Photographers & Filmmakers
Nadia Alexis
Nadia Alexis is a poet, photographer, educator, and organizer born in Harlem, New York to Haitian immigrants and currently based in Oxford, Mississippi where she is pursuing her PhD in creative writing at the University of Mississippi. Her poetry has been published in Kweli Journal, Indiana Review, MQR: Mixtape, Texas Review, and others. Her photography has been published in Forgotten Lands, MQR: Mixtape, TORCH Journal, MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, 2019 honorable mention prize winner of Hurston/Wright College Writers Award, 2020 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters photography award nominee, and 2020 semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. She is also a fellow of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop and The Watering Hole.
Vanessa Charlot
Vanessa Charlot is a documentary photographer living and working between St. Louis, Missouri and Miami, Florida. She shoots primarily in black and white to explore the immutability of the collective human experience and to disrupt compositional hierarchy. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of spirituality, socio-economic issues, and sexual/gender expression. She has worked as a freelance photographer and lecturer throughout the US, Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Her photographs have been commissioned by Vogue, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Artnet News among other national and international publications. She currently serves as a teaching artist for the International Center of Photography in New York.
Dee Dwyer
Dee Dwyer is a photographer from Southeast, Washington, D.C. Her work has been shown in exhibitions such as PhotoSCHWEIZ, Photoville, Catchlight, among others and featured in publications such as Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, BET, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek and more. She works as a photojournalist at the DCist where she focuses on communities of color. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Digital Production from The Art Institute of Washington and has studied at The Art Institute of Miami.
Jon Henry
Jon Henry, originally from Flushing, Queens, is a Brooklyn-based visual artist working with photography and text. His work reflects on family, socio political issues, grief, trauma, and healing within the African-American community. His work has been published nationally and internationally and exhibited at the Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon and BRIC, among others. Henry’s awards include the Arnold Newman Grant for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture, En Foco Fellow 2020, LensCulture's Emerging Artists 2019, the Film Photo Prize for Continuing Film Project sponsored by Kodak.
Terrence Jennings
Terrence Jennings is a Brooklyn, New York-based photojournalist whose body of work spans national news, politics, entertainment, event coverage and the African-American experience with an emphasis on documenting social justice issues. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center, New York University and Harvard University. Jennings is a member of the photographic collective, Kamoinge, the first African-American photographers collective founded in 1963. He is the founding curator for the photography public program series, Visually Speaking.
Carlos Javier Ortiz
Carlos Javier Ortiz is a Chicago-based director, cinematographer, and documentary photographer who focuses on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty, and marginalized communities. In 2016, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for film/video. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY, and the Library of Congress. In addition, his photos were used to illustrate Ta-Nehisi Coates' “The Case for Reparations” (2014) in The Atlantic. His films We All We Got and A Thousand Midnights have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles International Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, PBS Online Film Festival and Art Basel, Black and Blue, Stadtkino Basel cinema.
Curator
Grace Aneiza Ali is Guyanese-American and serves as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York. She is an Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Her curatorial research and teaching practice centers on curatorial activism, socially engaged art practices, global contemporary art, and art of the Caribbean Diaspora with a focus on her homeland Guyana. Ali’s recent book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora, examines Guyanese narratives of migration and the role of art in telling women’s migration stories.
Sound Design
Kareem Johnson is a classically trained pianist, producer, and sound design artist currently residing in Washington D.C. He received a Bachelor’s in Music Engineering Technology from the University of Miami. Johnson regularly performs in the D.C. area, championing his passions through tech, recording, DJing, and live shows. He has done prominent work with local and national artists and musicians and has been featured in international exhibitions spanning from the Caribbean to Europe.
Poetry & The Lists
Kimiyo Bremer is an artist, scholar, and writer from Los Angeles whose research focuses on critical race theory, Black feminism, gender studies, popular culture, and visual culture. She holds a B.A. in Theater and Performance from Bard College and a in M.A. in Arts Politics from New York University. She is the co-author of Color Coded (2018), curator of the curatorial research project “Gazing Onward: Contemporary Exhibitions Disrupting the White Gaze,” and has developed institutional public programs for Poster House. She will be pursuing her PhD in the History of Art and Visual Culture at Cornell University in the Fall 2021.
Site Design
Mikey Cordero is Director of Digital Media at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute. Born in Brooklyn to Boricua parents, he fuels his artistic drive by chronicling the narratives of struggle and triumph through a variety of formats and platforms as a transmedia storyteller and creative agitator. As Co-creator of the Defend Puerto Rico Project, he narrates the story of Boricua resilience and resistance through a multimedia movement sparking action and awareness. He produced the web series East WillyB (in development at ABC), a satirical take on a Brooklyn community engulfed with gentrification and cultural ramifications. He has spent over ten years working in arts education in New York City. He presently creates and documents in Puerto Rico.