Dr. Maytha Alhassen is a journalist, poet, community organizer, and scholar whose work bridges the worlds of media engagement, justice advocacy, academic research, and artistic expression. As Co-Executive Producer, she produces and writes for the award-winning Hulu series RAMY, an Executive Producer for landmark PBS docu-series American Muslims: A History Revealed, is a Pop Culture Collaborative Pluralist Visionaries Fellow, TED resident, a Harvard Religion and Public Life Art and Pop Culture Fellow from 2021-2024, and currently a lecturer for Stanford University Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. As a journalist, Maytha worked as an on-air guest host for Al Jazeera English and TYT, also field reporting for such outlets as CNN, Huffington Post, Mic, and The Baffler, and Op-Eds for the Boston Review and LA Review of Books. She also co-edited a collection of stories from the 2011 Arab Uprisings Demanding Dignity: Young Voices from the Front Lines of the Arab Revolutions, wrote the Pop Culture Collaborative supported report "Haqq and Hollywood: Illuminating 100 Years of Muslim Tropes and Traps and How to Transform Them," and numerous academic articles and book chapters. In 2017 she received her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from USC, an M.A. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and a B.A. in Political Science and Arabic & Islamic Studies from UCLA.

Mona Oraby is associate professor of political science at Howard University and editor of The Immanent Frame, a digital publication of the Social Science Research Council that advances scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere. Oraby is the author ofDevotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024) and coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022). She is writing a book that explores how Black Americans imagine ancestral connection to the ancient dynasties of Egypt and the Nile Valley. 

Dr. Denise L. Lim is an Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design and a transdisciplinary Africanist scholar specializing in South African art, design, and cultural heritage. With 18 years of research across Africa, she explores identity, place, and time through material and visual culture. Supported by the NEH-Mellon Fellowship, Dr. Lim is completing Palimpsests in Ponte City, an interactive digital monograph on Johannesburg’s Ponte tower. The project uses sensory data as cultural palimpsests to uncover colonial and apartheid legacies embedded in the tower’s architecture, media, and artifacts, offering a dynamic virtual exploration.

Nsenga Knight (b. 1981, Brooklyn, NY) is a visual artist whose work blends African, Caribbean, and Islamic cultural traditions with themes of diaspora and spirituality. In 2024, she completed the In Situ Fellowship at the Queens Museum, where she debuted her critically acclaimed solo exhibition Close to Home. Knight has exhibited internationally at institutions including the New Museum, PS1 MoMA, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. Knight holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and resides between Doha and New York.

Najha Zigbi-Johnson works at intersections of the built environment, contemporary Black art, and social movement history. She is the editor of Mapping Malcolm, a publication that brings together artists, transnational community leaders, and scholars who explore the politics of Black space-making across Harlem and the diasporic world. Najha teaches political science and architecture at The City College of New York, and has written for The Cut, New York Magazine, Essence, Artforum, Disegno Journal, and more. 

Najha is a graduate of Guilford College and Harvard Divinity School. While at Harvard she founded and led the course Freedom School: A Seminar on Theory and Praxis for Black Studies in the U.S. and co-edited the associated publication, Freedom School Magazine. During the 2021-2022 academic year, she was awarded a Research Fellowship at the Graduate School of Architecture Preservation and Planning at Columbia University, where she explored the legacy of Malcolm X within the built environment during her tenure as Director of Institutional Advancement of The Shabazz Center. 

Robyn Spencer-Antoine is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and History at Wayne State University and author of "The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland" (UNC Press, 2016).

Kevin Gaines is Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at the University of Virginia and author of "American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era" (UNC Press, 2006).

Benjamin Talton is the Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Professor of African and African Diaspora History and "This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics" (Penn Press 2019).

Michael E. Sawyer is on the African American Literature and Culture faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and author of "Black Minded: The Political Philosophy of Malcolm X" (Pluto: 2020).

Hisham Aïdi is a Moroccan-American political scientist, author, music critic, filmmaker, and on the faculty of SPIA at Columbia University.