Editors:
Yvonne Welbon is the founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema, the senior creative consultant at Chicken & Egg Pictures, and an award-winning independent filmmaker. She has produced over two dozen films, including Living with Pride:Ruth Ellis @ 100 (1999), Sisters in Cinema (2003), The New Black (2013), and Sisters in the Life (2018)
Contributors:
Jennifer Brody is a professor of cultural studies, African American literature, and performance studies at Stanford University. Her books, Impossible Purities (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008), discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies, and performance.
Jennifer DeClue is an assistant professor in the study of women and gender at Smith College. Her research interests include queer studies, black feminism, visual studies, cultural studies, diasporic loss, histories of segregation and miscegenation in the United States, the afterlife of chattel slavery, and the construction, production, and reproduction of blackness in the United States.
Raul Ferrera-Balanquet is a prominent Cuban American artist, writer, curator, and Fulbright scholar from the Mariel Generation. He holds a PhD from Duke University and a MFA from the University of Iowa. He has exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Centro de Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona, Spain among others.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the founder of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and the co-creator of the Queer Black Mobile Homecoming Project. She has a PhD in English, Africana Studies, and Women’s Studies from Duke University and is the author of Spill:Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016).
Thomas Allen Harris is the founder and president of Chimpanzee Productions, a company dedicated to producing unique audiovisual experiences that illuminate the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. His films include Through a Lens Darkly (2014), Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela (2005) and É a Minha Cara/That’s My Face (2001).
Devorah Heitner founded Raising Digital Natives for parents and educators seeking advice on how to help children thrive in a world of digital connectedness. She is the author of Screenwise: Helping Digital Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World (Duke University Press 2016) and Black Power tv (Duke University Press 2013 ), a book on black public affairs television.
Pamela L. Jennings has used creative problem solving through computational thinking, creativity, and technology as key drivers of her creative, academic, research, policy, philanthropic, and entrepreneurial activities. She has held leadership positions in corporate research think tanks and research universities and art schools. She ran the National Science Foundation CreativeIT program and continues to be summoned as a leader and advocate of integrative creative, research, and pedagogical practice for national policy development.
Kara Keeling is an associate professor in the Division of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts and in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007). Her research has focused on African American film, theories of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, and cultural studies.
Candace Moore is a professor at the Carlton College, where her work focuses on queer representation in film and television. Moore’s articles have appeared in Cinema Journal, glq, Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, Televising Queer Women, Reading the L Word: Outing Contemporary Television, and Third Wave Feminism and Television.
Marlon Moore is an assistant professor of English at the United States Naval Academy and the author of In the Life and in the Spirit: Homoerotic Spirituality in African American Literature (State University of New York Press, 2015). Her current research focuses on the intertwined themes of spirituality, homosexuality, and racial identity in African American literature.
Michelle Parkerson is a writer, filmmaker, and educator from Washington, DC, and has served on the faculties of Northwestern University, Howard University, and Temple University. Her award-winning films include Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1983); A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (codirected with Ada Gay Griffin, 1995); and Storme: The Lady of the Jewel Box (1987). She is currently scripting Lifted, a 1920s action adventure about the first black woman pilot, Bessie Coleman.
Roya Rastegar is a curator, producer, and writer. She is a producer of the Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two (2017), and writer of the magical realist documentary Wildness (2011), w
L. H. Stallings is an associate professor of women’s studies at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures and Mutha Is Half a Word! Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
Patricia White is a professor of film and media studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999) and is completing a book on global women’s feature filmmaking in the twenty-first century.
Karin D. Wimbley is an assistant professor of English at DePauw University. Her research interests focus on African American cultural production across aesthetic registers and canons, especially African American literature, film, and visual culture.