Aleia Brown is a public historian, curator, writer, and freedom seeker. At the University of Maryland, College Park, she serves as the Assistant Director of the African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities (AADHum) Initiative where she co-directs the Restorative Justice Project and leads research, teaching, and programmatic initiatives. She was the recipient of the 2017 Mellon-ACLS public fellowship and served as program manager at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers University-Newark where she launched Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice. She is the co-curator for Ubuntutu: Life Legacies of Love and Action and co-author of the exhibition catalog by the same name. Her current manuscript in progress reckons with the historical mishandlings of Black women’s textile art and illuminates the sophisticated ways that makers have visualized Black political thought. She holds a PhD in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University.

Jennifer A. Ferretti (she/her/hers) is an artist and Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Maryland Institute College of Art on Piscataway Land (Baltimore, Maryland). She is a first-generation American Latina/Mestiza whose librarianship is guided by critical perspectives, not neutrality. With a firm belief that art is information, she is interested in the research methodologies of artists and non-Western forms of knowledge making and sharing. Jennifer is a Library Journal 2018 Mover & Shaker and a founding member of We Here and Shades Collective. 

Bilphena Yahwon is a Baltimore based writer, abolitionist and restorative practices practitioner born in Liberia, West Africa. She is the curator of the online library, The Womanist Reader, which is dedicated to archiving free texts from Black women writers across the diaspora. Bilphena’s work uses a womanist approach and centers the needs and well-being of Black women and Black children.