ALBIE SACHS
On turning six, during World War II, Albie Sachs received a card from his father expressing the wish that he would grow up to be a soldier in the fight for liberation. His career in human rights activism started at the age of seventeen when as a second-year law student at the University of Cape Town, he took part in the Defiance of Unjust Laws Campaign. Three years later he attended the Congress of the People at Kliptown where the Freedom Charter was adopted. He started practice as an advocate at the Cape Bar at age 21 and the bulk of his work involved defending people charged under racist statutes and repressive security laws, many of whom faced the death sentence. He himself was raided by the security police, subjected to banning orders restricting his movement, and eventually placed in solitary confinement without trial for two prolonged spells of detention. In 1966 he went into exile. After eleven years studying and teaching law in England, he worked another eleven years in Mozambique as a law professor and researcher. In 1988 he was blown up by a bomb placed in his car in Maputo by South African security agents, losing an arm and the sight of an eye. During the 1980s working closely with the ANC leader in exile, Oliver Tambo, he helped draft the organization’s Code of Conduct and its statutes. After recovering from the bomb he devoted himself full-time to preparations for a new democratic Constitution for South Africa. In 1990 he returned home and as a member of the Constitutional Committee and the National Executive of the ANC took an active part in the negotiations which led to South Africa becoming a constitutional democracy. After the first democratic election in 1994, he was appointed by President Nelson Mandela to serve on the newly established Constitutional Court. He has traveled extensively sharing South African experience in healing divided societies. He has been engaged deeply in the sphere of art and architecture playing a central and active role in the development of the Constitutional Court building and art collection on the site of the Old Fort Prison in Johannesburg.
JANE M. SAKS | M2M Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director
Jane M. Saks is a writer, curator, activist, artist, educator as well as a cultural and arts advocate, creative collaborator, and cultural producer. Her work challenges and champions issues of gender, sexuality, human rights, race, and power within the worlds of arts and culture, politics and civil rights, academia, and philanthropy. She is the Founding President and Artistic Director of Project&, and Founding Executive Director of Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media. She has been a visiting critic, artist, professor, and lecturer including at Yale University, MIT, Harvard University, Orleans Parish Prison, The United Nations, Holocaust Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Field Museum, Aspen Institute, Center on Race and Equity. She has received awards and honors including Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow; Business and Professionals in the Public Interest “40 Who Have Made a Difference” Award; Arts Leaders Who Work for Equity, Racial Justice and Human Rights (United Nations High Commissioner Award) Inductee, City of Chicago’s LGBT Hall of Fame; Leadership Award, About Face Theatre; Impact Award, Chicago Foundation for Women; Visionary Award: Rape Victim Advocates; BeyondMedia Justice Award; Pride Index Leadership Award In recognition of partnership with and support of the African American LGBT communities; Fellow, International Leadership Program, National Arts Strategies, and the LGBT Human First Award, Center on Halsted. She is a published poet and as a writer, publishing with Phaidon Press, Northwestern Press and Haymarket Press and has collaborated with artists including Kerry James Marshall, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Jim Hodges and has collaborated with artists including Eve L. Ewing, Jim Hodges, invincible, Cheryl Pope, Hon. Albie Sachs, Eve L Ewing, and co-created with Claire Chase, E Patrick Johnson, Lynsey Addario, Cheryl Pope, Jeanne Gang, Daniel Alexander Jones, Tony Gerber and Lynn Nottage.
MAMADOU-ABOU SARR
Mamadou is the Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of V-Square Quantitative Management, a subsidiary of Valor Management L.P. Mamadou founded V-Square Quantitative Management in 2020 after an accomplished career in asset management whilst working for global financial services company across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
Industry leader in the field of sustainable investing and financial innovation, Mamadou's previous role was global head of product development and sustainable investing at Northern Trust Asset Management in Chicago, IL.
Previously, Mamadou worked for HSBC Global Asset Management, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Amundi Alternative Investments and Citi in trading in London, Paris, Abu Dhabi and Dakar. Mamadou received his bachelor's in economics from the Universite Paris-Saclay and holds a master's in International project management from the European School of Management (ESCP), Paris. Mamadou has also spoken at more than 150 conferences in North America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Australia and is a guest lecturer on sustainability at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Wharton and ESCP Business School.
Mamadou is actively involved in philanthropic and civic activities. He serves on the boards of CFA Society Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nature Conservancy Illinois Chapter (TNC), the US SIF (The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment), Rush Health Equity Advisory Council (Rush Hospital) and he is a member of the Investment Committee of Align Impact. He also serves at the ESCP business school Research Center for Energy Management (Member of the Advisory Board); French American Cultural Exchange (FACE - Founding member of FACE in Chicago) and a member of various committees of the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).
In 2014 he was named in the Financial News "Top 40 under 40 Rising Stars in Asset Management" in Europe, Middle East, and Africa. In 2017, Mamadou was named a "40 under 40" by Crain's Chicago Business. In 2017 he was also recognized in Top 50 Individuals who contribute the most sustainable & responsible investment industry in the world (IRRI). He is a fellow of Leadership Greater Chicago since 2019, a member of the Economic Club of Chicago and an adjunct professor of ESG Investing at the Baumhart Center (Loyola University Chicago). Mamadou is a French Foreign Trade Advisor, appointed by decree of the Prime Minister of France.
KANEZA SCHAAL
Kaneza Schaal is a New York City based artist working in theater, opera and film. Schaal is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, and received a 2019 United States Artists Fellowship, SOROS Art Migration and Public Space Fellowship, Joyce Award, 2018 Ford Foundation Art For Justice Bearing Witness Award, 2017 MAP Fund Award, 2016 Creative Capital Award, and an Aetna New Voices Fellow at Hartford Stage. Her project GO FORTH, premiered at Performance Space 122 and showed at Genocide Memorial Amphitheater in Kigali, Rwanda; Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans; Cairo International Contemporary Theater Festival in Egypt; and her alma mater Wesleyan University, CT. Her work JACK & showed in BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and with co-commissioners Walker Arts Center, REDCAT, On The Boards, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Schaal’s piece CARTOGRAPHY premiered at The Kennedy Center and toured to The New Victory Theater, Abu Dhabi Arts Center and Playhouse Square, OH. Her dance work, MAZE, created with FLEXN NYC, premiered at The Shed. She directed Triptych composed by Bryce Dessner with libretto by Korde Arrington Tuttle, which premiered at LA Philharmonic, The Power Center in Ann Arbor, MI, BAM Opera House and Holland Festival. Her newest original work KLII, was co-commissioned for the Eureka Commissions program by Onassis Foundation and is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Walker Art Center in partnership with Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, and REDCAT. Schaal is developing and directing SPLIT TOOTH with Tanya Tagaq (Luminato Festival, Canada), HUSH ARBOR with Imani Izuri (The Momentary, AK) and BLUE at Michigan Opera Theater.
VANESSA SEPTEMBER
The end of apartheid paved the way for me to fulfill a childhood dream - to build houses and create public spaces for people like me who grew up in a working-class neighbourhood surrounded by very little that was beautiful. At 30, I went back to high school and on to university to complete a Master of Architecture. At 51, I returned to complete a Master of Urban Design. My focus has been on transforming underutilised spaces through community-led design processes into well-functioning public spaces. This led me to serve on the board of Project for Public Spaces in New York and work on a transformative public space agenda in Nairobi with UN Habitat. It also led to a part time appointment at the University of Cape Town where my goal is to inspire young would-be planners to be thoughtful when they make their mark on the landscape. Currently, as CEO of the Constitution Hill Trust, I oversee the development of an exhibition in which we tell the story of the making and workings of our Constitution and the Constitutional Court. We are located on Constitution Hill, the home of the Constitutional Court and the site of the Old Fort Prison, which is being transformed into a monument of hope and democracy.
HEATHER SHIREY
Heather Shirey, PhD, is a Professor of Art History at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her teaching and research focus on race and identity, migrations and diasporas, and monuments, memorials, and street art in relation to public space and communities. Together with the Urban Art Mapping research team, she created and maintains the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database and the Covid-19 Street Art Database. These activist archives are driven by our understanding that it is crucial to document and analyze street art not only because of its ephemerality, but also because it captures the complexity of the experiences shaping the world today. Areas of inquiry include the study of creating, curating, and archiving as a form of activism and healing, and monuments and street art as modes of critical engagement in shared space. Dr. Shirey has published research on monuments in Brazil (African Arts, 2009) and in Great Britain (Open Cultural Studies, 2019). The Urban Art Mapping team’s latest research on street art is available in Urban Creativity Scientific Journal (2020), Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Landscape (edited by Tijen Tunali, May 2021), NUART (May 2021), and the Journal of Folklore Research (August 2021).
KAMAL SINCLAIR
Kamal Sinclair is making the world more beautiful as the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects and artist at Sinclair Futures. She served as an External Advisor to the MacArthur Foundation's Journalism & Media Program, a Creative Advisor to For Freedoms (the largest collective art project in US history), a member of Sharon Chang’s Family Office (Dream Office of Imaginary Friends) and as an advisory board member of MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, Starfish Incubator, and Eyebeam. Previously, she was the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program for seven years, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology. During that period, she consulted for the Ford Foundation's JustFilms program on a research project aimed at furthering equality in emerging media, which resulted in “Making a New Reality.” Sinclair got her start in emerging media as an artist and producer on Question Bridge: Black Males. At Question Bridge, she and her collaborators launched a project with an interactive website and curriculum; published a book; exhibited in over sixty museums/festivals.
ELISSA SLOAN PERRY
Elissa Sloan Perry (CoDirector, Change Elemental) is of African and Mississippi Choctaw descent, hails from Missouri, and is a 30-year resident of California. In both her creative practice and her nonprofit social justice work, Elissa is a call to the sacred in everyone. She defines the sacred as what’s possible when we all have what we need to be our best selves and contribute meaningfully to the interdependent well-being of people and planet. Elissa joined Change Elemental in 2013 as the Program Catalyst for the Network Leadership Innovation Lab and became CoDirector in 2015. Elissa supports Change Elemental clients with equity and liberation-rooted leadership development, culture change processes, and coaching services for individuals and teams. When she’s not at Change Elemental (and even sometimes when she is!) you can find Elissa writing prose, tap dancing, exploring other art forms, and spending time with trees.
JESSICA SOLOMON
Jessica Solomon is an organization development practitioner and cultural steward who has built a practice creating conditions for transformative impact in cultural, philanthropic and social justice spaces. Through her company Art in Praxis, she specializes in embedding creativity and equity into the work of planned change. Art in Praxis’ client roster includes national and place-based cultural institutions, social justice networks, and foundations. Previously, as Vice President of the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, Jessica sharpened the institution’s place-based arts and culture grantmaking strategy, led organizational change initiatives, and deepened institutional knowledge to drive more equitable impact. Most recently, Jessica co-produced cultural policy recommendations for the City of Baltimore as Co-Chair of the Mayor's Arts and Culture Transition Committee. Jessica is an emerging collector with a focus on Black contemporary art by women and gender-nonconforming artists. She hopes to learn how to play the harmonica.
NICK STILLMAN
Nick Stillman is Executive Director of Prospect New Orleans; the Prospect.5 exhibition Yesterday we said tomorrow opens October 23, 2021 in New Orleans. Prior to Prospect, Stillman was President & CEO of the Arts Council New Orleans. Before the Arts Council, Stillman taught Modern & Contemporary Art History at the University of New Orleans and was Managing Editor of BOMB Magazine. He has organized exhibitions of artists such as Kalup Linzy and Joe Bradley for PS1 Institute of Contemporary Art and has written for Artforum, Flash Art, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications.
CARMELITA TIU
Armed with a BFA, a JD, and a determination to use both sides of her brain, Cat built a career at the intersections of creativity, media and business. After several years handling legal and business affairs as an attorney for The Oprah Winfrey Show and OWN, she shifted into the advertising world and is now Senior Counsel for VSA Partners, LLC, a design-centric branding and marketing firm with Fortune 500 and tech clients such as Google, IBM, Nike, Salesforce, and AB InBev. Passionate about supporting the creative community, Cat has served on various arts-related nonprofit boards, including the Chicago Artists Coalition, Lawyers for the Creative Arts, Project&, Collaboraction and WomanCraft. She also taught Entertainment Law at Columbia College and DePaul University College of Law. Cat holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a JD from the DePaul University College of Law, and a certificate in Dispute Resolution from Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago with her family, including two daughters who’ve inspired her to create Know Them, Be Them, Raise Them, a podcast for women raising girls, launching in May 2021. Follow @knowberaisethem on IG for updates.
RED VAUGHAN TREMMEL
Dr. Red Vaughan Tremmel is a historian and artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana. For the last two decades, his academic and artistic work has focused on the significance of pleasure, play, and beauty in the social struggles and world-building projects of marginalized people. Tremmel earned his doctorate in American History from the University of Chicago, where he studied industrial capitalism, working-class pleasure cultures and the commercialization of “free time.” In 2012, Tremmel founded the Office for Gender and Sexual Diversity at Tulane University, where he is a Senior Professor of Practice. He was most recently published in the award-winning anthology, Understanding and Teaching U.S. Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History. Tremmel is also the creator and co-producer of Gurlesque, a queer performance revue that ran in Chicago from 2001-8; the director and co-producer of the documentary film Exotic World and the Burlesque Revival (2012); and the co-creator of Subjects of Desire: Objects of Resistance, a multimedia installation commissioned for dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). He is a past fellow of the Social Science Research Council; Columbia College’s Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media Program; the University of Chicago’s Center for Gender Studies Program; and the James Hormel Sexuality Program.
SARAH WESTLAKE
Silver fox, storyteller, editor, cultural producer and network weaver with twenty years communications experience. Tells it like it is, cuts to the chase, asks awkward questions, generates ideas by the minute, while managing every relationship with honesty and integrity. Strategic communications, figuring out editorial planning that makes sense, and delivering on quality every time. A versatile professional who is adept at keeping creativity fresh while handling the minutiae of multiple plates in the air. Born and raised working class in rural England. Proud to work as the volunteer Communications Director for Showing Up For Racial Justice (NYC chapter). Founder of creative communications collective Flannel & Blade, erstwhile Editorial Director at Artplace America and before that the Head of Creative at the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Also the co-founder of an artist giving circle Vital Little Plans and a growing online community for elder queers named, you'll never guess... Elderqueer.
AMANDA WILLIAMS
Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how we assign value to the spaces we occupy. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have detrimentally shaped much of the United States. Williams’ installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and in the process, raise questions about the state of urban space and ownership in America.
Her breakthrough series, Color(ed) Theory, was recently named by the New York TImes as one of the twenty-five most significant works of postwar architecture in the world. For the series, she gathered friends and family to paint the exterior of several condemned houses on the south side of Chicago. The unsanctioned project saw Williams’ cover each structure in a monochrome palette from culturally coded color associations. The project garnered international acclaim and interest. What Black Is This You Say?, a multi-platform project that explores the wide range of meaning and conceptual color that connotes blackness. Using her Instagram account as an initial platform to challenge and celebrate black lives, the work has evolved into a series of paintings, soundworks and a year long public work in New York’s SoHo neighborhood. In her most recent participatory artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in NY, Embodied Sensations, Williams considers how COVID-19 has reshaped how we move, and how we relate to one another. She examines questions of race, ability and power, highlighting the stark inequities and systemic injustices that underlie such shifts; asking us to reflect on control and freedom, isolation and community, prejudice and violence, love and fear.
Amanda has exhibited widely, including the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the MCA Chicago, and a public commission at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She is co-designer of a forthcoming permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn NY and part of the Museum Design Team for the Obama Presidential Center. Williams has garnered critical acclaim and been recognized as a USA Ford Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Painting and Sculpture grantee, a 3Arts Next Level awardee, and is the inaugural Artist-In-Residence at Smith College. She is a highly sought after lecturer, including a mainstage 2018 TedTalk. Amanda sits on the boards of the Graham Foundation, The Black Reconstruction Collective, and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
Her work is in several permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, NY). Her projects have recently been published in ‘Black Futures’ and ‘Radical Architecture of the Future’. Amanda lives and works on the south side of Chicago.
Photo Credit: Tony Smith
TARA AISHA WILLIS
Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer, PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, and Associate Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She recently held a NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship and is an editorial collective member of Women & Performance. Former co-managing editor for TDR/The Drama Review, she co-edited a special issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz and the performance writing project, Marking the Occasion (Wendy's Subway, 2020), with Jaime Shearn Coan. Willis performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine (2016-19) and in the 2016 “Bessie” award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture. She was the founding administrator of Movement Research's Artists of Color Council and a member of the phase 1 working group for “Creating New Futures," the COVID-19 responsive guidelines for ethical dance presenting.
MARY KEMPER WOLF
Mary is an arts advocate, curator, and creative consultant who believes art can unify, ignite and transform communities. Growing up in a family steeped in the art world and philanthropy, she understood the importance of collaboration and community. Mary’s passion for co-creating impact-driven art experiences was in large part inspired by her early-career research on Expressionist painter Frederick J. Brown, who was the subject of the documentary 120 Wooster Street, which she wrote and directed and which aired on PBS. The film centered on how Brown’s work engaged his African American and Native American Ancestry, music, the fabric of urban life, and religion and spirituality. Mary’s current curatorial projects include: a public art collaboration with Summer Wheat, to convert a former planetarium into a freestanding, immersive sanctuary; a public art conservation project on The Tallgrass Prairie in The Flint Hills of Kansas, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy; and an immersive sonic space with the musician Hermon Mehari. Mary is currently Chair of the Board of Trustees at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. She also serves on the Board of The American Jazz Museum, The Public Art Executive Committee for the (New) Kansas City International Airport, and Open Spaces Art Triennial Steering Committee.
avery r young
Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young is a 3Arts Awardee, Cave Canem fellow and a co-director of The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose has been featured in anthologies such as; featured in BreakBeat Poets, Teaching Black, Poetry Magazine and alongside images in photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s, In The Company of Black. As artist-in-residence at the University of Chicago, young created a series of assemblage and sculpture along with his first recording, booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid. As a composer, young has written and produced for Lise Haller Baggeson’s Hatorgrade Retrograde: The Musical and he wrote the libretto for The Chicago Lyric Opera’s Twilight: Gods. His performance and visual work has been exhibited and/or presented at The Art Institute, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Jazz Museum and other institutions. An award-winning teaching artist, young co-mentors the Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. He is the featured vocalist on Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening and has tours planned with his band de deacon board. Young’s latest full-length recording tubman. is the soundtrack to his first collection of visual and traditional poetry, neckbone: visual verses.
MARCELA ANDRADE SERMENT