ADVISORS

The Advisors

Rachelle V. Browne (Associate General Counsel, Smithsonian Institution) is an Associate General Counsel for the Smithsonian Institution and Adjunct Professor in Goucher College’s Master in Arts Administration Program. A member of the Legal Affairs Committee of the International Council of Museums, she is a past Chair of the D.C. Bar Arts, Entertainment and Sports Law Section. She previously served as: staff attorney and attorney advisor at the Federal Trade Commission; Legal Counsel to the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Commerce including its divisions of Film Promotion, Tourism, Industrial Development and Small Business Development; Legal Counsel to the U.S. Virgin Islands Port Authority; Assistant Legislative Counsel and, later, Chief Counsel of the U.S. Virgin Islands Legislature; and Adjunct Professor for the Business of Art in the Department of Fine Arts, Howard University. Ms. Browne was graduated from Barnard College, majoring in economics, and Harvard Law School. She was the Chair to the American Bar Association-American Law Institute’s Legal Issues in Museum Administration Program from 2005 through 2007. A recipient of numerous awards, including from the Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts, she was featured in the March/April 1996 issue of Washington Lawyer Magazine's cover story on “Washington Arts and Entertainment Lawyers.”

Manthia Diawara (Independent Filmmaker & Black Studies Scholar) is the editor-in-chief of Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, a journal of arts, culture and politics, as well as an author and filmmaker whose areas of specialization include Africa, the United States, and the Black Diaspora in Europe. He has written more than fifty articles on Black film and culture and is the author of several highly acclaimed books. His published works include We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World (2003), In Search of Africa (1998), Black American Cinema (1993), and African Cinema: Politics and Culture (1992). His film credits include Bamako Sigi Kan (2002), Diaspora Conversation (2000), In Search of Africa (1999), Rouch in Reverse (1995), and Sembene Ousmane: The Making of African Cinema (1993, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Co-Director).

Amina J. Dickerson (President of Dickerson Global Advisors) served as senior director of global community involvement for Kraft Foods, overseeing multi-national philanthropic programs in hunger, the arts, education, healthy lifestyles for children and employee engagement until her recent retirement after twelve years. Previously, Dickerson held executive posts with the National Museum of African Art at Smithsonian Institution, Chicago Historical Society, the African American Historical and Cultural Museum in Philadelphia and was President of Chicago's DuSable Museum of African American History and began her career as a theater artist in Washington, D.C. This rich experience provides the foundation for her current work as coach, strategist and counselor to emerging leaders, the philanthropic community and non-profit organizations through her consulting practice. Her work focuses on leadership advancement and executive coaching, succession planning, strategic partnerships and diversity in philanthropy, as well as themes in cultural programming, arts management, African American culture and youth development. Among her honors are the 18th James Joseph Lecturer by the Association of Black Foundation Executives, received numerous awards, including Chicago Women in Philanthropy, Chicago African Americans in Philanthropy and was named the Association of Fundraising Professionals Corporate Grantor of the Year. In 2009 she was added to the HistoryMakers national video archives of outstanding African American leaders and was named to The Network Journal's Class of 25 Influential Black Women in Business. She serves on many boards and advisory committees for a number of arts and cultural organizations.

Since 1984, Howard Dodson, Jr. (Former Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) has served as chief, the world's leading and most prestigious repository for materials and artifacts on black cultural life. A scholar, consultant, lecturer, and educator, Dodson has committed his professional life to the retrieval, preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of the history and culture of African and African American peoples. He will also serve on the Advisory Board for this project. Dodson will help the project by introducing the Center's cultural resources, and network of scholars of African American art and history which will help us fully understand the cultural significance of the Question Bridge project and help us utilize this unprecedented collection of interviews for the purpose of healing relationships that have suffered from historically divisive stereotype. His publications include Thinking and Rethinking U.S. History (Council on Interracial Books for Children, Inc., 1988) and In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience (National Geographic Books, 2005). 

Radiah A. Harper is the Vice Director for Education and Program Development at the Brooklyn Museum. She is also Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in the Arts and Cultural Management Graduate Program where she teaches a course in Arts Education. She is on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Arts Council. Ms Harper has held the Executive Director/Curator position at the Museum of African American Art in Tampa, Florida, and education/program director positions at the Weeksville Heritage Center, Museum for African Art, and Historic Hudson Valley, all in New York State. She was an artist in residence and teaching artist in several New York metropolitan area school-based programs, and an arts and museum management consultant, advising organizations in Florida, North Carolina and New York. Ms Harper earned a M.S. in Education: Museum Leadership, Bank Street College of Education, New York, New York, and a B.A. in Fine Arts, Marymount College, Tarrytown, New York.

Thomas Allen Harris (Independent Filmmaker) is an award-winning filmmaker and cultural warrior, whose documentary films, installations, and experimental videos have been featured in venues across the international landscape on television, at festivals, museums, and galleries. For over 6 years, Harris produced for public television, which included two Emmy nominations (in 1991) for his work as a staff producer at WNET (New York's PBS affiliate) on The Eleventh Hour and Thirteen Live. His documentary programs CRISIS: Who Will Do Science? and CRISIS: Urban Education aired nationally on public television in 1989 and 1990 respectively. A recent recipient of the United States Artist Award, Harris has received awards, grants and fellowships from such institutions as the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Paul Robeson Fund, and the Lannan Foundation. A Harvard graduate, Harris is presently a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Caran Hartsfield (Independent Filmmaker) has won numerous awards for her short films Double-Handed and kiss it up to god, including second place at the Cannes Film Festival. Her debut feature project Bury Me Standing was developed at the Cannes Film Festival's Cinefoundation Residency in Paris. She has been a Sundance Screenwriting Fellow and Directing Fellow and won the IFP's Gordon Parks award for Best Screenplay. Additionally, she has been the recipient of a Directors Guild of America Award, Martin Scorsese Fellowship, Spike Lee Fellowship and New York Foundation for the Arts Film Fellowship, among other honors.

Seith Mann (Independent Filmmaker) graduated from Morehouse College and later earned an MFA in film at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Mann's thesis at New York University was the short film Five Deep Breaths. It was awarded the Spike Lee fellowship while in development in 2002. The film is set an all-black college and deals with the aftermath of a physical assault upon a young woman by her boyfriend, and the actions of the victim's secret lover and his friends. Mann has commented that he likes morally ambiguous situations. The short starred Jamie Hector and the score was composed by jazz musician Jason Moran. The film premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It won first place in the Charles and Lucille King Family Foundation award (for Best Short Film), and The Carl Lerner Award for Film with Social Significance at the 2003 New York University First Run Festival. It was selected to screen at the 2003 Tribeca Film Festival and one of four American shorts to screen at the Cinefondation Competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival. It won a Gold Plaque for Narrative Short Film at the 2003 Chicago International Film Festival. It also won the Best Narrative Short Film award at the 2003 Los Angeles IFP/West Film Festival. Film maker magazine named Mann one of their 25 new faces of independent film in 2003. They praised his direction of Five Short Breaths as "skillful." The IFP gave Mann the Gordon Parks Awards for Emerging African-American Filmmakers following the film's release.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Ph.D. (Director of the Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture) is a scholar of African-American history from Indiana University. In late 2010 he was selected to be the next Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Dr. Muhammad, a native of Chicago's South Side, has served as Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University for five years, where he completed a major interpretive book in African-American studies, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, published recently by Harvard University Press. A great-grandson of Elijah Muhammad, he has deep roots in Black history and in Harlem. His father is the noted Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times photographer Ozier Muhammad. As an academic, Dr. Muhammad is at the forefront of scholarship on the enduring link between race and crime, that has shaped and limited opportunities for African Americans. Dr. Muhammad, currently nominated for tenure at Indiana University, is now working on a book-length history of the racial politics surrounding the creation and swift dissolution of Prohibition-era "tough-on-crime" laws, specifically New York's four-strikes law of 1926. He is also an Associate Editor of The Journal of American History. Dr. Muhammad graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Economics in 1993. After working at Deloitte & Touche LLP, he received his Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University in 2004, specializing in 20th-century U.S. and African-American history. He spent two years as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit criminal justice reform agency in New York City, before joining the faculty of Indiana University.

Ron Platt (Birmingham Museum of Art, Curator) is former Curator of Exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (1999-2004), where he organized over twenty exhibitions including the thematic shows Borne of Necessity, Around About Abstraction, and Lab Results: Three Artists' Residencies in the Sciences (catalogue), as well as numerous one-person exhibitions of, among others, Phoebe Washburn, Beverly McIver, Luca Buvoli, Sheila Pepe, Dona Nelson, and Jim Hodges, whose traveling exhibition Platt co-curated with Ian Barrie, Curator of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, New York. Prior to joining the Weatherspoon, Platt was Curator at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) (1996-1999) where he curated the one-person survey of Tom Friedman's work which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Aspen Art Museum; the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. At SECCA, Platt also organized exhibitions of the work of Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Walton Ford, Whitfield Lovell, Heide Fasnacht and Radcliffe Bailey, as well as the group exhibitions Sliding Scale and Parallel Worlds. Before moving to North Carolina, Platt was Assistant Curator at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, where he worked from 1989-1996. In 2005-2006 Platt curated Under the Skin: Tattoos and Contemporary Culture and co-organized (with Beth Venn) Black Mountain College: Its Time and Place for the Asheville Art Museum.

Kathe Sandler (Independent Filmmaker) is a Guggenheim Award-winning independent filmmaker best known for her one-hour documentary film, A Question of Color (1993), which explores color consciousness and internalized racism in the African American community and was the first Independent Television Service Program to receive a national airdate over PBS in 1994. The film was premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and received two Prized Pieces Awards from the National Black Programming Consortium. Sandler has also been recognized for her work on the 1996 film The Friends, which won First Prize in the Cross Cultural Category from the Black Filmmaker's Hall of Fame. Remembering Thelma (1982), Sandler's first independent documentary, screened at the NY Film Festival and received the Best Biography of a Dance Artist Award from the NY Dance Film and Video Festival. She also completed a documentary for the Vera Institute of Justice entitled Finding a Way: New Initiatives in Justice for Children. Sandler is currently at work on the completion of a one-hour documentary, When and Where We Enter: Stories of Black Feminism, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University/New Brunswick.

The Scholars

M.K. Asante, Jr., Ph.D. (Morgan State University) is a tenured professor of creative writing and film in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University. His latest book is It's Bigger Than Hip Hop. His other books include the poetry collections, Beautiful. And Ugly Too and Like Water Running Off My Back. A filmmaker, Asante directed and produced The Black Candle, a film he co-wrote with Maya Angelou, who also narrates the film. Asante also wrote and produced the film 500 Years Later. His arts and humanities background will provide a critical discussion on Hip Hop culture and history of slavery to the QB team.

Prior to his appointment, Lonnie Bunch (Director, Smithsonian Institution, National African American Museum of History and Culture) served as the president of the Chicago Historical Society, where he launched a much-applauded exhibition and program on teenage life, Teen Chicago. Bunch served as the curator of history and program manager for the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles from 1983 to 1989. While there, he organized several award-winning exhibitions including The Black Olympians, 1904-1950 and Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles, 1850-1950. Bunch will help to identify questions for the cross generation discussion for QB.

Joy DeGruy, Ph.D (Portland State University) is a nationally and internationally renowned researcher, educator, author, and an activist for social justice. Dr. Joy is the author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, and the newly released, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: The Study Guide. In P.T.S.S.: The Study Guide, Dr. Joy revisits the topics she covers in P.T.S.S. and provides a detailed mapping of how you can begin the change process in your personal life, employment, family and in your community. She illustrates how�with thoughtful self�exploration�each of us can evaluate our behaviors and replace negative and damaging behaviors with those that will promote, ensure and sustain the healing and advancement of African Americans.

Manthia Diawara, Ph.D (New York University) � See bio above.

Howard Dodson Jr. (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) � See bio above.

Robeson Frazier, Ph.D. (University of Southern California) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at USC Annenberg. Frazier traces how articulations and representations of race and gender travel globally through performance, media, art, athletics, diplomacy, and activism. He is currently considering these questions by scrutinizing African American activist intellectuals' cross-cultural exchanges with the People's Republic of China from 1949-1976. Prior to his appointment at USC, Frazier taught courses at New York University, Princeton University, University of California, Berkeley, and the City University of New York. He has had work published in African Americans in Global Affairs, as well as in academic journals and periodicals. His research and teaching examine race, cross cultural exchange and traffic, social movements, and popular culture, which will assist the QB team in looking closely at social movements.

Professor Robert A. Hill (University of California, Los Angeles) has been a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1977, before which he taught at Dartmouth College and Northwestern University. He moved to America from Jamaica in 1971 and was a senior fellow at the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta. He is the editor-in-chief of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers 1983�, ten volumes of which have been published thus far by the University of California Press. He served as executive consultant to the making of the PBS-WGBH documentary film Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind for The American Experience series in 2001. He is also the editor of numerous historical editions, among them Marcus Garvey's Black Man, Cyril Briggs's Crusader, The FBI's RACON, and George S. Schuyler's Black Empire and Ethiopian Stories. Professor Hill works on a broad range of issues that will bridge the history of migration and masculinity in the Caribbean for QB.

Robin Kelley, Ph.D (University of Southern California) is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class, Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. He is completing Going Home: Jazz and the Making of Modern Africa (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011), and a general survey of African American history co-authored with Tera Hunter and Earl Lewis to be published by Norton. Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including The Nation, New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Color Lines, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir, Social Text, Metropolis, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Souls, and frieze: contemporary art and culture, to name a few. Dr. Kelley will assist the QB team identifying questions and historical responses for the interviewees and curriculum.

Leslie King Hammond, Ph.D. (Maryland Institute College of Art) began to teach the art history courses at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 1976. She was appointed Dean of Graduate Studies at Maryland Institute College of Art until 2008. Currently the Founding Director of the new Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she received Mellon Grants for Faculty Research. In 2007 she became the Chairperson of the Board of the Reggie Lewis Museum. Major exhibitions and publications include The Intuitive Eye (The Maryland Art Place); Art as a Verb (Studio Museum in Harlem); Masters, Mentors, and Makers, Artscape '92 (The Maryland Institute College of Art Decker Gallery, 1992); Vice-President and essayist for the Jacob Lawrence Catalog Riasonn� Project, Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence (University of Washington Press. Forthcoming is the Life and Work of Hughie Lee-Smith, Pomegranate Press. Dr. King-Hammond figures prominently as she will assist with programming and curricular guide development and help to identify art and contemporary artists for the project.

Jabari Mahiri is a Professor in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education and Chair of its Language, Literacy and Culture Program. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard, a Senior Academic Fellow at Brown, and he is Vice-President of the Board of REALM, the one charter school in Berkeley, CA. He received his Ph.D. in English (Language, Literacy and Rhetoric) from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and he is the Principal Investigator of T E A C H, a research initiative that collaborates with urban schools and community partners on educational equity, academic achievement, and digital literacy and learning. Books he has authored are:�African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools�(1998);�When Scholarship Athletes become Academic Scholars�(2010);�and,�Digital Tools in Urban Schools(2011). He is editor of�What They Don't Learn in School�(2004); and,�Virtual Lives: Digital Literacies of Global Youth(Forthcoming, 2012).� He received UC Berkeley's Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence in 2007, and the American Educational Research Association's (Division G) Outstanding Mentorship Award in 2008.

Guthrie Ramsey, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania) specializes in African-American and American music, jazz, cultural studies, popular music, film studies, and historiography. He lectures internationally on these topics. Ramsey is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press.) His current project, In Walked Bud: Earl "Bud" Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge, is a study of jazz pianist Bud Powell and is forthcoming from the University of California Press. He has also begun a new book on singer/songwriter Curtis Mayfield. He has published in numerous scholarly and popular journals. Ramsey composes and arranges music, which moves beyond the traditional Jazz idiom, experimenting with R&B, Latin, Hip Hop fusions. Ramsey will serve as music advisor to the QB project.

Christopher Robbins, Ph.D. (Eastern Michigan University) earned a Ph.D in Curriculum and Instruction with emphases on critical cultural studies and sociology of education from Penn State University. His research interests include critical and public pedagogy, the interrelationships of social and educational policy, racism and racial inequality, and the impacts of criminalization and militarization on schools and public culture.

Formerly a professor at Temple University, Paul C. Taylor, Ph.D. (Pennsylvania State University) writes on aesthetics, race theory, Africana philosophy, pragmatism, and social philosophy, and is the author of the book Race: A Philosophical Introduction. His recent work includes a study of video model Vida Guerra, an essay on post-analytic race theory, and keynote lectures to the Philosophical Society of South Africa, the Alain Locke Society, and the Philosophy of Education Society. He is currently at work on a book called Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (under contract, Blackwell). Taylor will assist the project in uncovering the complexities within the discussion of beauty in black male culture.
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The Consultants

Jinan N. Sumler (Education Consultant) started in education as an elementary special education teacher after graduating from Spelman College. She joined the staff of Teach For America, as a program director, where she worked to support 100+ teachers in the Greater New Orleans area. In this capacity, Ms. Sumler worked directly with superintendents, principals, university faculty and the business community. Ms. Sumler received a Masters in Education from Harvard and began working as a school improvement consultant for the Southern Regional Education Board in Atlanta. She coordinated a Successful Transitions Initiative between middle schools and high schools in the southeast region of the country. Originally from New York, Jinan returned in 2005 to work for AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination) as the Northeast States Director. In this position, she works to support schools in seven states through face-to-face and e-learning professional development and coaching. Ms. Sumler markets AVID to new schools, districts and community organizations, manages AVID implementation at the school and district level and co-writes curriculum on Culturally Relevant Teaching.

Adam Huttler (Technology Advisor) is the Executive Director of Fractured Atlas, a national non-profit organization that provides technology-based infrastructure for the cultural sector. They were awarded the NYC Cultural Innovation Fund (Rockefeller Foundation) and a competitive contract from the Hewlett Foundation to create the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map, a constellation of web-based applications that collectively aggregate/analyze the region's cultural activity data. With support from the Andrew W. Mellon, Doris Duke and Kresge Foundations, Fractured Atlas spearheads the creation of ATHENA, an open source software platform for the cultural sector. Additionally, the organization serves as a technology advisor to a diverse roster of partners and clients, including Misnomer's Audience Engagement Platform, Women Make Movies, Opera America, and others. In 2003, Fractured Atlas created Gemini SBS, a for-profit subsidiary that develops bespoke web-based software for non-profit organizations and government agencies, including the US Department of Education.