U.S. dance companies to inaugurate a cultural diplomacy program for the U.S. Department of State in 2010. She is the founder of UBW Summer Leadership Institute, founding Artistic Director and Visioning Partner of UBW and currently holds the position of the Nancy Smith Fichter Professor of Dance and Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Jawole received a 2008 United States Artists Wynn fellowship and a 2009 fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial. Jawole received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and honorary degrees from Tufts University and Rutgers University. Jawole received the Dance Magazine Award in 2015 and the Dance/USA Honor Award in 2016. Recently, Jawole received the 2017 Bessie Lifetime Achievement in Dance Award for her work in the field.
Erica Kohl-Arenas
Erica Kohl-Arenas is an Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of California, Davis and the Faculty Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. She is a scholar of social movements, freedom struggles, and the politics of institutionalization, professionalization, and private philanthropy. Kohl-Arenas’ research has focused primarily on the radical imaginations and deferred dreams of social movements that become entangled with the politics of institutionalization and funding. This work is captured in her book The Self-Help Myth: How Philanthropy Fails to Alleviate Poverty(University of California Press, 2016) and in a diversity of publications including Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, Social Movement Studies, Journal of Poverty, Geography Compass, Public: A Journal of Imagining America, chapters in books with international scholars of philanthropy and poverty studies, and public scholarship platforms including HistPhil and Transformation (at Open Democracy).
Based on an early mentoring relationship with the late Myles Horton of the Highlander Center in Tennessee, all of Kohl-Arenas’ work is inspired by the principles of movement building, popular education and liberatory pedagogy. As an organizer, popular educator and researcher, she has worked with farmworker and immigrant organizations in California’s Central Valley, in the coal-mining towns of Appalachia, in California urban public schools, and, internationally, in southern Africa, Scotland and Wales. Over the past decade Kohl-Arenas organized a number of action research partnerships with cultural institutions, humanities initiatives, and nonprofit organizations, and currently directs the diverse public scholarship platforms of Imagining America. Kohl-Arenas was the inaugural recipient of The New School’s Achievements in Social Justice Teaching Award (2014), and received The New School Distinguished University Teaching Award (2016) as faculty at The New School in New York City, where she was awarded tenure in May 2017. She now teaches courses on California social movements and public scholarship at UC Davis.
Kohl-Arenas currently serves as a Co-PI on two major research initiatives: the IA Leading and Learning Initiative about the politics of institutional change in higher education in support of public and activist scholarship, and a collaborative research project about the reclamation of land, agriculture, and community memory in building self-determined futures in rural Black Mississippi, in partnership with Mina Matlon, and Carlton Turner of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). She is also working on a book project about intergenerational freedom fighters from the 1960s and now. Kohl-Arenas received a BA in Sociology from Reed College, a Masters of Science in Community Development from UC Davis, and a PhD in Social and Cultural Studies in Education from UC Berkeley.
Trina Van Schyndel
Trina Van Schyndel is the Membership Director for Imagining America, and she also coordinates the Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows program. She comes to IA with extensive experience in higher education settings, including community-engaged learning and community-campus partnerships. She also has been responsible for supporting networks of publicly-engaged practitioner-scholars. Previously, Van Schyndel worked in the community engagement offices at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and the Medical College of Wisconsin. She is also a prior director of Campus Compact for Wisconsin.
Van Schyndel has bachelor’s degrees in international relations and German from Michigan State University, and she served for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ukraine where she taught English at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Upon returning to the U.S., her passion for experiential education and the environment led her earn a master’s degree in natural resources from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, and she has experience as an environmental educator in state and national parks, nature centers, and an environmentally-focused residential high school. Her journey then led her to transition from environmental education to higher education, where she found a home in community engagement, especially place-based approaches to supporting and sustaining communities and their connections to the world around them. She is inspired by approaches to this work that incorporate the arts and humanities, especially music, storytelling, photography, and handicrafts.
Van Schyndel is currently a doctoral student in the higher, adult, and lifelong education program at Michigan State University, where she is also completing her graduate certificate in community engagement. Her dissertation focuses on the identity development of community-engaged practitioner-scholars through their participation in community engagement professional associations while in graduate school. Recent publications and presentations focus on supporting community-engaged graduate students and community-engaged boundary-spanners in higher education. She is originally from the Midwest, but she and her dog, Sammy, are excited to explore their new home in California. She loves walks with her dog, cooking and trying new foods, exploring new places, hanging out with family and friends, and reading a good sci-fi novel.
Kal Alston
Kal Alston is professor in Cultural Foundations of Education and in Women’s and Gender Studies at Syracuse University. She is Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the School of Education and previously served as Senior Associate Provost and Senior Vice President. In all her appointments, she has been invested in helping academic units leverage all resources and create fruitful collaborations, inside and outside of the University, to broaden the academic impact on and for faculty and students. As a philosopher of education, Alston’s scholarly interests center on intersections of popular culture/media with American experiences of race, class, and gender. She is currently working on analyses of the history of civil rights in US education as it connects to other cultural institutions. Her most recent publications have focused on ethics and higher educational leadership, the phenomenal experience of race in philosophical practice, and the relevance of truth in educational practice. She is currently chair of the Imagining America National Advisory Board and the president-elect of the Philosophy of Education Society.
Kim Szeto
Kim Szeto is currently Program Director, Public Art at the New England Foundation for the Arts. Kim grew up in Boston and has a deep love for this city and all its complexities. She’s a graduate of Wheaton College (MA) and has a background in Environmental Studies with a focus on food systems change.
Daphne Muse, Seasoned Elder
Daphne Muse is a writer, veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, educator, and cultural broker. Born in Washington, DC to parents who were part of the second wave of migration up South under The Warmth of Other Suns, Muse graduated from Fisk University with a BA in American and English Literature. At Fisk, her activism was forged by the Anti-War Movement and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She went on to teach in DC Public Schools before landing a job at Drum and Spear Bookstore where the work expanded her consciousness deeply into the African Diaspora and connected her with activists, writers, and poets throughout the world. Her work has been published in “This Week in Palestine,” The Atlantic, and aired on NPR. She also served as a writer for The Education Division for the Commission on Major League Baseball and Scholastic, Inc. Norman Lear’s Declaration of Independence Road Show. After migrating to Northern California in 1971, she served as a secretary for the Legal Defense Team for the Angela Davis Trial. In 1972, she joined the faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She went on to serve on the faculty at Mills College and Director of the Women’s Leadership Institute. For thirty-nine years, her home in Oakland was an Oasis in the Diaspora for poets, writers, activists, and filmmakers including Afeni Shaku and her son Tupac, author Alice Walker, Civil Rights icon Rosa Parks, and Palestinian poet and artist Manar Harb. Muse has spent the past two years presenting at cultural centers, archival repositories, and academic institutions based The Daphne Muse Correspondence Collection of more than 5,000 letters documenting Black Lives and Cultures Across the Diaspora from 1958 to the present
Carlton Turner
Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, researcher and founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). Sipp Culture uses food and story to support rural community, cultural, and economic development in his hometown of Utica, Mississippi where he lives with his wife Brandi and three children.
Carlton currently serves on the board of First People’s Fund, Imagining America, and Project South. Carlton is a member of the We Shall Overcome Fund Advisory Committee at the Highlander Center for Research and Education and former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS. He is also a founding partner of the Intercultural Leadership Institute.
Carlton is a current Interdisciplinary Research Fellow with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. He is also a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and a Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts.
Carlton Turner is also co-founder and co-artistic director, along with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction). M.U.G.A.B.E.E. is a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling. His current work is River Sols, a new play being developed in collaboration with Pangea World Theater that explores race, identity, class, faith, and difference across African American and South Asian communities through embodiment of a river.
He is also a member of the Rural Wealth Lab at RUPRI (Rural Policy Research Institute) and an advisor to the Kresge Foundation’s FreshLo Initiative. In 2018, Carlton was awarded the Sidney Yates Award for Advocacy in the Performing Arts by the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. Carlton has also received the M. Edgar Rosenblum award for outstanding contribution to Ensemble Theater (2011) and the Otto René Castillo Awards for Political Theatre (2015).
Brett Snyder
Brett Snyder is an Associate Professor of Design at the University of California Davis and a principal of Cheng+Snyder an experimental architecture and design studio based in Oakland, California. Much of Snyder’s work, at the intersection of architecture and media, focuses on the ways that design can engage communities in impactful ways. He is a co-lead of Imagining America’s Collective of Publicly Engaged Designers, an organization that highlights the ways in which an engaged design process can foster community resilience. Recent projects include Unlock Alameda Creek, a resilience building initiative in the SF Bay Area; Smart Sidewalks, a winning entry to the NYC Reinvent Payphones competition; and Museum of the Phantom City an architectural iPhone app to view visionary but un-built architecture. Together, these projects represent the forefront of engaged design, with an array of experimental methods, including analog and digital techniques to foster civic and environmental participation.
Mallika Bose
Mallika Bose, Professor of Landscape Architecture; Associate Dean for Research, Creative Activity, and Graduate Studies, Penn State. Co-Chair CoPED
Mallika Bose is an architect (Jadavpur University, Kolkata – India and School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India) and urban planner with a specialization in environment-behavior studies (Kansas State University and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee).
She is a professor and the graduate program coordinator in the Department of Landscape Architecture, as well as the associate dean for research, creative activity, and graduate studies with the College of Arts and Architecture. From 2008 to 2012 she served as the interim director/director of the Hamer Center for Community Design at Penn State. Bose currently serves on the board of directors of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), and served as the chair of the EDRA Board in 2012-2013.
Her research is motivated by her interest in understanding how social structures are embedded in the built environment, and how such socio-spatial constructions shape behavior of different groups in society. She has been active in research in the following areas: Built Environment and Active Living/Healthy Eating; Public Scholarship and Community Based Design; Gender and Development; and Design/Planning Pedagogy.
Bose’s scholarship has been published in the Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, Landscape Journal, Habitat International, International Development and Planning Research, Open House International, and Journal of Urban Design. She also co-edited a book on community engaged teaching and scholarship titled, Community Matters: Service-learning in Engaged Design and Planning.
Carol Bebelle
New Orleans native, Co-founder and Executive Director of Efforts of Grace,Inc./ Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Bebelle is a constant voice and advocate for the primal influence of culture in emerging equity, justice and compassion in American society. This learning and insight was derived from her first career in human service planning that spanned two decades. Her day-to-day laboratory, however, for this work for 21 years has been the Ashé Cultural Arts Center where the day to day was created by the intersections of culture, community and art.
Effective 2020, her new platform is AKUA Productions NOLA where her artist self is made present in her efforts to engender radical hopefulnes, compassion, justice and cultural healing.
Spirit McIntyre
Spirit McIntyre (spirit/they/them) is a Cellist, Vocalist, Lyricist, Wellness Advocate, Sound Healer, Reiki Practitioner, and Compassionate Facilitator — promoting empowerment and healing by any medium necessary. Spirit believes in: the importance of breath, the power of deep listening and witnessing, holding space for complex emotions, healing intergenerational trauma, honoring lovability, and growing compassionately through tight places to find authentic connection. They incorporate these beliefs in their lyfe practice, work, and performance rituals, which focus on: Black folks, Transgender, Gender-Non-Conforming and Non-Binary identities, Health & Wellness, Self-Expression, Ancestral worship, and Grief practices. Spirit is the Lead Organizer for Trans*Visible and their reputation for honesty, compassion, and accountability allows for deeply transformative healing to be a through line in all of their performance and advocacy work. Spirit created their multi-disciplinary healing arts practice, SpiritWerks, in 2014. Since the transitioning of their father, Paris McIntyre on January 16, 2017, Spirit has been exploring the divinity of grief.
José Torres-Tama
Ecuadorian-born José Torres-Tama is a published poet and playwright, an arts educator, cultural activist, and visual and performance artist. He explores the underbelly of the “North American Dream” mythology and post-9/11 blind nationalism that has led to rampant anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States of Amnesia, which seduces its people to embrace forgetting the atrocities committed in the name of freedom.
Among many awards, he’s received a prestigious MAPFUND for his Taco Truck Theater / Teatro Sin Fronteras ensemble dinner theater on wheels that challenges the criminalization of immigrants and the parallel struggles of African Americans with continuous killings of unarmed Black civilians by white police. This Taco Truck Kills Fascists is the documentary on his theater on wheels, and Directed by Chilean-American filmmaker Rodrigo Dorfman, it won Best Louisiana Feature at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival.
Aliens, Immigrants, & Other Evildoers is his “sci-fi Latino noir” performance solo that exposes the rise in hate crimes against immigrants—dehumanized by the same system that readily exploits their labor. ALIENS has sold-out a two hundred-seat theater at Vanderbilt University, and his fall 2019 tour sold-out shows in Houston, New Orleans, and Los Angeles.
Northwestern University Press has published the full performance script of Aliens in a 2019 book titled Encuentro: New Latinx Performances for the American Theater, and this anthology brings together six contemporary Latinx playwrights.
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/encuentro
The recently published experimental poetry book GLOSOLALIA: Border Poetics Against the Wall (USA/Mexico, 2020) contains Torres-Tama provocative Spanglish verse on borders as colonial scars. From 2006 to 2011, Torres-Tama contributed commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA that explored the many challenges of Latino immigrant workers in post-Katrina New Orleans. His forthcoming book Hard Living in the Big Easy: Immigrants & the Rebirth of New Orleans documents the human rights violations experienced by immigrant reconstruction workers who have given their blood, labor, and love to resurrect a devastated port city from its critical condition in the immediate years post-storm. www.torrestama.com
Adam Carr
Adam Carr is an independent based in Milwaukee, WI, who works at the intersection of community and communication. Carr’s work ranges from writing to media, photography to film making, public art to in-depth tours. He was co-chair for the Coordinating Committee of March On Milwaukee 50th commemorating Milwaukee’s Open Housing Marches with a 200 Nights of Freedom in 2017-2018. In 2016, he authored the children’s book Explore MKE: Your Neighborhood, Our City, working with five 3rd grade classrooms throughout Milwaukee and SHARP Literacy. Carr is the Deputy Editor for Community Engagement at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and was the producer at 88Nine RadioMilwaukee from 2008-2011.
Gwen Johnson
Gwen Johnson has been a leader in the Letcher County Culture Hub since its founding in 2016. She is longtime secretary-treasurer of the Hemphill Community Center, a Culture Hub partner, where she directs the Center’s day-to-day operations and founded the Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery and Catering Company, featured on PBS NewsHour in 2018. Gwen is one of the Culture Hub’s most active and effective leaders, who is very eager to learn how to build power more effectively. Gwen grew up in the coal camp of Hemphill, where she still resides, as the daughter, and granddaughter of coal miners. She graduated high school unable to read beyond a second-grade level; she learned to read while reading to her children and went to college the same year her oldest daughter did, receiving a BS at the University of Pikeville and an MA at Goddard College in health arts and sciences. She has worked as an administrator in the University of Kentucky’s Early Childhood Development program since 2003.
Laura Harjo
Laura Harjo is a Mvskoke scholar and an associate professor teaching Indigenous Planning, Community Development and Indigenous Feminisms at the University of Oklahoma’s department of Native American Studies. Her scholarly inquiry is at the intersection of geography and critical ethnic studies with “community” as an analytic focus. Harjo’s research and teaching centers on three areas: imbuing complexity to Indigenous space, and place; Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives and anti-violence; and community-based knowledge production. She is the author of Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (University of Arizona Press, 2019), which employs Mvskoke ways of knowing, and Indigenous feminisms to grapple with a community based practice of futurity.
Denise Griffin Johnson
Denise Griffin Johnson is the director of the Arch Social Community Network in West Baltimore, a community-led cultural organizing network founded in 2015 and based at the historic Arch Social Club. Denise has decades of experience as an organizer and advocate in Baltimore, during which she has held many positions in government and nonprofit organizations and served on numerous boards and advisory groups. She is a co-founder of CultureWorks Baltimore, a member of the national network Alternate ROOTS, and a Cultural Agent with the US Department of Arts and Culture (a non-government entity). In 2011-2013 Denise collaborated with Alternate ROOTS and Roadside Theater to produce a cultural festival that drew an audience of 11,000, and in 2015 she collaborated with the higher education consortium Imagining America to produce a national conference and cultural organizing institute in Baltimore. Denise is a graduate of Coppin State University, with an MS in Family Counseling.
Ausettua AmorAmenkum
Ausettua AmorAmenkum is committed to the preservation, documentation and presentation of traditional and indigenous cultural art forms from Africa and New Orleans. The Director of Kumbuka African Drum & Dance Collective; her company has presented traditional African dance for 40 years through out Louisiana. The “Big Queen” of the Washitaw Nation, Black Masking Indians of New Orleans (also known as Mardi Gras Indians) she along with the Indian Nation creates and presents hand sewn suits that are often viewed in the sacred pageantry on the streets of New Orleans and abroad at festivals, schools etc. Ausettua is also adjunct professor of African & Hip Hop Dance at Tulane University for 25 years. As Co-Director of the Louisiana Correctional Facility for Women (LCIW) Drama Club and The Graduates Rising, a group of formerly incarcerated women, Ausettua continues to use art as activism, art to uplift community and art to facilitate healing.
Dance For Social Change Teen Company
Dance for Social Change Teen Company is a New Orleans based performance group that uses their artistic voices to advocate for justice. They examine social issues impacting their communities, create original multidisciplinary performances about those issues, and organize the annual Dance for Social Change Festival in collaboration with local advocacy organizations, youth groups, and civic leaders. Past themes have included the school-to-prison pipeline (2016); women’s rights and gender justice (2017); mental health (2018); and gentrification and displacement (2019-2020). This year they are focused on creating a series of short dance films surrounding topics that have come up during the pandemic such as: navigating online school, maintaining social relationships during physical distancing, and reflecting on the recent movements around racial equity or the lack thereof. Dance for Social Change is a program of Dancing Grounds, a nonprofit organization that develops young leaders, promotes health and wellness and advocates for social justice through dance. For more information: dancingrounds.org, @dancinggrounds, @danceforsocialchange
John Harris
John Harris grew up in Louisiana and was reared with a social consciousness and community spirit that still drives him today in his work in Baltimore. He is secretary of the board of directors for the Arch Social Community Network (ASCN) at the Historic Arch Social Club, whose mission is to enrich and revitalize the neighborhoods of West Baltimore by providing cultural programming, youth development, and economic opportunities in the community. Additionally, John is president of the neighborhood organization in Baltimore’s of Moravia-Walther, and he serves on the board of directors for HARBEL, a caring multipurpose organization that works to build and support our communities through service, advocacy, and empowerment, and Hamilton Lauraville Main Street, which organizes volunteers and staff for multiple community and economic events such as festivals, the Down Hill Derby, and First Fridays. John is an active member of Black Professional Men (BPM), an organization with the mission focus to ensure the future of the African American male.
Las Nietas de Nonó
The sisters, Mulowayi and Mapenzi are Las Nietas de Nonó . They were raised between the Manuel A. Pérez housing project in Río Piedras and the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina. Their artistic practices stem from the Afro-Diasporic experience in the island-colony context highlighting circumstances and elements that are present in their neighborhood: the expansion of ancestral knowledge, the exchange of food grown and the reuse of found materials. In their creative process they evoke the family memory to expose the systemic oppressions that they have lived through for generations.
The work of Las Nietas de Nonó is fueled by the intersection of experimental theater, activism, ecology, emancipatory education and food. Mulowayi and Mapenzi are the Co founders and Creative Directors of a black womxn social justice organization called Parceleras Afrocaribeñas which is currently implementing a participatory design project for which they were awarded the distinguished grant of Sigrid Rausing Trust, London (2020).
Las Nietas de Nonó have received the United States Artist Award (2018), The Art of Change from the Ford Foundation (2017), and the Global Arts Fund of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2017). Their work has been shown in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, the United States, Scotland, Germany, England and Norway.
Calvin Williams
Over the past 20 years, Calvin Williams has been worldbuilding for liberation.
He believes radical imagination activates our power to transform liberatory possibilities into irresistible realities. As Cultural Strategies Fellow at Movement Strategy Center, he conspires with fellow afrofuturists to produce immersive spaces for new stories and storytellers of Black Joy to emerge. And as an Impact Producer for The Big We, Offsides Productions and Wakanda Dream Lab – he builds fandom communities organized by shared narratives, values and vision for a just future. He moonlights as an educator, reluctant poet, youth advocate, and co-host for The Big We podcast.
In partnership with PolicyLink and Wakanda Dream Lab, Calvin co-produced “Memories of Abolition Day” – the latest fan-fiction publication in the “Black Freedom Beyond Borders” augmented reality anthology series that reimagines the future of public safety rooted in joy and justice.
After many journeys across places, space and time – Calvin lives in Oakland with his Beloveds, Leila & Baby Malik Amari.
Alsie Parks
Alsie Parks is an Atlanta-native, that advocates and activates the use of food as an organizing tool for healing and liberation. As a child of the south, farmer organizer and agrarian cultural worker she serves by cultivating intimate and responsive relationships with and for the land and our people that activate remembrance, honor sacred traditions and practice radical resistance. She is a founding member of Black Agrarian Cultural Workers of the South (BAWS) Collective, currently serves as the lead field organizer for the Southeastern African American Farmers Organic Network (SAAFON) with a focus on weaving, pollinating and crafting kinship in Georgia & Mississippi, and represents the organization on the leadership team for the National Black Food & Justice Alliance (NBFJA).
Marie José Poux
Marie José Poux is a native of Haiti who resides in New Orleans. She is a retired hospice nurse who makes several trips a year to her native country to work with orphan children whose parents are unable to care for them. For over 40 years she has traveled to Haiti at her own expense and with whatever donations she can get in order to distribute these donations to the children and families of Haiti.
The orphanage has been fully operational for the last few years through Marie Jose’s commitment and dedication to the children. When donations and the kind charity of others are unavailable to the children, Marie José Poux has gone into her pockets to provide for the children. She is currently in need of a greater community support effort.
Shelia J. Webb
Dr. Webb is the Associate Clinical Director and Chief Operating Officer at EXCELth, INC, responsible for day to day operations of healthcare centers and facilities. She also develops special projects and health programs including fund procurement, planning, implementation and oversight responsibilities. Dr. Webb serves on staff at the Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Center of Dillard University and Louisiana State University. Dr. Webb is a former Director of Health for the City of New Orleans. In this capacity she successfully undertook the mission of increasing funding for health services for medically underserved populations. She mastered the talent of collaboration with the many community projects she helped to fund and implement forever changing the landscape of the New Orleans Public Health Infrastructure. Dr.
Webb served under two mayors, and was the first African-American, and first non-physician Director of Health for the city of New Orleans. She is a former Commissioned Officer of the U.S. Public Health Service. Dr. Webb research interests include; breast health promotion practices, African-American women, health disparities, and the economic and social determinants of health. Dr. Webb serves as founder and Executor of the Webb Connect Foundation Fund. She holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Nursing from Dillard University and a Master of Science Degree in Nursing from the University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg. She is a Clinical Nurse Specialist. She received the Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Nursing from Southern University and A & M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dr. Webb is the recipient of numerous honors and awards which includes the prestigious Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Award (2000).
Lisa Yun Lee
Lisa Yun Lee (BA, Bryn Mawr College, Ph.D, Duke University) is a cultural activist and the Executive Director of the National Public Housing Museum. Lisa is also an Associate Professor in Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and teaching faculty with the Prison Neighborhood Art Project, She has published books and articles about aesthetics and politics, public art, and the potential of museums as radical sites of resistance, and for participatory democracy. Lisa served as a Co-Chair of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Arts & Culture Transition Team, and is currently on the Mayor’s Committee for the evaluation of Monuments, Memorials and Historical Reckoning. She is currently a member of the Chicago Torture Justice Colelctive, a board member of the Field Foundation, 3Arts, and on the Executive Committee of the UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.
Andreanecia Morris
Andreanecia M. Morris serves as the Executive Director for HousingNOLA, a 10-year public private partnership working to end New Orleans’ affordable housing crisis. The 10-year Strategy and Implementation Plan indicates the need for 33,600 affordable housing opportunities by 2025. Morris has spent her career working to create affordable housing since graduating from Loyola University New Orleans. After Hurricane Katrina, she implemented programs that created over 500 first time homebuyers, secured $104.5 million soft second subsidy for Metro New Orleans and provided supportive services for approximately 5,000 households—homeowners who were struggling to rebuild and renters who required wrap around services. Morris was lead organizer for the Greater New Orleans Housing Alliance (GNOHA) when it started in 2007 and, since its incorporation in 2012, Morris has served as GNOHA’s President. GNOHA’s advocacy supported members and partners in developing approximately 88,000 housing opportunities between 2006 and 2015 in New Orleans.
Gambit Weekly named Morris New Orleanian of the Year for her role in HousingNOLA’s innovative strategy in 2017. As a part of the celebrations around New Orleans’ tricentennial anniversary, JP Morgan Chase partnered with the Times Picayune to name Morris one of 12 “Icons of New Orleans” as part of the NOLA.com 300 for 300 campaign in 2018. She also chairs the HousingLOUISIANA Alliance Network; serves on the boards of Propeller, Finance New Orleans and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) and is a member of Prosperity Now Community Advisory Committee and the Federal Reserve Community Advisory Committee.
Alana Stein
Alana is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research uses an intersectional, feminist approach to study inequalities in the food system, focusing on food banks and the private food assistance system. She engages in public scholarship, as she researches stratification, the environment, political economy, food studies, and organizations. In her research, she pulls on the methods of ethnography, in-depth interviews, geospatial analysis, content analysis, and network analysis. As part of Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative, Alana has worked on a team to better understand graduate students’ experiences with public scholarship.
Christina Preston
Christina Preston is a research associate for Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative. She graduated with a master’s of science in community and regional development from UC Davis in 2016. She also holds a bachelor’s of arts in anthropology from Sacramento State University. In addition, she has received professional training in conflict resolution from UC Davis and training in oral history from UC Berkeley.
Preston has spent the last three years conducting oral histories within an isolated mining and ranching community in the Northern Nevada desert. Prior to graduating from UC Davis, Preston served as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act Coordinator for Sacramento State University. In this role, she consulted with California Native nations to identify and facilitate the repatriation of ancestral remains, sacred objects, and funerary items from the University’s archaeological collections.
Preston’s work and interests center around public history, stakeholder analysis, participatory action research, museum studies, community storytelling, and program development. Preston has received numerous awards and recognition for community service and non-profit development through her work in the Sacramento Valley.
Preston also co-owns and manages a music studio with her partner in Pasadena, California.
Romo
Romo (they/them/their) is a first-generation Xicanx doctoral student in Cultural Foundations of Education (CFE) at Syracuse University. They are the co-president of the School of Education (SOE) Council and the executive board member/PAGE Co-Director of Imagining America.
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) they worked on publicly engaged scholarship initiatives in their neighborhood through the Pico Neighborhood Association (PNA) and Pico Youth and Family Center (PYFC) to address issues of access to affordable housing and overdevelopment, unequal educational resources, and culturally relevant/sustaining pedagogies that recognize the experience, knowledge, and values of young people of color. It was within academic and community spaces that their interest in social justice education and activist-scholar identity emerged.
While working on their M.S., Romo has served as the Graduate Research Assistant and adjunct instructor for undergraduate level courses at the SU Intergroup Dialogue Program (IGD). As a doctoral student, Romo has worked with a local alternative high school in the Syracuse City School District (SCSD) as part of the high school/university partnership. As part of the partnership, they co-facilitate an English Elective Course (Cultural Voices) that provides youth a space to analyze their individual experience as related to structural systems of power and privilege. In keeping with high school students’ interest, Romo used their backgrounds and scholarly interest in art-base social justice education and critical cultural studies to co-develop the afterschool program and curriculum (Lit Arts) in 2016. Lit Arts, bridges art-based social justice education and intergroup dialogue to provide a space for students to continue to exercise dialogic skills and promote youth activism and civic engagement.
Jai’ Celestial
Jai’ Celestial (He/Him) is a Black and Southern boi with a passion for hitting his lil jig, cooking meals for his fam and keeping your elder’s favorite quotes alive and in the rotation.
Born and raised in Baton Rouge and politicized in New Orleans, Jai’ holds over 10 years of training and facilitation experience. He’s been active in organizing campaigns to end criminalization, policing, deportation and confinement since 2013. Jai’ has been an active member of BYP100 since 2015, and currently serves the organization as the Southern Regional Organizer.
When he’s not supporting BYP100 chapters in the South, Jai’ helps foster leadership development of young trans and queer blaq folx through his consulting work with Soft Boi Consulting.
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana
Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana (she/her/hers) is the daughter of immigrant parents from Jalisco, Mexico and a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California Davis working towards a Ph.D. in Spanish with an emphasis on Human Rights. As part of her dissertation work, she has coined the Childhood Arrivals Critical Theory (CACrit) framework and the term Childhood Arrivals Diaspora. These are concepts that inquire on the forced expulsion of childhood arrivals to the U.S. through the deportation apparatus. In the summer of 2020 as an Imagining America’s Leading and Learning Initiative (LLI) Fellow for the Mellon Public Scholars Program, De La Cruz collaboratively engaged in the research of public scholar experiences in graduate programs. As a current UC President’s Pre-Professoriate Fellow for the academic year of 2020-2021 she will be writing her dissertation.
Barbara Ransby
Dr. Barbara Ransby John D. MacArthur Chair, and Distinguished Professor, in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where she directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative, a project that promotes connections between academics and community organizers doing work on social justice. Dr. Ransby is a historian, author and longtime activist and organizer. She has been involved in the Black freedom movement, feminist struggles, and social and economic justice projects for nearly forty years.
Margo Okazawa-Rey
Margo Okazawa-Rey, Professor Emerita San Francisco State University, is an activist and educator working on issues of militarism, armed conflict, and violence against women examined intersectionally. She has long-standing activist commitments in South Korea and Palestine, working closely with Du Re Bang/My Sisters Place and Women’s Centre for Legal Aid and Counseling, respectively. She is a founding member of the Combahee River Collective, 1970s anti-imperialist, socialist African-American feminist group that introduced and promoted an understanding of intersectionality, informed by Black feminists who came before us.
Professor Okazawa-Rey is one of the founders of the International Women’s Network against Militarism and serves on the International Advisory Board of Du Re Bang (My Sisters Place) in Uijongbu So. Korea, International Board of PeaceWomen Across the Globe in Bern, Switzerland, and Board of Directors of Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). Her recent publications include “Nation-izing” Coalition and Solidarity Politics for US Anti-militarist Feminists, Social Justice (2020); Gendered Lives: Intersectional Perspectives, Oxford University Press (2020); “No Freedom without Connections: Envisioning Sustainable Feminist Solidarities”(2018) in Feminist Freedom Warriors: Genealogies, Justice, Politics, and Hope, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Linda Carty (eds.); Between a Rock and Hard Place: Southeast Asian Women Confront Extractivism, Militarism, and Religious Fundamentalisms (2018); “Liberal Arts Colleges Partnering with Highlander Research and Education Center: Intergenerational Learning for Student Campus Activism and Personal Transformation,” Feminist Formations Special Issue on Feminist Social Justice Pedagogy (2018).
Abby VanMuijen
Abby VanMuijen is a Berkeley, CA-based graphic recorder, illustrator and the founder of RogueMark Studios. She has been graphic recording and training other graphic recorders for 7+ years. She studied Urban Planning and International Development at UC Berkeley and uses this academic background to help her translate complex, systems-level content into accessible visuals and visual notes.
Bidhan Chandra Roy
Dr. Bidhan Chandra Roy is a professor of English Literature at California State University, Los Angeles, where he has taught for the past thirteen years. Trained in postcolonial studies, Bidhan received his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Bidhan’s current research and teaching focuses upon a critical pedagogical approach to community engagement in the humanities. Toward this objective, he has produced several community storytelling projects and exhibitions, and analyzed the pedagogical and social effects of these projects in recent publications. He is the founder of WordsUncaged, a platform for incarcerated artists and writers to engage with the public, through book publishing, art exhibits and digital media. Bidhan is also currently the faculty director of the first in-prison degree program at Los Angeles County Prison, Lancaster and researches new pedagogical approaches to teaching in prison. He has been teaching in prison since 2004 and is a passionate advocate for prison reform in California.
He currently serves on the board of California Humanities and rapper YG’s foundation, 4Hunnid Waze. He is currently co-authoring a book about the development of WordsUncaged as a platform for prison reform with former life without parole prisoner, Tobias Tubbs.
Bidhan’s proudest achievement is that of the 67 LWOP (life without the possibility of parole) commutations issued in California by former Governor Jerry Brown, 13 (20%) had participated in WordsUncaged programs while in prison and had support letters written on their behalf by the organization.
Gale Greenlee
E. Gale Greenlee, Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is an ACLS/Emerging Voices Fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. She holds a doctorate in African American literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her research sits at the intersection of Black and Latinx girlhood studies, geography and children’s literature. A writer by training and a literacy practitioner by experience, she is interested in pop culture, Black Appalachian literature and culture, and the use of kids lit as a vehicle for social change. Her public humanities work focuses on curating literary programs for community spaces, and she’s currently collaborating on an installation to be housed in the Berea College Women’s and Gender Non-Conforming Center. As a PAGE alum and a former PAGE Co-Director, Gale now serves as a consultant on the Leading and Learning Initiative (LLI), researching how graduate education and institutional culture impact grad student experiences in public scholarship, community-engaged work, and scholar activism
Stacey Sutton
Stacey Sutton is an Associate Professor in Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago and the Faculty Liaison in the Social Justice Initiative. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of race, place, and self-determination, principally focusing on worker-owned cooperatives and economic democracy; Black geographies, liberated zones, and solidarity economy initiatives; and racially disparate impact of place-based policies. She is currently working on a multi-city study of solidarity economy ecosystems and the potentiality for radical alternatives in the United States. Sutton’s most recent publications have examined enabling environments for worker-owned cooperatives, neighborhood racial transition and gentrification, and the effects of punitive policies and municipal enforcement on racialized communities.
As a scholar activist, Sutton partners with various grassroots and community organizations committed to racial and economic justice, equitable development, anti-gentrification and displacement, community planning, and cooperative ownership. As the UIC faculty recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar grant, Sutton led comparative cross-disciplinary dialogues among scholars, activists, and artist about radical alternatives for 21st century American cities. Prior to joining UIC in 2015, she taught urban planning and policy at Columbia University. Sutton received a BA in International Affairs from Loyola University in Baltimore, an MBA in Economics from New York University, and a joint PhD in Urban Planning and Sociology from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
Amber Butts
Amber Butts is a storyteller, cultural strategist, and grief worker who believes that Black folks are already whole. Her work asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance, and joy, while living in a world reliant on our terror. She is currently at work on an intergenerational speculative fiction novel.
Justin Wolfe
Justin Wolfe is a William Arceneaux Professor of Latin American History and Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellow. He specializes in Central America, particularly post-colonial social and cultural history. His research interest include nation-formation, race and ethnicity, and the African Diaspora.
Jeff Hou
Jeffrey Hou, PhD, is Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on public space, democracy, community design, and civic engagement. In a career that spans the Pacific, he has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, and fishers in Taiwan, neighborhood residents in Japan, villagers in China, and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities. Hou is recognized for his pioneering writings on bottom-up placemaking and community engagement, with collaborative publications including Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010), Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (2013), Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (2015), Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia (2016), Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity (2017), and City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017). Most recently, he served as a guest editor for the special issue on Guerrilla Urbanism(2020) for Urban Design International.
Queen Cherice Harrison-Nelson
Cherice Harrison-Nelson is an educator, narrative, visual and performance artist, and arts administrator. As the co-founder and curator of the former Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame, she was the co-editor of 11 publications and coordinated numerous exhibitions and panel discussions focused on West African-inspired cultural traditions of New Orleans. Her creative expressions have been performed, presented, and exhibited throughout the city and the world. She approaches her art as a cognitive provocateur, with the specific intent to engage observers through imagery and performances that simultaneously explore gender roles, classism and other limiting/confining norms.
Baba Andrew Wiseman
Andrew Wiseman is a world musician and master drummer. He has performed in theatrical productions and festivals throughout the United States, France and West Africa. He is committed to the perpetuation and preservation of West African retentive cultural and musical traditions. He has a longstanding career of working with children and elders in the community, churches, and educational settings. Wiseman is a leader of the critically acclaimed Djakpa Ewe Ensemble.
Michel DeGraff
Professor Michel DeGraff is co-founder and co-director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative for improving education in Haiti through strategic use of digital and non-digital resources in Kreyòl for active learning. The MIT-Haiti Initiative, through a constructive intersection between linguistics and education, is setting up a global model for opening up access to quality education via the use of local languages in the design of high-quality active learning methods and materials. In both linguistics and education, DeGraff’s research is ushering a more inclusive and equitable approach to Creole languages and their speakers.
Darianna Videaux-Capitel
Darianna Videaux-Capitel holds a Bachelor Degree in Classical Performance from the University of the Arts of Havana and a Master Degree in Jazz at Contemporary Improvisation from The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance. She taught bass for kids and adolescents at music conservatories in Cuba. Currently, she is pursuing a Master in Latin American Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her research explores the testimonies of Haitian migration in the Eastern region of Cuba and its influence in the Caribbean music and culture.
Catherine Murphy
Catherine Murphy has spent much of the last 20 years working in Latin America. She is founder & director of The Literacy Project, documentary, oral histories that collect personal testimonies about adult literacy in the Americas. As an independent producer, Murphy’s work has largely focused on social documentaries, exploring transformational testimonies of community educational experiences. Her films Maestra (2011) and Mi primera tarea (2020) focus on stories related with the National Literacy Campaign in Cuba in 1961. Say I’m Your Teacher (2019) brings the experience of Freedom Schools reflecting on equity of education in the U.S. South. In 2009, Murphy founded Tres Musas Producciones, a collaborative production house of independent women producers working in film, music, and literature.
Lilian Lombera Herrera
Lilian Lombera has worked for 15 years in Cuba as a cultural producer, curating musical performances, films, literature, and visual arts. With a degree in Art History, her educational experience includes teaching Cuban music and culture at University of Havana. She has collaborated with The Literacy Project and Horns to Havana on educational exchanges for Cuban music students. Lombera is currently pursuing a Master’s Degree in Latin American Studies at Tulane University. As a fellow of the Tulane Mellon Graduate Program in Community Engagement and in partnership with Tres Musas Producciones, she co-creates and analyzes cultural experiences integrating knowledge from the academy and the community. Her research explores maroon identities in Cuban and New Orleans artists as contemporary expressions of the African diasporic legacy of resistance and resilience.