ENGAGE!

Key Jo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), where she thinks with artists about Blackness, perception, cosmology, interior life and the futures museums rarely know how to hold. With more than. Decade in the field, her work lives at the intersection of curating, theory, and institution-building, asking how exhibitions do intellectual work and how care can be designed, not just declared.Her recent projects include UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe and Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors and Radical Black Joy.

Previously, she was Associate Curator of American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is the author of Perceptual Drift, Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, has written for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and holds dual MA and MPhil degrees in History of Art and African American Studies from Yale University.

Sadie Barnette is an artist working in a wide variety of visual outputs, often all at once. She was born and raised in Oakland, California and holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from UC San Diego. Her work has been equally influenced by the history of conceptual art, Bay Area rappers, anxiety, car culture, and Hello Kitty. Barnette’s work has recently been featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, among many others. She is represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery. She has been awarded grants and residencies including the Studio Museum in Harlem, United States Artists Fellowship, UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, and is a 2026 Creative Capital fellow. She lives in Oakland, CA.

Reyna Brown is an alchemist who creates mixed media artworks and installations to transform emotional trauma. As a practitioner of Ifá, a spiritual tradition derived from West Africa, Reyna uses her artistic practice as a means of communing with and honoring her ancestors. By tackling issues such as systemic racism, addiction, and mass incarceration, her art speaks truth to power while opening a pathway to healing for those engaging with her creations. Painting, glass blowing, ceramic sculpting, beading, embroidery and installation are just a few of the many forms Reyna’s artistic practice takes shape. Led by spirit, she allows the messages on her heart to tell her how they need to be brought to life.

Oasa DuVerney lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work reimagines elements from natural and urban, as well as political and social landscapes, positioning them as active sites for building solidarity in the pursuit of Black liberation.

Her exhibitions include Flight Into Egypt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2024); Acquired! Shaping the National Design Collection, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY (2024); A World to Live In, Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine: Paradise Is One’s Own Place, Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn, NY (2021); Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, NY (2021); 2020 Women to Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2020); Twenty Twenty, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2020); Something to Say, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); The Window and the Breaking of the Window, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016); and The Brooklyn Biennial II, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2016).

Her work is included in the collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

DuVerney received her MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2011 and her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology (SUNY) in 2007.

Rodney Ewing (b. Baton Rouge, La.) is a visual artist, whose drawings, installations, and mixed media works focus on his need to intersect body and place, memory and fact, and to re- examine human histories, and cultural conditions.  His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, Jack Shainman Gallery: The School, The Drawing Center in NY, The Brooklyn Museum, and Rena Bransten Gallery. Ewing is a grantee of the Pollock Krasner award (2022-2023) San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant (2016 and 2020) and his work has been included in to the collection of Tufts University Art Gallery, and SFMOMA.

As a topic-based artist, my interdisciplinary practice involves extensive research of overlooked historical objects, individuals, spaces and events of the Black Diaspora. My narratives explore and translate the actual and emotional dimensions of these subjects to draw the viewer in toward the piece and immerses them in a reorienting experience of images, words and ideas. I layer visual elements to create an experience that is unique and nuanced within the context of his prints, sculptures, drawings, or installations. With my work I am creating a platform that requires us to be both present and profound in our observations.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Brooklyn-born visual artist, educator, andcultural organizer whose interdisciplinary practice is rooted in photographyand expanded through textiles, video, sound, and handmade paper. Grounded inwhat she terms Kpoto Patchwok—a methodologyinformed by ancestral intelligence, embodied memory, and ecologicalknowledge—her work explores how stories are carried and preserved throughbodies, landscapes, and material culture.A first-generation artist with heritage from Sierra Leone and EquatorialGuinea, Fawundu is co-author and editor of MFON: WomenPhotographers of the African Diaspora. Her two new books In Searchof the Spirit House (Project for Empty Space/Express Newark) and Praise House(Archive Books) were released in Spring 2026.  She has received numeroushonors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, CatchLight Fellowship, Rema HortMann Foundation Artist Grant, and a New York Foundation for the ArtsFellowship. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the SãoPaulo Biennial and the Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial, and is held innumerous public and private collections.  

Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, educator, and curator. She is Dean of the Humanities & Sciences Division and Professor in the History of Art and Visual Cultural Studies at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), and co-editor of several books, including Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023) and Romare Bearden: American Modernism (2011). In 2024, Francis co-curated an exhibition on modernist sculptor Sargent Claude Johnson for the Huntington Art Museum (San Marino, CA). Among her other curatorial projects are “You Will Not Be Forgotten: Work by Adia Millett” (2024, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong), “Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life” (2023, Museum of Craft & Design, San Francisco), and Where Is Here (2017, MoAD). Francis is Secretary for the National Committee for the History of Art (the US affiliate of the Comité International d'Histoire de l’Art) and she serves on San Francisco’s Asian Art Commission. In 2001, Camara Dia Holloway and Francis co-founded the Association for Critical Race Art History, an online resource for scholars and students researching racialization as a project advanced in art and visual culture.

Stephanie Parker (she/her) M.A., SEP, is a Black Queer Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, Licensed Nia Instructor, and Anti-Oppression Consultant based in the Bay Area, California. She holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Stanford University, and worked in tech at Google before developing a chronic health condition that awakened her to the connections between bodily illness, emotional trauma, and systemic oppression. With this knowledge, Stephanie stepped fully onto the path of the embodied healing arts in 2022. Today, she supports individuals and organizations through deeply attuned somatic coaching and DEI & wellness programs, integrating Somatic Experiencing, embodied movement, and Afro-diasporic spirituality into a trauma-informed approach that honors everyone’s place on the path towards liberation. Stephanie holds Nia Healing Dance classes weekly in Berkeley and Oakland.

To learn more about Stephanie and her offerings, visit https://linktr.ee/stephanieparkerhealing.

Michi Meko's (b. 1974 in Florence, Alabama; lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia) work spans painting, sculpture, and installation, activating spray paint and found objects to create layered compositions. His gestures reflect an interplay between beauty and violence, rebellion and reflection, and past and future. Meko’s art interrogates themes of identity and resilience by offering an exploration of light, texture, and form. The American landscape, with its layered histories of fugitivity and survival, serves as both a backdrop and a starting point for his examination of race, place, and memory. Through the use of repurposed and hand-built tools, Meko’s compositions invite viewers to engage with multifaceted narratives that speak to emotional, psychological and ecological histories.

Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award. Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include: The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Art (Richmond, VA), Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum (Atlanta GA), Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, (Atlanta, GA), Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), and Abstraction Today, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia (Atlanta, GA).  

His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; King & Spalding, Atlanta, GA; Ruby City, San Antonio, TX, Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles, CA; and CW Network, Atlanta, GA, among others.

Michi Meko will open a solo exhibition of works this fall at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about Black visuality and world-making. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (2011), and co-author with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024) among other publications. Raiford has written essays about the work of a number of contemporary artists including Dawoud Bey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Raiford is Series Editor with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis and Deborah Willis of Vision and Justice, an imprint of Aperture Books. In 2026 Raiford was named the Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation.

Cornelia Stokes curatorial practice is based in Pan-African practices and kinship, focusing on building community through the arts and philosophies of the Black diaspora. Looking to complexify the oversimplification of Blackness within mainstream culture, Stokes invests in opportunities to promote and explore the wide varieties of the Black experience. Cornelia Stokes is the inaugural Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora with The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD).

Photo credit: Kelvin Bulluck