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Terri Lyne Carrington

Terri Lyne Carrington is an NEA Jazz Master, Doris Duke Artist, and four-time Grammy award-winning drummer, composer, producer, and educator. She serves as Founder and Artistic Director of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, as well Artistic Director for both Next Jazz Legacy program (a collaboration with New Music USA) and the Carr Center in Detroit, MI. She has performed on more than 100 recordings over her 40-year career and has toured and recorded with luminaries such as Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Stan Getz, Esperanza Spalding, and numerous others. Her artistry and commitment to education has earned her honorary doctorates from York University, Manhattan School of Music and Berklee College of Music, and her curatorial work and music direction has been featured in many prestigious institutions internationally. The critically acclaimed 2019 release, Waiting Game, from Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science earned the esteemed Edison Award for music and a Grammy nomination. In fall of 2022, she authored two books, Three of a Kind (about the forming of the Allen Carrington Spalding trio) and the seminal songbook collection, New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets By Women Composers. This book was accompanied by the album new STANDARDS vol.1 (Candid Records) which won the GRAMMY® Award for the best jazz instrumental album, and New Standards art installation, at Detroit’s Carr Center and the Emerson Contemporary Media Art Gallery, as part of the Jazz Without Patriarchy Project. 

Delita Martin

Delita Martin is an artist currently based in Huffman, Texas. She received a BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and an MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formerly a member of the fine arts faculty at UA Little Rock in Arkansas, Martin currently works as a full-time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was included in the State of the Arts: Discovering American Art Now, an exhibition that included 101 artists from around the United States. Her work is in numerous portfolios and collections.

Throughout history, the marginalization of Black women has led to problematic representations of their roles within community and family structures, as well as problematic visual and textual representations; thus making it difficult to document their positive contributions within collective systems. Martin’s current work deals with reconstructing the identity of Black women by piecing together the signs, symbols, and language found in what could be called everyday life from slavery through modern times. Martin’s goal is to create images as a visual language to tell the story of women that have often been marginalized, offering a different perspective of the lives of Black women.

Nathalie Batraville

Nathalie Batraville is an Associate Professor at Concordia University’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, where she teaches in the areas of Black feminisms, queer theory, and prison abolition. A scholar and artist, her work seeks to generate and illuminate frameworks that challenge both state violence and interpersonal violence. Her scholarship has appeared in scholarly publications such as Small Axe, The Journal of Haitian Studies, The CLR James Journal, TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Tangence. Her first book, Disrupting Agency: Towards a Black Feminist Anarchism, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. In it, she rethinks abolitionist frameworks from a Black feminist anarchist perspective. Through her ceramic art practice, she explores storytelling, plant life, desire, and rebellion. 

Grisha Coleman

Grisha Coleman is an artist working in areas of choreography, performance, experiential technology and sound composition. Her practice and research explore relationships across physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. 

Her echo::system project is a springboard for re-imagining the environment and environmental justice through participatory installation, chorography and composition in live performance, media and computation. Her current project, The Movement Undercommons: Technology as Resistance | Future Archives, creates a repository of vernacular movement data, imagining a lexicon centered around identity and embodied cultural narrative. 

Her work has recently been generously supported by The Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab, a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellowship, The National Endowment for the Arts in Media grants, the Rockefeller Multi-Arts Project [MAP] Fund, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Surdna Foundation Thriving Cultures Grant, the MacDowell Arts Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist Fellowship. 

Coleman earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. Before the academy, she worked as a member of the acclaimed dance company The Urban Bush Women, and later created the music performance group Hot Mouth, which toured internationally and was nominated for the NYC Drama Desk Award for ‘Most Unique Theatrical Experience.’ 

She currently holds the position of Professor of Movement, Computation, and Digital Media in the in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, and an affiliation with the School of Arts, Media, and Engineering, the School for the Future of Innovation in Society, and the Center for Race and Democracy at Arizona State University. 

Ms. Coleman is a New York City native. 

L’Merchie Frazier

Multimedia visual activist, public artist, and historian, educator, and poet. She uses innovative visual media and textile language as design elements to create restorative narratives highlighting five hundred years of Black and Indigenous experience. She is Executive Director of Creative / Strategic Planning for SPOKE ARTS Inc, formerly Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket, and served as NEU Public Health Advocacy Institute Violence Transformed. Director of Creative Engagement for the Transformative Action Project. Frazier is a life-long member of The Women of Color Quilters Network (WCQN) founded by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi. For more than thirty years L’Merchie has designed original multidisciplinary public programs, classes, teacher institutes, curated exhibits with the purpose of expanding America’s historical narrative for groups often excluded from it. Currently she is co-teaching a graduate course in the Department of Urban Planning at MIT on textile texts.  

Frazier’s innovative art focus supports social and reparative justice and the quest for civil and human rights. Her visual art stories, carefully researched, confront the lasting impacts of slavery, property ownership, population theft, human kidnapping and transatlantic dislocation. Her work joyously creates textile integrations for reclaiming the lives and legacies of history’s missing people. Her work marshals archival materials as literal threads linking historical petitions, speeches, letters, lawsuits, newspaper clippings and photographs.  

Her works sit in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the White House,, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art that dedicated her work to the memory of George Floyd.  

Additional honors include national and international residences in Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Africa, France, United Kingdom, and Cuba, the City of Boston Artist in Residency, the NEU African American Master Artists in Residency Program (AAMARP), NEU Law School Artist Residency and the New England Foundation for the Arts, MIT Southend Technology FabLab resident artist, and resident historian for Castle of Our Skins.  

Her civic leadership include a mayoral appointment to City of Boston Reparations Task Force and a gubernatorial appointment to the State of Massachusetts Art Commission. She is a recipient of the 2023 Boston Celtics “Heroes Among Us” Award. Frazier is a public lecturer and media guest of area TV, print and radio networks and her textile, metal and beadwork has been the subject of notable monographs and publications including the Boston Art Review and Forbes Magazine.. Her poetry is now published in a volume, Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters Anthology. 

Nikki Greene

Nikki A. Greene, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. She received her BA with honors from Wesleyan University, and her Masters and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Delaware. She proudly hails from Newark, New Jersey.  

Her recent book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press, 2024) presents a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and considers the intersection between the body, black identity, and the sonic possibilities of the visual using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. Hyperallergic selected Grime, Glitter and Glass as one of the top 30 art books of 2024.  

In January 2021, Greene served as a co-producer of When We Gather, a three-minute film based on an extraordinary vision by María Magdalena Campos-Pons who was moved by the election of Kamala Harris as Vice-President-elect of the United States and directed by filmmaker Codie Elaine Oliver. She served as an advisor to the ICA Boston for the 59th Venice Biennale presenting the work of Simone Leigh for the United States Pavilion in 2022. During the spring of 2024, Greene curated Taking the White Gloves Off: A Performance Art Series in Honor of Lorraine O’Grady ‘55, which featured six multidisciplinary artists: Ayana Evans, Dominique Duroseau, Eleanor Kipping, M. Lamar, Nyugen E. Smith, and Tsedaye Makonnen, to accompany the exhibition Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. She was awarded the RAP Fellowship at the Clark Art Institute during the summer of 2024 to further write and develop her current manuscript, Taking the White Gloves Off: An Experimental [BlaQ] Performance Art Series. The next mounting of the exhibition will take place at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College during the 2025-26 academic year.  

Greene’s essays have appeared in American Studies Journal, Aperture, Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, The Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, and WBUR Boston. She has also written for The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others. She is the former Visual Arts Editor of Transition magazine published by the Hutchins Center.  

Some of her awards and honors include the Richard D. Cohen Fellowship at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, participation in the ALARI (Afro-Latin American Research Institute) Traveling Faculty Seminar to study Afro-Latin American Art History in the Americas (2020-2023), the Ucross Foundation artist residency for non-fiction writing in Wyoming, and the Visiting Scholar position at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University (2021-22), as one of the inaugural New England Humanities Consortium’s Faculty of Color Working Group Mellon Fellows.  

Taliyah M. Williams

Taliyah M. Williams is a 4th-year Health Science student and Master of Public Health (MPH) candidate at Northeastern University with a strong commitment to health equity. Rooted in Black feminist values and inspired by her family’s dedication to community service, Taliyah strives to address systemic barriers in healthcare, lower costs, and design systems that prioritize historically marginalized communities. Her work focuses on bridging health equity, innovation, and social justice to build more inclusive healthcare solutions. Her research centers around racial disparities in healthcare, particularly how they affect breast cancer treatment for Black women and promotes evidence-based policies and creative strategies to combat health inequities. 

Scheherazade Tillet

Scheherazade Tillet is a photographer, curator, and feminist activist. She received her BA in Child Development from Tufts University with a minor in fine art from the School of the Museum of Fine Art in Boston. After spending a semester abroad at the Mason Gross School of Fine Art at Rutgers University and working with artist Steve Hart, Tillet became interested in documentary photography and began her first long-form project capturing her sister’s healing from sexual violence. She received her Master’s in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she deepened her practice of engaging art to help individuals and communities reclaim their stories and recover from trauma. Tillet explores the themes of beauty, grief, play, and freedom within the larger context of Black girlhood.  

In 2000, Tillet transformed her series of documentary photographs into “Story of a Rape Survivor” or “SOARS,” a landmark performance that tells the journey of recovering from rape and finding hope amid ruin. She toured SOARS across hundreds of campus and cultural centers throughout the United States, reaching thousands of survivors. Three years later, Tillet founded and became the director of A Long Walk Home, an art organization that empowers young people to end violence against girls and women. As an art therapist and activist in Chicago’s North Lawndale community, Tillet’s practice expanded to collaborating with her subjects by teaching, now, several generations of Black girls and young women how to document their own lives. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago hosts an annual group exhibition that uplifts and increases the visibility of A Long Walk Home’s young artists in its Girl/Friends program.  

Tillet is best known for her vibrant and intimate portraits of Black girls coming of age throughout the African Diaspora. Ranging from her series, “Eight,” inspired by Sally Mann’s “At Twelve,” in which Tillet captured the complexity of her niece’s childhood during the pandemic, to the “Prom: Send Offs,” which chronicles the community celebration of Black girls as they take symbolic steps toward womanhood, to “Kiddie’s Carnival,” which brought her back to the rituals of play and performance and the site of her own upbringing in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Tillet has also recently curated two groundbreaking shows: “Picturing Black Girlhood: Moments of Possibility” (2022) at Express Newark, the largest photography exhibition on Black girlhood, featuring artists from ages 8 to 94. Last year, as part of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, “The Black Girlhood Altar” project at the Chicago Cultural Center was described by Hyperallergic as “multimedia, artifact-based, video, and object-based artwork to create sacred spaces and honor the lives of Black girls and young Black women who have gone missing or been murdered.” Tillet’s most recent series, “Breonna Taylor Family’s Homes,” was done in collaboration with Taylor’s family.  

Her work has been celebrated in Elle Decor, Forbes, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Gagosian Magazine, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Magazine/The Cut, and The New York Times. With Zoraida Lopez and Salamishah Tillet, she is currently editing the book, “Picturing Black Girlhood” (Aperture, 2026), and with award-winning authors Javaka Steptoe and Salamishah Tillet, she is working on the children’s book “Will You Be My Monument?” (Penguin), inspired by her large scale mural installation of the same name in downtown Newark. Tillet is also a grantee of the Chicago Monuments Project, for which she will spearhead a lasting monument to Rekia Boyd.  

Scheherazade Tillet has been honored as the 2025 Fellowship Recipient in Art by The Gordon Parks Foundation, a prestigious recognition celebrating her impactful contributions to the arts. As part of this esteemed fellowship, Tillet will present a highly anticipated solo exhibition at the Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery in Pleasantville, New York, scheduled for 2026.  

As Executive Director of A Long Walk Home, Scheherazade inaugurated the Girl/Friends Leadership Institute, a yearlong artist-activist program that empowers girls and young women in Chicago to be social justice leaders in their schools, communities, and Chicago at large. Girl/Friends has been at the forefront of Chicago’s recent protests against community, gender, and police violence and is currently designing the Rekia Boyd memorial project, as part of their larger public arts program, “The Visibility Project.” 

In Spring 2016, she was awarded the School of Art Institute of Chicago’s first artist-in-residence in Homan Square, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016, she curated a national photography exhibition “Picturing Black Girlhood” at Columbia University, the first national exhibition to feature the works of African American women and girl photographers exploring the theme of girlhood in one show. Scheherazade later featured images in the exhibit, “Black Girl Culture” in St. Louis as well as at the Nathan Cummings and New York University joint-show, “Reimagining Safe Spaces” which was curated by Deborah Willis as well as the NoVo Foundation convening on #MeToo. Currently, Scheherazade is 3Arts artist working on photography project a “Prom Send Off: The Rites of Passage for Chicago’s Girls” and the 2018-2019 artist-in-residence at Shine Portrait Studio and New Arts, Newark, NJ on larger collection of work on Black Girlhood. 

In 2014, Gloria Steinem nominated her for the Chicago Foundation for Women’s Impact Award. Along with her sister, Salamishah, she was a finalist for Glamour’s “Woman of the Year Award” was named Chicago’s 100 Women of Inspiration by Today’s Chicago Woman Magazine. In 2013, she was chosen as one of twenty Movement Makers by the NoVo Foundation’s Move to End Violence. 

Scheherazade earned a Masters of Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She studied at Rutgers University’s Mason School of Fine Arts under the tutelage of veteran photojournalist Steve Hart. Her work has been featured in Gagosian Journal, Marie Claire, Teen Vogue, The Chicago Tribune, and MSNBC. 

N. Fadeke Castor

N. Fadeke Castor (she/they) is a Black Feminist ethnographer and African diaspora studies scholar, with research and teaching interests in religion, race, performance and the intersectional politics of decolonization. As a Yorùbá Ifá initiate of Trinidadian heritage they are inspired by African spiritual engagements with Black liberation imaginaries and the Black radical tradition. She is the author of Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifá in Trinidad (Duke University Press, 2017; Clifford Geertz Prize, 2018), which centered the Ifá/Orisha religion in the Black radical tradition and Trinidad’s Black Power revolution to illuminate practices and performances of decolonization in the post-colonial Caribbean. Their writings can be found in Cultural AnthropologyFieldwork in ReligionTarka, and The Black Scholar. Her current research focuses on an exploration of the spiritual ontologies and epistemologies of Black spiritual praxis as shifting our centers of being and ways of knowing towards collective care, healing, and social transformation. As part of this larger project they are building Digital Ancestral Altars: Remembrances of Trinidad Ifá/Orisha Elders (funded by a Community Stories grant from The Crossroads Project, Princeton University), a digital multi-modal repository and archive, to commemorate Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders.

Tchaiko Omawale 

Tchaiko is a writer/director whose filmmaking is influenced by growing up in 8 countries by age 16. Themes of living in and in-between, fill her work. Her impulses for fantasy connect to African indigeneity and the healing powers of body and spirit. She centers an ethic of care, a creative process grounded in intuition and deep listening to her body, her dreams and motherhood. Her debut feature film SOLACE stars Lynn Whitfield, Glynn Turman, and Syd (Odd Future). It is streaming on Paramount + and KweliTV, and won Special Jury Mention for Best Ensemble cast at the LA Film Festival and an Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival. The film’s outreach included a conversation about food, trauma and the Black body with Roxane Gay and Franklin Leonard. Her fantasy short film SITA starring Chadwick Boseman exhibited in the Project Row House show “Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter,” co-curated by Simone Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the US at the Venice Biennale. Tchaiko’s recent episodic work includes QUEEN SUGAR, CHERISH THE DAY, SACRIFICE, BMF and GOOD TROUBLE. Her fantasy horror feature BEAST is a recipient of the 2024 Creative Capital Award and in development. 

Bimbola Akinbola

Dr. Bimbola Akinbola is Chicago-based artist and scholar and an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Working at the intersection of African diaspora studies, performance, and visual culture, her creative and scholarly work is concerned with kinship and belonging, gender performance, and affect in the African diaspora. Dr. Akinbola’s first book manuscript, which will be published by Duke University Press in 2025, examines disbelonging and diasporic homemaking in the creative work of contemporary Nigerian diasporic women artists. Her essays have also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly and Women Studies Quarterly. In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Akinbola is a practicing visual and performance artist. 

Aja Burrell Wood

Aja Burrell Wood is the managing director for Berklee’s Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice. Wood oversees the day-to-day operations of the institute and collaborates with founder and artistic director Terri Lyne Carrington on developing curriculum, programs, and initiatives in addition to teaching courses related to gender and justice in jazz, and curating events, among other duties.

 

Originally from Detroit, Michigan, Wood is an ethnomusicologist, educator, and curator with a background in development and violin performance. She has taught courses on music, history, and culture at the City University of New York (CUNY), City College, and Brooklyn College Conservatory of Music. Her work includes research on musical community among black classical musicians, women in jazz, jazz in the digital era, music and civic engagement in Harlem, and other related genres of the African diaspora such as blues, hip-hop, soul, and West African traditions. She has been a visiting fellow at the New School in addition to her role as guest lecturer at New York University and various institutions throughout New York City.

 

Wood was formerly the director of operations for Gate Pass Entertainment and has been the associate director of special projects and public engagement for Wynton Marsalis Enterprises. She has curated performances for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for their annual Women’s Jazz Festival. She has also served as an arts-presenting consultant and thought partner for Harlem Stage, Weeksville Heritage Center, Revive Music Group, and the Sphinx Organization. 

With a deep focus on the intersections of race, gender, and performance, she has curated transformative programs and initiatives that amplify the work of gender equity in jazz. Aja’s work bridges academia and performance, shedding light on underrepresented stories in the music industry.

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is a Black feminist literary scholar and cultural critic who works at the intersection of race, gender, and justice. Her scholarship and teaching in Africana Studies include expertise on Black France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Caribbean literature, Black girlhood, Haiti, and the diaspora. She is the author of Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014), The Trumpet of Conscience Today (Orbis Press, 2021), and Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2022). She is currently working on two book projects–one explores representations of Haitian girlhood, and the other is a co-authored interdisciplinary study of sexual violence entitled The Rape Culture Syllabus. Dr. Jean-Charles is a regular contributor to media outlets like The Boston GlobeMs. Magazine, WGBH, America Magazine, and Cognoscenti, where she has weighed in on topics including #metoo, higher education, and issues affecting the Haitian diaspora.

Dzidzor Azaglo

Dzidzor (Jee-Jaw) is a Ghanian-American folklore, performing artist, author, and curator. Dzidzor’s style of call and response has combined traditional storytelling in Afro-folklore and Poetry Slam through a sonic experience. Dzidzor is moved by the responsibility to alarm the power/abundance in the midst of bodies while creating a practice of care and freedom through creativity. Dzidzor is the founder of Black Cotton Club and partners with Grubstreet, ICA Boston, and Boston Public Schools to teach creative empowerment workshops in Boston.

Asia N. Potts

Asia N. Potts is a Ph.D. student studying contemporary Black literature in Northeastern’s English department. Her research is grounded in Afrofuturism and the multitudinous ways Black women use creative expression to tell their stories. Her work explores the long-standing presence of Afrofuturiste aesthetics in 20th and 21st-century literature and argues that Afrofuturism is an integral tenet of Black women’s creative and intellectual thought. By examining the genre as a Black literary tradition and feminist movement, Asia aims to further identify elements of Afrofuturist feminism and canonize Black women creatives in Afrofuturism’s ancestral genealogy.

Marli Mason

Marli Mason (she/her) is a first-year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics major with a minor in Law and Public Policy. She currently serves as Co-Director of Programming for Sisters in Solidarity (SiS), Underclassmen Representative for Hawai’i Ohana at Northeastern University (HONU), and is a member of Kinematix Dance Troupe. This past semester, Marli worked as a Northeastern Votes ambassador, holding campus tabling events to encourage voter registration and education among the student body. Outside of the Northeastern community, She is the Vice-Chairperson of the Hawai’i State Youth Commission, a part of the State of Hawaii Department of Human Services geared toward youth civic engagement, advocating on behalf of the youth of the state through legislative avenues. Marli is all about increasing civic engagement and exploring tangible solutions to create a better future!