Contributor Biographies
Sama Alshaibi (b. 1973, Iraq) situates her own body as a site of performance in consideration of the gendered and social impacts of war, migration and environmental demise. Alshaibi has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including the 55th Venice Biennale, State of the Art 2020 (Crystal Bridges Museum of Contemporary Art, Arkansas), the 2019 Cairo International Biennale, the 2017 Honolulu Biennial, MoMA (NY), the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., the MARTa Herford Museum (Germany), the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (NY), the Arab American National Museum (Michigan), the Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris), and the Ayyam Gallery (UK/UAE). Alshaibi has been the recipient of a 2019 Artpace San Antonio residency, an Arab Fund for Arts & Culture Visual Arts Grant, and a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship to Palestine. Her monograph, Sand Rushes In (New York: Aperture, 2015), features her Silsila series. Alshaibi is Professor of Photography, Video and Imaging at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Esther Armah is Executive Director at The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, a global institute implementing the visionary framework for racial healing by providing emotional education in the context of race, gender, and culture. The AIEJ does this via projects, training, thought—leadership. Armah leads a global team in Ghana, Chicago and London. She is an international award-winning journalist, a writer, a playwright and an international speaker who has lived and worked in New York, London, Washington, D.C., Accra, Lagos, Nairobi, and Johannesburg.
Nohora Arrieta is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, where she specializes in Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. Her dissertation, Bittersweet Poetics: Aesthetics and Politics of the Sugar Plantation in Brazil and the Caribbean (1990-2018), discusses works of visual art about the sugar plantation produced by Afro-descendant artists in Brazil and the Caribbean.
Nohora is co-translating into English the poetry of Afro-Colombian poets Romulo Bustos and Pedro Blas. She is also working on two writing projects: How to Look at Silence examines family archives, memorabilia and contemporary works of art to discuss the migrations of Black and Indigenous women in the continental Caribbean (Venezuela-Colombia). I have been here for a while is a collection of narrative profiles of Black artists from the Spanish Caribbean, Colombia and Brazil. Her research and writing have been funded by ACLS/Mellon and Fulbright
Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Dominican Republic) received an MFA from Hunter College, a BFA from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2020, Báez was shortlisted for Artes Mundi 9, and will be the subject of a solo presentation at the ICA Watershed (Boston, MA) this summer. In 2019, she had solo exhibitions at the Mennello Museum of Art (Orlando, FL), the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). Her major 2015 solo exhibition Bloodlines was organized by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and traveled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Gabriella N. Báez is a queer documentary photographer based in San Juan, Puerto Rico covering stories across the Caribbean region. Her personal projects focus on intimate topics about family, migration and self-portraiture. Gabriella as a young practitioner has already been published in Reuters, Bloomberg, The New York Times, CNN, and The Nation. In 2020 she became a Magnum Photography and Social Justice fellow, an IWMF Howard G. Buffett Fund grantee, and a Women Photograph + Nikon grantee. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram as @gabriellanbaez.
Kalia Brooks, Ph.D, is the Director of Programs and Exhibitions at NXTHVN. She is responsible for the design and delivery of curatorial exhibitions, public programs, artist projects, community engagement initiatives and the learning environment for the fellowship and apprenticeship programs. Her academic research covers art from the nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on emergent technologies and African American, trans-Atlantic and diasporic cultures of the Americas. Brooks holds a Ph.D in Aesthetics and Art Theory from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). She is co-editor of Women and Migration: Responses in Art and History (Open Book Publishers: Cambridge, 2019). She has served as a consulting curator with the City of New York through the Department of Cultural Affairs and is currently an ex-officio trustee on the Board of the Museum of the City of New York.
Jennifer Clement is the President of PEN International and the first woman to be elected since the organization was founded in 1921. Clement grew up in Mexico City, Mexico. She studied English Literature and Anthropology at New York University and also studied French Literature in Paris, France. She has an MFA from the University of Southern Maine. From 2009 to 2012, Clement was president of PEN Mexico and her work focused on the disappearance and killing of journalists. Human rights issues have motivated her writing. In 2014 she was awarded the Sara Curry Humanitarian Award for her novel Prayers for the Stolen that involved over ten years of research on the stealing of young girls in Mexico.
Patricia Cronin is Professor of Art at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist whose work examines issues of gender, sexuality and social justice through painting and monumental sculpture. In 2002, Cronin created Memorial To A Marriage, the first and only Marriage Equality Monument in the world. Cronin’s work has been exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including a solo exhibition Shrine For Girls, an Official Solo Collateral Exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy, 2015), and has travelled to The FLAG Art Foundation (New York, 2016) and the LAB Gallery (Dublin, Ireland, 2017). Additional solo exhibitions were presented at the Capitoline Museum’s Centrale Montemartini Museum (Rome, Italy); the Newcomb Art Museum (New Orleans); the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY); and the Tampa Museum of Art (Tampa, FL). Cronin received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, among other awards. Major artworks by Cronin are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, both in Washington, D.C.; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Tampa Museum of Art; Woodlawn Cemetery (Bronx); and Kelvingrove Art Galleries and Museum (Glasgow, Scotland).
Arlene Dávila is Professor of Anthropology and American Studies and founding director of The Latinx Project at New York University. She is the author of many books on the topic of latinx cultural politics.
Von Diaz is a writer, documentary producer, and author of Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South. Born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, GA, she explores food, culture, and identity. She is a self-taught cook who explores Puerto Rican food, culture, and identity through memoir and multimedia. She teaches Food Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and works as a writer, documentarian, and audio storyteller. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Food & Wine Magazine, Bon Appétit, Eater, and Epicurious. She has also been a reporter for NPR, StoryCorps, The Splendid Table, American Public Media, WNYC, PRI’s The World, The Southern Foodways Alliance, Colorlines, and Feet in 2 Worlds. In spring 2020 she was the Lehman Brady Joint Visiting Scholar at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill. Von holds a dual MA in Journalism and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from New York University, and a BA in Women’s Studies from Agnes Scott College.
Brandy Dyess is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. Her art explores the contrasting nature of the human condition, always keeping an eye out for the joyful and the absurd. She is interested in themes of multiracial identity, representation and place, individualism, isolation, performance, and groupthink. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University where her research focused on Latin American and Women’s History. She lives in the Mojave Desert.
Bryn Evans (she/her) imagines, looks, and moves in Decatur, Georgia. Her breathing comes by, through, and with her kin’s. Bryn situates her scholarship and creative work within Black feminist theory and visual culture studies. Her forthcoming senior thesis engages abolitionist praxis and its relationship to Southern geographies, the built environment, memory, and poetics of Black vernacular. Bryn’s writing and creative projects have appeared in The Columbia Review, Quarto Magazine, and Hoot Magazine. These appearances, fleeting and archived, occasionally transpire online when she is in a generous mood. Transpire as emergence, but also as breath, if Bryn were a color, she would be a scattered sky. Address your next poem to her. Make it taste like bread pudding. Twitter/IG @brynevans_.
Ana Teresa Fernández, born in Tampico, México in 1981, received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute. Fernández has exhibited at institutions including the Arizona State University Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ); the Denver Art Museum (CO); the Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University (Bloomington, IN); the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV); the Palm Springs Art Museum (CA); the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (AZ); and the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), among others. Her work has been collected by institutions including the Denver Art Museum, the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, among others.
An award-winning author, scholar and teacher, Cheryl Finley is the Director of the innovative Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective, strategically poised to prepare the next generation of Black museum and art industry leaders.
Terri Geis is an art historian, independent curator, and museum educator. She is a specialist on women artists affiliated with Surrealism and the intersections between Surrealism and the Americas. Past projects and publications include “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, with Ilene Susan Fort and Tere Arcq) and “‘My Goddesses and My Monsters’: Maria Martins and Surrealism in the 1940s”, in Debates on Surrealism in Latin America: Vivisimo Muerto (Getty Research Institute). Geis’s work has also investigated Surrealism’s connections with Afro-Caribbean art and culture, with essays including “Great Impulses and New Paths: VVV, Surrealism, and the Black Atlantic” (Revue Miranda). Other recent publications include an essay for the retrospective exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales (Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City), and multiple essays for The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (London: Bloomsbury Academic). With Manthia Diawara, Geis has been awarded the 2021 senior fellowship through the Dedalus Foundation for a book project on the surrealist Ted Joans.
Dr. Bettina Gockel holds the Chair for History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Art History at the University of Zurich. She has been a Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (Germany), and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (USA). Her research interests are the history of art and photography, with a special focus on the history of perception, psychology, and the history of science.
Hande Gurses, originally from Istanbul, is a displaced scholar of comparative literature. She holds a Ph.D in Literary Studies from University College London. Her primary research interests include contemporary world literature, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies. She is also interested in inclusive pedagogies and contemplative practices in higher education. She has taught courses on the international short story, migration, dystopian literatures, and ecocriticism. Most recently she has co-edited a volume on ecocritical approaches to contemporary Turkish literature titled Animals, Plants, and Landscapes: An Ecology of Turkish Literature and Film (Routledge Press, 2019). Currently she is working on a book manuscript titled Reframing Bridges and Borders in the Fictions of Orhan Pamuk, under contract with Lexington Books. She has held positions at UMass Amherst, the University of Toronto, and Ryerson University. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Simon Fraser University.
Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984 in Kentucky, raised in Florida) has exhibited widely across the US and abroad. Her work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and Atlanta Contemporary. Select recent group exhibitions include there is this We, Sculpture Milwaukee; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (traveling); Shifting Horizons, Nevada Museum of Art; Enunciated Life, California African Art Museum; More, More, More, TANK Shanghai; and Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, Storm King Art Center. Work by the artist is held in public collections such as the Hood Museum of Art, the Menil Collection, the Nasher Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Speed Museum of Art, among others. Hamilton has participated in a range of fellowships and residencies, including at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton holds a Ph.D in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.
Arielsela Holdbrook-Smith is a Ghanaian-American second-year graduate student in the NYU School of Global Public Health working towards a Master in Public Health, with a concentration in Community Health Science and Practice. Prior to NYU, she worked as a Research Assistant on domestic and international projects primarily geared toward linkage to resources for community organizations and gender-based violence intervention. A graduate from the University of California, San Diego Department of Global Health, Arielsela has focused her work on addressing social inequities, tackling structural violence, and dissolving the disconnect between academia and marginalized communities. Arielsela’s broader interests include: storytelling and narrative medicine; social disparities impacting Afrodiasporic communities; Black feminist and queer theory; migrant health; community engagement and culturally-responsive practice; implementation science and quality improvement of social services; mental health, collective trauma, and community healing; and the incorporation of arts and media into public health practice.
As a media artist, photographer and scholar, Roshini Kempadoo re-imagines everyday experiences drawn from historical legacies and memories by Caribbean persons and the Carribean diaspora. Central to her work as photographs, fictional writings, and sounds as interactive and online artworks are the urgent issues of extraction, sustainability and ecological activism associated with work by black, indigenous and women of color. Contributions include: Life Between Islands – Caribbean-British Art 1950s – Now, Tate Britain, London (2022); Fragments of Epic Memory, Art Gallery Ontario (AGO), Toronto (2021); Thirteen Ways of Looking, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry (2020); Like Gold Dust, Artpace International Artist-in-Residence (IAIR), San Antonio (2019); Itinerant Imaginaries (2021), a seminar series by Creating Interference, a network investigating artworks as responses to memories and histories; “Imagining Activism, Black, Gold, Dust” in Kunstlicht 42/3-4, 2021; and the monograph Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure (2016).
Sarah K. Khan, multimedia maker/scholar, writes and creates content (paper, books, prints, photography, films) about food, culture, women, and migrants. Her research has taken her to live with Bedouins in the Middle East, document the plight of Indian women farmers, traverse the world of Queens NY, and film women cooks and farmers speaking about their foods and ways in Fez, Morocco. Khan has degrees in Middle Eastern history (BA), public health and nutrition (MPH, MS), and traditional ecological knowledge systems/plant sciences (Ph.D). A two-time Fulbright scholar, Khan is the recipient of multiple residencies, grants, and fellowships. She continues to expand her projects on US and South Asian women farmers, Migrant Kitchens/The FoodCraftProject, The Cookbook of Gestures, and the Ni’matnāma—The Book of Delights. @sarahkkhan | http://www.sarahkkhan.com/
Leslie King-Hammond is Professor Emerita, Founding Director, Center for Race and Culture, Dean of Graduate Studies, Project Director, Ford Phillip Morris Artist of Color, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); Senior Fellow, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation; Director, Motor House Gallery; Board of Directors, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture; Board of Directors, Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation; Girls of Baltimore Arts Collaborative, Past President, College Art Association; Board of Directors, Creative Alliance at the Patterson; former Board of Trustees, Baltimore Museum of Art; Juror, NAACP-ACT-SO Initiative; exhibiting artist of “Migrations”, Decker Gallery, MICA; “Artist/Scholar,” Smithsonian, Arts and Industry; as well as group exhibits at Museum Of Biblical Art, New York Historical Society, Galerie Myrtis, James E. Lewis Museum, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, Howard University Gallery of Art; curated numerous exhibitions at MICA and the Motor House Galleries; Ashe’ to Amen—African Americans and Biblical Imagery”, Museum of Biblical Art; “Black Printmakers and the WPA”, Lehman College Gallery of Art; co-curated with Lowery Sims, “Art as a Verb”, MICA, MetLife Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem; “Global Africa Project”, Museum of Art and Design; co-curated with Tritobia Benjamin, “Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors”, Philadelphia Museum of African American History and Culture.
Michelle Lanier is an AfroCarolina folklorist, museum professional, filmmaker and educator, passionate about memory and land. Raised in South Carolina, with deep roots in North Carolina, Michelle’s ancestral geographies guide her work on Blackness, diaspora, and the American South. A faculty member at the Center for Documentary Studies (Duke University), Michelle has lectured at Spelman, Harvard, UCLA, and in Beijing and Cape Town. As a “Documentary Doula”, Michelle supports the birth of films, most notably the award-winning “Mossville”, a story of resistance to environmental racism. “Mossville” has been translated into five languages, screened on six continents, and chosen by the United Nations to raise awareness of climate justice and people of African descent. In 2008, Michelle advocated for legislation creating the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which she led as founding executive director. In 2018, Michelle became the first African American director of North Carolina’s twenty-five state-owned historic sites.
Melvina Lathan has pursued a dual career as a fiber artist and as a professional boxing judge. In 1991, she became the first African American female licensed as a professional boxing judge in the state of New York where she currently serves as the Commissioner of the New York State Athletic Commission. She has judged for all of the major world and international sanctioning organizations and received many boxing-related honors. Lathan was invited to join a consulting team which contributed to the earliest stages of planning and development for the Muhammad Ali Center, now located in Louisville, Kentucky. When not at ringside, Melvina is an exhibiting artist and photographer. As a mixed media artist, Lathan has worked with fiber art for over thirty-five years. Through fiber art she uses a whimsical approach to create and explore the images of America’s multiculturalism by interjecting pattern and dimension, often incorporating natural and semi-precious stones, hand carvings and other natural raw materials and objects. She has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout the world. She also constructs sculptural and glass assemblages. Bold in color, texture and symmetry, her sculptures offer a daring contemporary contrast to the “old world” stained glass. As a costume designer she has created costumes for New York Off-Broadway Theater, and has served as design consultant for numerous MTV music video productions. Melvina is a graduate of the Franklin College of Science and Arts.
Nashormeh N.R. Lindo, artist, educator, consultant, curator and arts activist, was born in Philadelphia, PA. She earned a BA in Art from the Pennsylvania State University and a MS in Museum Leadership from Bank Street College of Education. Her work as a printmaker, photographer, and painter has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is currently an independent museum consultant, lecturing and writing about the impact of African-American history and heritage on contemporary visual culture, as well as its musical and literary counterparts. She has previously held the titles of Manager of Educational Programs for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library and Coordinator of Community Services at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recently, she completed serving six years, three as Chair, on the California Arts Council. She is looking forward to continuing her art practice and her work as an advocate for the arts.
Dr. Ifrah Magan was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. She lived in Egypt for nearly ten years prior to arriving in the United States as a refugee. Dr. Magan currently serves as an Assistant Professor at the Silver School of Social Work. A qualitative researcher and social worker, Dr. Magan incorporates storytelling as a method for understanding the lived experiences of refugee and immigrant populations, particularly with regard to faith and culture. Dr. Magan takes an intersectional approach to research in vulnerable communities, focusing particularly on race, religion, gender, and class. She has extensive experience working with Somali, Rohingya, Iraqi, and Syrian refugee populations in the United States. Dr. Magan received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Jane Addams College of Social Work, where she received the Abraham Lincoln Fellowship and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Award. She is fluent in English, Somali, and Arabic.
Tsedaye Makonnen is an artist, curator, researcher and cultural producer as well as a Black American mother, Perinatal Community Health Worker & Doula and daughter of East Africans. Her studio practice primarily focuses on intersectional feminism and migration. Her intention is to create a spiritual network around the world that aims to re-calibrate the energy towards something positive and life affirming. Tsedaye is the current recipient of a permanent large-scale public art commission for Providence, RI. In 2019 she was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and in 2021 her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian for their permanent collection. This Fall she will be performing at the Venice Biennale for Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat and she is also the inaugural Clark Art Institute’s Futures Fellow. In 2023, Tsedaye will be exhibiting at The Met. She is currently represented by Addis Fine Art. She lives between DC and London.
Muna Malik is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her current work focuses on creating poetic imagery around the narratives of women of color and refugees using abstract paintings and interactive sculpture. Muna’s work has been exhibited at Northern Spark Arts Festival, MCAD, Artworks Chicago & the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. She was the billboard artist for North Carolina for the ‘For Freedoms 50 State Initiative.’ She recently completed exhibitions at the Band of Vices Gallery, LA, the Annenberg Space for Photography, LA with Photoville, the International Center for Photography with For Freedoms and MOCA Geffen in LA. She also currently has work on view at the Somaal House of Art in Minneapolis, MN for the Ilaa Shalay\Since Yesterday exhibition.
Carolina Mayorga is a Colombian-born and naturalized American interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the last twenty years. Her work is part of national and international collections and has been reviewed in publications in South America, Europe and the US. Mayorga’s artwork addresses issues of social and political content. Comments on migration, war, and identity are translated into video, performance, site-specific installations, and two-dimensional media in the form of photography and drawing. During her second participation in the Women and Migration(s) panel, Mayorga shared insights about Maid in the USA, an endurance performance art piece that comments on stereotyped views of roles played by women of Hispanic origin. The artist lives and works in Washington, DC. For more information visit: http://carolinamayorga.com/.
Video and installation artist Shirin Neshat (Iranian, b.1957) explores the political and social conditions of Iranian and Muslim life in her works, particularly focusing on women and feminist issues. Neshat was born in Qazvin, Iran, and left the country to study art in the United States at seventeen; she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with an MFA in 1982. When she returned to her home country in 1990, she found it barely recognizable from the Iran before the 1979 Revolution, a shocking experience that incited the meditations on memory, loss, and contemporary life in Iran that are central to her work. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul and Johannesburg Biennials, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Tate Gallery in London, among other institutions. Neshat currently lives and works in New York
María Elena Ortiz is Curator of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), where she is spearheading the Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI). At PAMM, Ortiz has organized several projects including Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Art Collection (2020); The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art (2019); Latinx Art Sessions (2019); william cordova: now’s the time (2018); Beatriz Santiago Muñoz: A Universe of Fragile Mirrors (2016); Ulla von Brandenburg: It Has a Golden Sun and an Elderly Grey Moon (2017); Firelei Báez: Bloodlines (2015); and Carlos Motta: Histories for the Future. Her writing has been published globally. A recipient of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) and Independent Curators International (ICI) Travel Award for Central America and the Caribbean, Ortiz’s curatorial practice is informed by the connections of Latinx, Latin American, and Black communities in the US and the Caribbean.
Heike Raphael-Hernandez is Professor of American Studies at the University of Würzburg, Germany and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Maryland Global Campus. With Cheryl Finley and Leigh Raiford, she was an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellow for the project “Visualizing Travel, Gendering the African Diaspora.” She is one of the general editors of the forthcoming Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Visual Culture; she will be responsible for “Global Diasporas and Visual Culture.” Among her publications are Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture (with Leigh Raiford, 2017) and a special issue (with Pia Wiegmink) for the journal Atlantic Studies about “German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery” 14.4. (Fall 2017). She is editor of Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (2004), and co-editor of AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (with Shannon Steen, 2006). She is author of Contemporary African American Women Writers and Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope (2008) and Fear, Desire, and the Stranger Next Door: Global South Immigration in American Film (forthcoming).
Bronx-born curator, and interdisciplinary artist Yelaine Rodriguez received a BFA from The New School (2013) and her Masters from NYU (2021). Rodriguez’s curatorial portfolio includes Afro-Syncretic at NYU (2019), Resistance, Roots, and Truth at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (2018) and (under)REPRESENT(ed) (2017) at The New School. Rodriguez participated in the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ AIM Fellowship Program (2020), the Latinx Project Curatorial Fellowship (2019), the Wave Hill Van Lier Fellowship (2018), and the ICA Fellowship from the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (2017). She has exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, Rush Art Gallery, El Centro Cultural de España, and Centro León Biennial. Her works feature in Hyperallergic, Vogue, and Aperture Magazine.
Hannah Ryan is currently the Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota, having completed her Ph.D in Art History at Cornell University in 2019 with Dr. Cheryl Finley, researching maternal and lactation imagery in transatlantic visual culture. Hannah’s areas of research include modern and contemporary arts of the African diaspora, photography, intersectional feminism, and women artists. With a decolonial and feminist perspective, her work engages with issues of race and gender through theories of consumption, labor, recuperation, and care, particularly as they intersect with maternity. With a background in the museum field, Hannah has served in outreach positions at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and curates exhibitions on contemporary artists, including the subjects of her contribution to this book: Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun.
Sirpa Salenius, Ph.D, originally from Helsinki (Finland), lives in Florence (Italy) and teaches American Studies at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu, Finland). Her publications include An Abolitionist Abroad: Sarah Parker Remond in Cosmopolitan Europe (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and Race and Transatlantic Identities (Routledge, 2017), co-edited with Elizabeth T. Kenney and Whitney Womack Smith. She is presently conducting research on nineteenth-century African American women in Italy as 2020-2021 Terra Foundation for American Art Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C.
Gunja SenGupta is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. She has authored the books For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas, and From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York; as well as articles in journals like the American Historical Review, Journal of Negro (now African American) History, and Civil War History among many others. Her latest book, co-authored with Awam Amkpa, and titled Sojourners, Sultans and Slaves: America and the Indian Ocean in the Age of Abolition and Empire, is forthcoming from the University of California Press in Spring 2023. This work mines multinational archives to connect and compare stories from the African diaspora in the North Atlantic with those from societies along the Swahili coast, through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, into the Indian subcontinent, among other themes.
Summer Sloane-Britt is a third year Ph.D student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. As the Elizabeth A. Josephson fellow, she studies global photography, representations of race in mid-twentieth century art of the United States, and visualizations of labor and landscape. She is currently researching the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photography projects during the 1960s. Previously, she served as the Emily K. Rafferty Intern in Museum Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Community Cluster Fellow at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Debora Spini is currently teaching at NYU Shanghai. Her research interests focus on religious groups in the public sphere, secularization/postsecularization, monotheism and violence, and the rise of xenophobic populism with a focus on gender issues. Among her most recent publications are the following essays and book chapters: “Civil religion, uncivil society. A reflection on Baba Sahib Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s conception of a ‘religion for civil society’” in B.R. Ambedkar: The Quest for Justice, ed.by A. Rathore Singh (Oxford: OUP, 2020); “The price of liberty. On republicanism democracy and non domination” in Republicanism, theoretical and historical perspectives, ed. by F. Ricciardelli and M. Fantoni (Rome: Viella 2020); “Decolonizing Postsecularization”, Annali di Studi Religiosi, 21 (2020), 167-179; “Post–secolarizzazione e regressione politica. cosa possiamo imparare dal casodel populismo di destra”, Iride – Rivista Italiana di Philosophia, Gennaio 2020, 369-381. Spini has lectured and participated in conferences on these themes in Europe, the US, India and Brazil.
Ellyn Toscano is the Executive Director of the Hawthornden Foundation, a US foundation supporting contemporary writers and literary arts through residential fellowships in Scotland and Italy. Previously, Toscano was NYU’s Senior Director for Programming, Partnerships and Community Engagement, where she fostered partnerships at the intersection of technology, new media and the arts. Before that, as Executive Director of NYU Florence, she directed Villa La Pietra, a fifteenth-century villa, garden and art collection and founded and produced The Season, a summer cultural festival. Before NYU, Toscano served as Chief of Staff to Congressman Jose Serrano of New York for two decades and directed his work on the Appropriations Committee. Toscano also served as Counsel to the New York State Assembly Committee on Education for nine years. A lawyer by training, Toscano has an LLM from New York University School of Law in International Law.
Hồng-An Trương uses photography, sound, video, and performance to examine histories of war and immigrant and refugee narratives. Her work has been exhibited widely including at the International Center for Photography (NY), Art in General (NY), Fundación PROA (Buenos Aires), Istanbul Modern (Istanbul, Turkey), Nhà Sàn (Hanoi, VN), The Drawing Center (NY), the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (NC), The Kitchen (NY), and the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.) among many others. In 2018, she exhibited in Prospect.4 New Orleans: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, and her collaborative work with Hương Ngô was included in Being: New Photography 2018 at the MoMA. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at UNC.
Deborah Willis, Ph.D, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments in the KIA”, “Migrations and Meanings in Art”, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; “Out of Fashion Photography: Framing Beauty” at the Henry Art Gallery and “Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments” at Indiana University.
Paulette Young, Ph.D, is a New York-based cultural anthropologist, curator, writer and independent scholar in the visual arts and artistic cultural practices of communities in Africa and the African Diaspora. Her research centers on the historical and contemporary roles of global dress, design and style as an expressive artistic and cultural form. She examines the ways that people of African descent articulate power and meaning through the visual and verbal arts, particularly as presented in photography. Paulette is an educator and advisor in the visual and performing arts for a diverse range of universities, museums, galleries and community-based organizations. She lectures and provides ethnographic and archival research for local and international cultural, educational, and business institutions. Young is Director of the Young Robertson Gallery in New York, NY. The gallery specializes in fine arts from Africa and the African Diaspora, focusing on traditional African fine art, textiles and photography.