Isaac Julien was born in 1960 in London, where he currently lives and works. Earlier works include Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask; Young Soul Rebels (which was awarded the Semaine de la Critique prize at the Cannes Film Festival); and the acclaimed poetic documentary Looking for Langston. 

Julien was visiting lecturer at Harvard University's Schools of Afro-American and Visual Environmental Studies and is currently a visiting professor at the Whitney Museum of American Arts; a research fellow at Goldsmiths College;  and a Trustee of the Serpentine Gallery. Julien was the recipient of both the prestigious MIT Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts (2001) and the Frameline Lifetime Achievement Award (2002).

 

 

Dr. Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latino/a and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.  Dr. Jones was named an Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellow in 2008, in 2005 was the recipient of the David C. Driskell Award in African American Art and Art History from the High Museum of Art.

 

Dr. Jones is the author EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke University Press 2011) and the forthcoming Taming the Freeway and Other Acts of Urban HIP-notism: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s from The MIT Press. Dr. Jones is the curator of "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980," which will open at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in October 2011.

 

 

Professor Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora, examining African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art. Mercer is the author of Welcome to the Jungle (1994), and is featured in anthologies including Art and Its Histories (1998), The Visual Culture Reader (2001) and Theorizing Diaspora (2003). Mercer is the author of monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, James VanDer Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper.

 

A recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, he is currently working on an essay collection, Travel & See: Writings on Black Diaspora Art.

 

 

Professor B. Ruby Rich received the 2006 Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the 2007 James Brudner Award for outstanding LGBT scholarship from Yale University, and a 2007 Camargo Foundation fellowship and residency. Rich is the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement, Duke University Press (1998); and New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut, forthcoming from Duke. She is a Contributing Editor for Film Quarterly, is on the editorial advisory board of Camera Obscura and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Film Classics series, published by the British Film Institute and Pangrave/Macmillan. Rich has served on the selection committees and juries for numerous film festivals including Sundance and Toronto.

 

 

Professor Jane Gaines is award-winning author of two books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. She received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholarly Award for her forthcoming book on early cinema, Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers and is working on The Documentary Destiny of Cinema. She has published articles on intellectual property, documentary theory, feminism and film, early cinema, fashion and film, and critical race theory in Cinema Journal, Screen, Cultural Studies, Framework, Camera Obscura, Women and Performance.