Malene (ma-lay-nee) Djenaba (jen-na-ba) Barnett is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, textile surface designer and the founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, a global platform and community of independent Black makers. Malene’s art reflects her African Caribbean heritage, building on her ancestral legacy of mark-making as a visual identity, and has been exhibited at galleries and museums throughout the United States. Her art and design work has also been featured in major publications such as the New York Times, Architectural Digest, and Elle Decor.

In 2024, Malene released her first book, “Crafted Kinship: Inside the Creative Practice of Contemporary Black Caribbean Makers” (Hachette), which includes interviews with over 60 artists of Caribbean heritage, taking readers on an important journey through the world of Black Caribbean creativity. This groundbreaking collection is the first to feature Caribbean makers’ intimate stories of their artmaking processes, and how their countries of origin—the “land” —influences and informs how and what they create.

Malene is a Fulbrighter, gives talks nationally, and publishes work raising awareness of Caribbean makers and ceramic art traditions of the Black diaspora. Malene has participated in residencies at Anderson Ranch, Watershed, Greenwich House Pottery, Judson Studios, and Haystack. In 2024, she was the Nellie Mae Rowe Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia.

When she’s not traveling the world researching Black diasporic aesthetics, Malene resides in Brooklyn, New York.

Dr. Siobhan Meï is a digital humanist and fashion studies scholar whose research explores the intersections of material culture, narrative, and translation in the Black Atlantic. Dr. Meï's publications have appeared in The Routledge Handbook on Translation, Feminism, and Gender, Mutatis Mutandis, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, Callaloo and Caribbean Quarterly among other places. Dr. Meï is the co-founder of the digital humanities project "Rendering Revolution" which explores Haitian history and literature through the lens of dress culture. Dr. Meï is a member of the teaching faculty in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from Cornell University. Previously, he taught in the Committee on Degree in History and Literature at Harvard University and was a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, he curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery at the Herron School of Art and Design, which closed in January 2023. He is currently preparing for his upcoming show titled Almost Unknown, The Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. A proponent of the use of social media as a form of radical pedagogy, Dr. Square also leads the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.