2017-2019 COHORT
kai lumumba barrow
kai lumumba barrow (b. 1959, Chicago) is a visual and performance artist who lives and works in New Orleans. She has exhibited paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations and multimedia performances in Atlanta, Brooklyn, Chicago, Durham, Glasgow, London, New Orleans, and NYC.
barrow is concerned with notions of radical imagination. Her sprawling paintings, installations, and sculptures transgress biological, geographic, ideological, and physical borders. Comprised of archaeological and environmental materials, her work is imbued with cultural and historical clues that reference avant-garde art and radical liberation movements. barrow’s installations and ritualistic environments recall African diasporic cosmologies incorporating reusable materials such as dirt, moss, rocks, machines, money and bones as a visual and ethnographic language. Together with her four muses: Absurdity, Sarcasm, Myth, and Merriment, the work performs queer, Black, feminist resistance to carceral control.
In 2010 barrow launched Gallery of the Streets, a broad network of artists, activists, scholars, and organizers who work at the nexus of art, political education, and transformative change to confront and resist oppressive policies, practices, and beliefs through public art, organizing, and community engagement.
Key Jackson
Key is a 1st nations/Black Queer radical dreamer who is committed to weaving the strength of their community into sustainable social change. A Founding member of Black Youth Project 100 New Orleans, Key has spent the past 15 years fighting for Queer, Youth, Educational, Housing, Immigrant and Racial Justice. Key’s lived experience as a low income, Queer person of color has fueled their desire to educate and move always towards a more equitable reality. Key has co-founded multiple youth centered initiatives and has provided formal as well as informal trainings to hundreds of youth, organizations and communities across the nation. Key resides in New Orleans, LA.
Marlon Peterson
Marlon is the host of the Decarcerated Podcast, and is currently an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. He is also owner of The Precedential Group, a social justice consultancy. His newest endeavor, Be Precedential, a not-for-profit media entity is slated to be in unveiled in 2019.
Marlon's 15 years of advocacy, beginning with his 12-year prison term during his 20's, centers on youth development, (gun) violence prevention and intervention, carceral climates, and other social justice issues. During those 15 years Marlon created the prison-college practicum, Vassar (College) & Otisville (Prison): Two Communities Bridging the Gap. While incarcerated he also lead the Transitional Services Center, where he prepared other incarcerated men for their release through motivational interviewing, life skills workshop facilitation, parole preparation, and one-on one counseling. He was also the secretary for in-prison organization, Caribbean African Unity, which aimed to educate and prepare men who were facing deportation.
During those prison years Marlon earned an Associates Degree in Criminal Justice, and published articles around politics and incarceration in various community media, including his own blog, pensfromthepen1.blogspot.com.
In the years since Marlon's release in 2009, he co-founded and served as the first executive director of How Our Lives Link Altogether (H.O.L.L.A.!), a youth development initiative in partnership with renowned educator Dr. Nadia Lopez. Marlon was also a violence interrupter for Cure Violence-based program, Save Our Streets (SOS) Crown Heights before creating the youth development arm of SOS, Youth Organizing to Save Our Streets (YOSOS). He also earned his second degree, a Bachelors in Organizational Behavior from New York University.
An insightful writer, Marlon has been published in various media outlets, including, USA Today, The Nation, EBONY, Essence,Huff Post, Good Men Project, Colorlines, Gawker, Cassius, Mic, The Marshall Project, The Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, The Brooklyn Reader, Caribbean News, Black Press USA, The Crime Report, The National Academies Press, and other publications. He is also a contributing writer to Kiese Laymon's How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others In America, Love Lives Here, Too, by former New York Times columnist, Sheila Rule, and How We Fight White Supremacy, by Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin.
He has appeared on several television, radio, and podcast to offer his analysis on various issues. Some of those appearances have been on CNN-HLN, Matter of Fact TV, The Laura Flanders Show, New York's 97.1 FM's Street Soldiers, The Extraordinary Negroes podcast, C-SPAN, PBS New Hour, and others.
Marlon's TED Talk, "Am I not human? a call for criminal justice reform," has amasses over 1.1 million views on TED.com and another 72,000 on Youtube. He has lectured and facilitated workshops at colleges, schools, and prisons throughout the United States, Trinidad & Tobago, and South Africa.
Among his honors are the EBONY Magazine 2015 Power 100, Colorlines 20 X 20, 2015 Soros Justice Fellowship, 2015 Aspen Ideas Fellow, TED Residency, 2016 Caribbean News Impact Award, and various civic awards from New York City and New York State elected officials.
Marlon, based in Brooklyn, NY, is working on his first book, a memoir, and can be found soapboxing on twitter @_marlonpeterson.
Nabila Lovelace
Nabila Lovelace is a first-generation Queens native, her people hail from Trinidad & Nigeria. Sons of Achilles her debut book of poems, is out now through YesYes Books. You can currently find her kicking it in Tuscaloosa.
Shana M. griffin
Shana is a feminist activist, independent researcher, applied sociologist, artist, and mother. Her work is interdisciplinary and undisciplinary, and engages research and organizing projects that attend to the lived experiences of the black Diaspora—centering the particular experiences of black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, carcerality, polluted environments, reproductive legislation, economic exploitation, and housing discrimination.
Rooted in black feminist theories, praxes, and methodologies, Shana’s activism and research explore critical questions concerning the political economy of reproductive violence and policies of population control, surveillance, and policing; discriminatory housing practices and the racial-sexual politics of urban development; black geographies and insurgent realities; and histories of racial slavery and everyday violence in contemporary life. Whether serving on a board, a member of a collective, conducting research, collaborating on an art project, documenting social movements, organizing a conference, coordinating an action, leading a campaign or establishing a new initiative, her work is expansive and exists in multiple social justice formations, contexts, and capacities.
Shana’s current project, PUNCTUATE, supported in part through her Weavers Fellowship, seeks to provoke the creative uses of black feminist discourses and geographic space to address the intersecting forms of everyday violence and subjectivity experienced by black women and their communities; and encourage new spatial relationships and strategies of engagement. Put differently, PUNCTUATE is an insurgent intervention, spatializing black feminist practices through the cultural production of engaged inquiry, art, activism, and public programming.
To learn more about Shana’s work, projects, and upcoming events, visit her at www.shanamgriffin.com or contact her at info@shanamgriffin.com.