DR. LAMONDA HORTON-STALLINGS

Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, Dr. LaMonda Horton-Stallings received her Ph.D in English from Michigan State University. As L.H. Stallings, she is the author of four books: The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life (Indiana University Press, 2021); A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (University of California Press, 2019); Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2015); Mutha’ is Half a Word!: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture (Ohio State Univ. Press, 2007).

A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South was a 2021 finalist for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize. Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures received the Alan Bray Memorial Award from the MLA GL/Q Caucus, the 2016 Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work by One or More Authors in Women’s Studies from the Popular Culture Studies Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA), and it was a 2016 Finalist for the 28th Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ Studies.

ISAAC JULIEN

Isaac Julien, CBE RA (born 1960) is a critically acclaimed British artist and filmmaker. In 2018, Julien joined the faculty at the University of California Santa Cruz where he is a distinguished professor of the arts and leads the Isaac Julien Lab together with Arts Professor Mark Nash.

Current and recent international solo exhibitions include: Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, USA, on view until 10th July 2022; Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi - A Marvellous Entanglement, Betchler Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte, NC, USA, on view until 27th February, 2022; Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement, CentroCentro (Panorama Madrid), Madrid, Spain (2021); Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, McAvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco (2020–2021); Isaac Julien: Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement, MAXXI, Rome (2020–2021); Isaac Julien: Western Union: Small Boats, Neuberger Museum, New York (2020); Isaac Julien: Frederick Douglass: Lessons of the Hour, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2019); Looking for Langston at Tate Britain (2019); and Playtime at LACMA (2019).

Julien has previously exhibited at venues including Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013), Art Institute of Chicago (2013), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2012), and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2005). Julien is the recipient of The Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award 2017 and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2017.

Image credit:

Isaac Julien, Film-Noir Angels (Looking for Langston Vintage Series), 1989/2016

Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London/Venice

NZINGHA KENDALL

Nzingha Kendall’s work focuses on researching, screening, and generating conversations about moving images by black women from across the diaspora. She is currently an assistant professor in film and screen studies at Pace University.

KWAME OTU

Kwame Edwin Otu is currently an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is also the Guerrant Assistant Professor of Public Health at UVA’s Center for Global Health Equity.
I’m a cultural anthropologist with varied interests, ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, and their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. My first book monograph, entitled, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, published by the University of California Press, is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. The book draws on African philosophy, African/black feminisms, and African and African Diasporic literature to explore how sasso navigate homophobia and the increased visibility of LGBT human rights politics in neoliberal Ghana.

LWANDO SCOTT

Lwando Scott is a Next Generation Scholar at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape. Lwando is currently working on the Transformative Constitutionalism platform at the CHR. Through this platform, Lwando and others at the CHR, are engaging law, humanities, and technologies, to think about the complexities of South Africa’s transition and transformation. Lwando’s other research focus is on what he loosely terms “queering the postcolony”. Lwando is looking to develop this concept of “queering the
postcolony” by stretching concepts such as decolonisation, sexuality (queerness), gender, and culture within the post-colonial South African context. “Queering the postcolony” is a continuation of Lwando’s work in Queer African Studies which has been the focus of his university career.