Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe is an Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University. She recently completed her PhD in the Department of Music at Princeton University. Genevieve has an MPhil in Ethnomusicology and a BA in Music and Sociology from the University of Ghana. Her main research interests include music of Africa and the Black diaspora. Her research is anchored by an exploration of the multiple remediations of Black music as it moves between geographical locations, offline and online communities, and across digital platforms. Her other research interests include sound studies, the music industry, and the creative economy. She has published in journals such as the Journal for Popular Music Studies.

Between 2021 and 2022, she was a visiting fellow at the Humanities Branch of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona (IMF-CSIC). In 2023, she was awarded the Eugene K Wolf research grant by the American Musicological Society for her dissertation "Between Acousmatic Blackness and Blacksound: The Cultural Politics of Black Music in Spain" She is currently working on a project that explores Black music in Spain using sound, race, and digital technology as critical categories. She is the founder/host of the Black Music Nomad podcast. Genevieve is also a composer. 

David Carré is a doctoral student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. They are also pursuing a graduate certificate in Africana Studies. David’s research centers on the availability of black feminine flesh and the implications of this exposure for semiotics and aesthetics in modernity. Their work specifically considers the roles of enfleshment, fungibility, and ontological plasticization in shaping the potentialities of both modern thought and its ostensible derangement. In one of their subprojects, David considers the cosmological tendency of maroon communities in Jamaica toward romantic affinity with ontological plasticity alongside more pessimistic scholarly criticism of the plasticization of blackened being. A second subproject critically exhumes the effaced labors of black femininity in the future-hastening work of abstract artists in the Dutch Neoplasticism movement. Generally, their research seeks to nuance commonplace understandings of the endurance of racial slavery and the ethico-political conundrums it has wrought.

David is also a Graduate Fellow in the Black Bibliography Project (BBP) at Rutgers and Yale universities, a 2024-25 Graduate Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis (RCHA), a 2024-25 Graduate Assistant in the Rutgers Race and Gender Equity (RAGE) Lab, and a Graduate Mentor in the HLLC-Price Humanities Scholars Program at Rutgers—Newark.

Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Le Blanc Mesnil, France, lives Paris) represented France at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and has had solo exhibitions at Le Magasin Centre National D’Art Contemporain, Grenoble France (2023); Performa Biennial, New York (2023); LUMA, Zürich, Switzerland (2023); LUMA, Arles, France (2022); the Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2022); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2019); CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2019); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris, France (2018); and Bétonsalon, Paris, France (2018). He is included in the collections of the Kadist Art Foundation, Centre Pompidou, Fondation Villa Datris, Fondation d ’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Frac Normandie Rouen, Frac Normandie Caen, Frac Grand Large - Hauts-de-France, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Frac Île-de France, Frac Aquitaine, and FRAC. Recently, Creuzet participated in the 35ª Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2023); 12th Liverpool Biennial (2023); Momenta Biennale de L’image (2021); Frestas Triennial Sao Paolo (2021); Manifesta 13 (2020); the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); the 6th Rennes Biennale (2018); FIAC (2018); the 11th Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017); the 14th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art (2017); and the Festival Hors Piste at the Centre Pompidou (2017). Creuzet is the recipient of the 2021 BMW Art Journey Award and the 2019 Camden Arts Centre Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze.

Anny-Dominique Curtius is Professor of Francophone Studies in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Iowa where she also serves as Director of the working group “Museum Futures” at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Her interdisciplinary work interweaves cultural theory, cinematic, visual, and performing arts of the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and Sub-Saharan Africa to examine museum practices, cultural restitution and repatriation, tidalectical and racial ecologies, and the defacement and toppling of the iconography of slavery in the public space. Her latest works include Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d’une mémoire empêchée (2020), Francophonies of the Early Modern/Francophonies de la première modernité, a co-edited special issue of L’Esprit Créateur (2024), and Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings, a co-edited volume forthcoming with Liverpool UP. Her book in progress examines the entangled rememory of slavery in new museum practices, artistic productions, performativities and memorials in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, France, the UK, and Senegal.

Alexandria Eregbu, also known as FINDING IJEOMA, is an award-winning curator and interdisciplinary practitioner working at the intersections of art and music. As a DJ, she has performed alongside leading musicians such as, Grammy-nominated Uncle Waffles, Ibibio Sound Machine, Noname, Common, and Sudan Archives. 

As FINDING IJEOMA, she blends distinct methods of sampling, mixing, and archival audio to amplify femme voices, invoke Black memory, and honor the tradition of storytelling within global dance music culture. Rooted in Chicago’s sonic legacy, her practice embodies a deep reverence for rhythm, ritual, and collective healing. Her current musings include Afrofuturist technologies, ancestral drum patterns, digital archives, and the living word as tools for calling into existence love, liberation, unity, peace, and abundance on a daily, ongoing basis.

Alexandria’s performance work is published in The Black Scholar; Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Race and Performance After Repetition. Her practice has been presented partnership from 3Arts; AMFM L!VE; Field Foundation; the Center for Afrofuturist Studies; Independent Curators International; Camargo Foundation; Villa Albertine; Rebuild Foundation, CUNY Center for Humanities; the Afrobeats Symposium at Northwestern University; Duke University at the John Hope Franklin Center; African Studies Association (ASA) Conference; and EXPO Chicago. She received her Master of Art degree in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she taught in the department of Fiber & Material Studies. Recent curatorial projects include AfroDisco Social Hour (2023-present); How to Build a Queendom (2023); Envisioning Justice (2019); and du monde noir (2012-2018).

Avishek Ganguly works on the ethics and politics of writing-adjacent practices like translation, theatre and performance, and most recently design. He has co-edited two books: Performance and Translation in a Global Age (2023) with Kelina Gotman, and Living Translation: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2022) with Emily Apter, Mauro Pala and Surya Parekh. He is currently working on a monograph on the cultural politics of “Global Englishes”, and a transdisciplinary project titled “Design Humanities.” He is Associate Professor and Department Head of Literary Arts and Studies at Rhode Island School of Design, USA.

Céline Kopp was appointed director of Le Magasin, the National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble in 2022. She was director of Triangle-Astérides, a 30-year-old non-profit visual arts organization based in Marseille, from 2012-2022, where she developed exhibition projects with Liz Magor, the Chicano artist group Asco, Paul Maheke, Jesse Darling, and Lydia Ourahmane, among others. She was Curator of the 6th Ateliers de Rennes Contemporary Art Biennial, the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at MCA Chicago, and has conceived numerous projects in France and abroad, notably with the Powerhouse in Memphis and SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen. Since 2020, she has been elected to the board of d.c.a, the national network for the development of art centers in France, where she promotes her vision of the art institution as a site for the assertion of cultural rights: artist-centered, audience-responsive, and site-specific.

Kate Kraczon is Director of Exhibitions of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) and Chief Curator of The Bell at Brown University. She oversees the BAI’s exhibition program, which includes The Bell and its collection of over 7,000 works in List Art Center, the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Brown’s robust Public Art program. As a member of the BAI leadership team, Kraczon builds programs across campus and within the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center. She is also involved in many aspects of developing and lecturing within the BAI’s academic program. Since joining the BAI, Kraczon has curated solo exhibitions with artists including Elisabeth Subrin, Savannah Knoop, Jules Gimbrone, Franklin Williams, Julien Creuzet, and a two-person exhibition with Harry Gould Harvey IV and Faith Wilding. Upcoming projects include a major exhibition with Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas. Previously the Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2008-2019), she organized over thirty exhibitions while at ICA, including Ree Morton’s first major retrospective in the United States in over three decades (2018).

Sabine Lamour is a sociologist trained in both France and Haiti, and is currently a Visiting Professor at Brown University. Since 2018, she has held a faculty position at the Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH). Her scholarship is grounded in standpoint epistemology, participatory methodologies, grounded theory, materialist feminism, Afro-feminism, and decolonial feminist thought. Her research focuses on gender relations, women’s migration, family structures in the Caribbean, the Haitian feminist movement and the Haitian political system. She is currently working on a research project examining the philosophical foundations of Haitian feminism. 

Dr. Lamour is co-editor of Déjouer le silence: contre-discours sur les femmes haïtiennes, published by Éditions Remue-Ménage (Montreal), a work that foregrounds counter-discourses on Haitian women’s lives and resistance. Her academic articles have been published in several prestigious journals, including Recherches Féministes, Chemins Critiques, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, and Caribbean Studies.

In addition to her academic work, she is an active feminist activist. She has worked with grassroots women’s organisations as an activist, trainer and independent consultant in both rural and urban contexts. From 2017 to 2022 she was the national coordinator of the feminist organisation SOFA (Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn). She is currently completing a monograph entitled: Imaginer le feminisme haitien: enjeux théoriques et méthodologiques, which seeks to articulate new analytical frameworks for understanding feminist thought in the Haitian context.

SAMMUS aka Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (she/her) is a black feminist rapper, beatmaker, and scholar from Ithaca, NY with family roots in Côte D'Ivoire and the Congo. She is the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown University as well as the Faculty Director of the Black Music Lab. Since 2010 SAMMUS has written, produced, and recorded six albums and a beat tape, and she has worked on several one-off collaborations with notable artists including Moor Mother, Open Mike Eagle, Sadie Dupuis, and William Brittelle in addition to her collaborations with video game developers, podcasters, and filmmakers. She is currently completing two studio projects slated for release in 2025.

Lyrically SAMMUS is known for her dense and introspective rhymes about everything from retro video-game inspired Afrofuturist space odysseys to the power of talk therapy; broadly her work explores the aesthetics of anxiety, specifically what it means to move through the world as an anxious black girl. Her live shows, characterized by her high energy and the inclusion of elements of cosplay, bring together a vibrant array of hip hop heads, punks, activists, and self-identified nerds and geeks, among others. As noted by the Los Angeles Times, Sammus “has a gift for getting a message across.”

Dr. Lumumba-Kasongo received her PhD from Cornell University in Science and Technology Studies. Her doctoral research, which she completed in 2019, focuses on the sociotechnical dynamics that shape the development and use of “community-studios”—recording studios that provide high-quality recording tools, professional sound engineering services, and audio training to communities that often lack financial or social access to these resources. Her scholarly areas of interest include black feminist sound studies and hip-hop praxis, particularly as it intersects with AI and gaming technocultures.

Since Fall 2021 she has been a member of the steering committee for Brown’s science, technology, and society program. From 2019 to 2024 she served as the Director of Audio at Glow Up Games, the first women-of-color led game studio, and since 2020 she has been a member of theKEEPERS, a women-centered hip hop collective led by international MC and scholar akua naru.

Tianren Luo is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. His research focuses on Afro-Asian studies, critical infrastructure studies, and critical finance studies. His future works will examine the new extractive infrastructures of financial capitalism across Africa and Asia, investigating how these infrastructures dominate popular imaginaries of the future. Tianren is also interested in critical AI and Critical Algorithm Studies. He is currently working on a project excavating the genealogy of epistemologies of models in early AI history. Beyond academia, he is also an activist and artist, collaborating with a team of artists and data scientists on a transmedia art project that interrogates the use of data visualization techniques in the stock market.

Alyssa Mattocks is an independent curator, writer and producer of artist projects and exhibitions based in New York. She is currently an associate producer on the documentary SUN RA: Door of the Cosmos. Previously, she was the Director of Deli Gallery, organizing exhibitions in New York and Mexico City. Before that, she worked at David Zwirner and 52 Walker. 

Jordan Taliha McDonald is an essayist, critic, editor, cultural worker, and (sometimes) poet. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University with a secondary field in History of Science. Her scholarship primarily examines how literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas of complicity and fidelity were shaped by the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism, and the construction of racial Blackness. Her research interests include 19th and 20th-century Black/Afro-diasporic literature, rhetoric, critical theory, visual culture, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, animality studies, the history of aesthetic surgery, and the development of race science. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Beinecke Scholarship, and the Ford Foundation.

Mohamed Amer Meziane holds a PhD in Philosophy and Intellectual History from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. After teaching at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, he joined Brown University as an Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies, affiliated with the Center for Middle East Studies at the Watson Institute. He is the author of The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. The book won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023 and was published in English in April 2024 by Verso Books. His second book was published in French in 2023. It is titled: Au bord des mondes. Vers une anthropologie métaphysique (At the Edge of the Worlds: Towards a Metaphysical Anthropology). His work reaches both an Academic and non-Academic audiences in Europe and Africa, with talks at Harvard University, The Collège de France, MoMa PS1, LuMA, The Night of Ideas in New York or Dakar as well as in Morocco. His books have been reviewed in several media such as Le Monde, Mediapart and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also invited to write texts about several contemporary artists for exhibitions catalogs, art galleries or journals such as Flash Art. 

Mame-Fatou Niang is Associate Professor of French Studies and the Founder-Director of the Center for Black European Studies and the Atlantic at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Niang is also the international curator of the Rio de Janeiro Literary Festival (FLUP) and an artist-in-residence at Ateliers Medicis (Echoic/Sounds of Silence). She is the author of Identités Françaises (2019), and the co-author of Universalisme (2022). Her recent research examines Black geographies, Blackness in France and the institutionalization of Black Studies. In 2015, she co-directed “Mariannes Noires” a film in which seven Afro-French women unravel what it means to be Black and French, Black in France. Dr. Niang is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University, where she is working on two projects: a manuscript tentatively titled Mosaica Nigra: Blackness in 21st-century France and a book on French filmmaker Alice Diop.

J.M. Nimocks is a PhD student in the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown University. Before arriving at Brown University, they received their Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, California and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship after graduating. Upon returning from the fellowship, J.M. enrolled at the University of Washington-Seattle and completed their Master’s in Social Work from the University of Washington-Seattle with a concentration in Public Policy. During their graduate studies, J.M. was a nightlife DJ and scored independent creative productions including a feature play at the "I wanna be with you everywhere" (2019) festival at Performance Space New York in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art. Upon completion of their M.S.W., J.M was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Research Fellowship - Brazil in 2020. During their time in Brazil, which was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they worked closely with the then budding kiki ballroom scene in Sao Paulo, Brazil. After a short hiatus from art-making, in 2021 at the Black Portraiture[s] VII: Play & Performance Conference at Rutgers University, J.M. performed and presented a self-produced, experimental film series exploring the intersections of sound studies and environmental science. 

Since arriving at Brown University in 2022, J.M. has presented their work at multiple gatherings including Brown University German Studies Department’s Thinking Unrest, Reading Time: German Idealism and the Traces of History (2023), University of Chicago’s Department of Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Conference Playing With Animals (2024), Duke University’s Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Summer Workshop at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (2024), and Brown University’s Elemental Media Conference (2024). They are scheduled to present at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (November 2025) on their talk titled, “The Unpromise of Desire: Revisiting Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown”. J.M.’s research interests include but are not limited to continental philosophy, black feminist theory, literary theory, spectrality, semiotics, theater and performance studies. Their developing dissertation project is considering the intersections of the body and textual performance in biological or vital philosophy spanning from the eighteenth thru twentieth centuries, mythology and the role of the specter, and dramaturgical studies.

Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He currently serves as the Exhibitions Proctor at the Brown Arts Institute/Bell Gallery and programmes films at Brown University with Magic Lantern Cinema.

Nyawose was part of the inaugural curatorial team for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: The Brandfort Years 1977–1986 at the Winnie Mandela Museum (2022). He has worked as a film programmer for the Encontro de Cinema Negro Zózimo Bulbul festival in Brazil (2022–2024), and was the University of Cape Town’s Institute for Creative Arts – Live Art Festival Curatorial Fellow (2022), as well as a Young Curators Incubator fellow (2022) with the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg and the Wits School of Arts, History of Art Department. In the same year, he participated in the TURN2 curatorial residency programme at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. He also received the Andrew Mellon Graduate Internship at the Iziko South African National Gallery (2019) and served on the University of Cape Town’s Works of Art Committee (2019–2022).

Nyawose is the recipient of the HSS Award (National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, South Africa) for Best Creative Collections: Emerging Artist/Curator (2025), a Foam Paul Huf Award nominee (2022), and the recipient of the Hariban Award Juror's Choice (2022). His work has been featured in Der Greif magazine, Issue 16, curated by Shirin Neshat (2023), and in the Hyundai Tate Research Centre's Transnational Waterways: Arteries, Rhythms, and Kinship at Tate Modern (2024).Recent exhibitions include the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako – Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (Dec 2022–Feb 2023); Indigo Waves and Other Stories at Zeitz MOCAA (June 2022–Feb 2023); the PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography (April–July 2022); eBhish’ at KZNSA Gallery (Jan 2022); and eBhish’ at blank projects (July 2021).

Choreographer and “imagery” artist, born, raised, and nourished in Brazil, working from France and navigating the world through the regenerative layers of the African Diaspora and its radical imagination. She deepens a line of research on ancestral dances and their actual peripheral forms, working as an “extemporary” dancer, pedagogue, space maker, and writer. Grounded in the material study of gestures and movements transmitted by traditions and transmuted through different landscapes, software programs, living bodies, and archives, her practice carefully examines their philosophical and futurity potential while activating and creating new systems of permanence. 

Pi’s choreographic pieces, sculptural installations, films, pedagogical acts, and research were featured in the 35th São Paulo Biennial—Choreographies of the Impossible (2023), Tomie Ohtake for the exhibition Histórias Afro-Atlânticas (2018), Performa Biennial 2023, 15th Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art—The Wake, and have been also programmed in institutions such as the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, the Centre Pompidou (Paris and Metz), RAW Material Company, Amant (Brooklyn), Inhotim Museum, Museo Reina Sofia, Museu de arte de São Paulo, Bard College, P.A.R.T.S., Dancing Museums, Videobrasil, Festival d’Automne à Paris, ImPulsTanz, Alkantara, Holland Festival, to mention just a few. In 2025, Pi will premiere ATOMIC JOY, a choreographic piece for 8 dancers, at Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis and Pinacoteca de São Paulo.

Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer, and is completing a PhD at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her writing has appeared in Lux magazine, the Baffler, the Nation, Film Quarterly, and other publications, and her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival.

As a transnational curator and researcher, Anissa Touati has been working between the West and the “Global South”. She is currently the artistic director of the MDNAF museum, WA and a visiting researcher at Brown University, USA where she develops the notion of 'Entangled Legacies of Space'. Most recently, she served as guest curator 2023-2024 of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva, curator-at-large of Paris Internationale from 2020-2023 and has been the artistic director of Contemporary Istanbul from 2018-2020. Over the past decade, she has taken on the role of  artistic director at several international locations, advised, curated or co-curated exhibitions and projects in many different countries including ARCO Madrid (Spain), Chalet Society (France), Thalie Foundation (Belgium), BEMA Museum (Lebanon), Mughal Museum (India), Lagos Biennial (Nigeria), Broad Museum (USA) amongst others. Anissa Touati has lectured at numerous places such as MIT (Boston), Harvard GSD (Boston), University of Zürich (Switzerland) amongst others and writes for exhibitions catalogs, art galleries or journals such as Flash Art, Apartamento.

Alexander Ghedi Weheliye is Malcolm S. Forbes Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University, where they teach critical theory, Black literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies, and popular culture. They are the author of Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (2005), Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), and Feenin: R&B Music and the Materiality of BlackFem Voices and Technology (2023).