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Keesha Gaskins-Nathan is the director for the Democratic Practice–United States program and the Racial Justice Initiative at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan is dedicated to advancing measures and ideas that improve democratic systems and engage democratic culture in the United States to support full and fair democratic and economic opportunity for all residents.

Keesha has worked as an organizer, lobbyist, and trial attorney. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, she was senior counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice, serving as the director of the Redistricting and Representation program. Her portfolio included redistricting reform, voting rights, and elections, with a focus on voter suppression issues. Ms. Gaskins-Nathan is a frequent lecturer and writer on issues related to women and politics, movement building, and democratic transformation.

Keesha served as executive director for the League of Women Voters Minnesota and the executive director for the Minnesota Women’s Political Caucus. She worked for several years as a civil trial attorney and served as a special assistant appellate public defender for the State of Minnesota.

She is currently a Commissioner for the New York State Public Finance Board, a 2022-2023 Atlantic Racial Equity Fellow, and the 2021-2022 Daynard Public Interest Fellow at Northeastern University School of Law, 2019 Aspen Ideas Scholar, and 2008 Feminist Leadership Fellow with the University of Minnesota, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs – Center on Women and Public Policy. She is a frequent commentator on democracy, womens’ rights and racial justice including past appearances on Background Briefing, The Great Battlefield, PBS’s NewsHour, MSNBC, and Bill Moyers.

Keesha also is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Jelani Cobb joined the Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.

He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.

Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Renée T. White is the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at The New School in New York City, where she is also a professor of sociology with tenure at The New School for Social Research.

 
With more than 25 years of experience working in higher education, Dr. White previously served as provost and a professor of sociology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts and as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Simmons University. She has also held a variety of faculty appointments, including professor of sociology and Black studies at Fairfield University, and a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the African American Studies Research Center at Purdue University. Dr. White is the editor of four books, including the acclaimed Spoils of War: Women of Color, Cultures, and Revolutions and the recently published Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness and is the author of Putting Risk in Perspective: Black Teenage Lives in the Era of AIDS.

 
She has served as editor of the Journal of HIV/AIDS Prevention in Children and Youth, and is a member of the Editorial Review Board of the Journal of Women and Gender in Higher Education. She serves as a Strategic Leader for VisionForward — a national coalition of organizations and individuals working to advance gender equity through women’s leadership.

Dr. White holds an AB with honors from Brown University and an MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was awarded a Mellon Foundation doctoral fellowship.