Mark Gabriel Little, PhD is Managing Director of the UNC Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, a think tank that brings together leaders in business, policy and academia to solve big problems for public good. He is the Founding Director of NCGrowth and SmartUp, innovative initiatives dedicated to creating good jobs and equitable opportunities in regions of economic distress. He also serves as Senior Fellow for CREATE, a new center seeking to end the growing wealth gap across the U.S. and beyond. He previously worked as a geochemist in China and AAAS Fellow to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Karla Slocum is the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Chair of Public Policy, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Institute of African American Research at UNC-Chapel Hill. She specializes in studies of place, race and history. Her research has focused on Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean farmers’ responses to global economic change and the significance of race and history to communities known as “All Black Towns.” Slocum is the author of Free Trade and Freedom: Neoliberalism, Place and Nation in the Caribbean. Her book, Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West, will be published in November 2019.

María R. Estorino is Associate University Librarian for Special Collections and director of the Louis Round Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A cultural heritage professional with 18 years of experience in special collections, she was previously the Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair of the Cuban Heritage Collection at the University of Miami Libraries and vice president for museum collections at HistoryMiami Museum. She received a Master of Arts in public history from Northeastern University and a Master of Science in library science from Simmons College. María also studied history at Loyola University, New Orleans, and participated in the Smithsonian Institution’s Latino Museum Studies Program.

Dr. Hoffler holds a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Meharry Medical College and Bachelor of Science in biology from Xavier University of Louisiana. Hoffler has 19 years of experience in pharmacology and environmental toxicology research with particular focus on metabolism and biomarkers of exposure, chemical-induced carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity. Hoffler conducted her research at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences- National Institutes of Health and the National Center for Toxicological Research- U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As Director of Research Compliance and Technology Transfer at NCCU, Hoffler’s responsibilities include the following: monitor all University research activities to assure compliance with relevant federal, state, local regulations and University policies and procedures; protect the intellectual property developed from the University’s research enterprise; and, facilitate opportunities for the acceleration and commercialization of new knowledge and technologies.

Angela Lee is the Executive Director of the Hayti Heritage Center, an historic cultural arts and arts education venue in Durham, NC. Lee has served as Executive Director since 2013 and guides the organization in its mission of preserving and advancing the history and culture of historic Hayti and the African American experience through programs that benefit the broader community locally, nationally and globally. In addition to her work with Hayti, Lee is Vice Chair of Durham’s Cultural Advisory Board and serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute for African American Research at UNC – Chapel Hill. Lee is a resident of Chapel Hill and is active in her church community. She is a member of the Trustee Board, the music ministry, the martial arts exercise class, and more. She is a sports enthusiast and loves the arts, enjoys reading, and is devoted to her family.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and documentary film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. She is a Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in September 2018. The book is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present, written for a general audience. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010), won several awards, including Best First Book of 2010 in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She has written over fifteen book chapters or articles, on topics including American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and has published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, The North Star, and Scalawag Magazine. She has won fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, and others. Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (currently airing on PBS), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (broadcast on HBO in 2014), In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Amatullah King is the Events & Programs Manager for the Institute of African American Research and The Carolina Seminars. King has over six years experience in events planning. King holds a B.A. in English, cum laude, from Cornell University. At Cornell, she was a fellow in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program (MMUF), to which IAAR’s MURAP is a sister program. As a fellow, she concentrated on 19th and 20th century African-American Literature. Her interests continue to be in African American history, culture, preservation, and theatre arts.

Kara Stith is the Program Coordinator of NCGrowth, an economic development initiative at the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. In this role, she helps support the efforts of NCGrowth, a center dedicated to helping businesses and communities create good jobs and equitable opportunities for their people through technical assistance and applied research. Kara is also the Program Manager of the North Carolina Investment Forum, an initiative seeking to support and convene the Private Capital community in North Carolina.

Jennifer Ashbaugh is the Event Support Assistant for the UNC Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. She brings over 15 years of experience in the event planning industry. Jennifer excels at logistics and operations, and her attention to detail means that events go smoothly from conception to completion. As the Event Support Assistant, Jennifer’s experience with onsite meeting management, including audiovisual, registration, speaker and food & beverage, has been invaluable to the Black Communities Conference planning team.

Sydney Bannerman is the Events Manager for the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise which develops and promotes innovative, market-based solutions to vital economic issues. Along with the institute’s external affairs team, Sydney plans and produces events including conferences, symposia and more for the institute and its affiliated centers.

Patrick Horn coordinates public programming as well as grants and fellowships at UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South. His research and teaching focus on multiethnic American literature, and his work has been published in Southern Cultures, North Carolina Literary Review, and Studies in the Novel. Prior to graduate school, he served as an Air Force intelligence officer in Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Kuwait, and East Africa.

Emily heads up the Kenan Institute’s social media efforts, building out the institute’s social media presence and developing follower relationships.
Prior to coming to the institute, she was a digital editor at Aggrego, a Chicago Sun-Times digital start-up. She has experience working in newspapers, radio and nonprofits.
Emily graduated magna cum laude from Ithaca College with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and a minor in sport studies.

Joseph graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 with a degree in Political Science. He is a recent graduate of the Duke University School of Public Policy where he focused in education and social policy. Joseph is currently in the first year of his PhD program in Education and Administration Policy at the University of Georgia’s College of Education.

DeWarren K. Langley, JD, MPA is an equity-minded leader, black male achievement specialist, policy analyst and strategy consultant. He is the Visionary & Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Foundation, Inc. which is a 501(c)(3) academic, leadership and professional development nonprofit organization which provides a continuum of programs, services and mentorship to educate, engage, empower and equip young men of color with the strategies they need to secure socioeconomic success by transforming academic policies and connecting them with professional opportunities to become high-results leaders. Mr. Langley is also a Black Male Achievement Leadership-in-Residence Fellow with the Campaign for Black Male Achievement. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Management & Economics with a minor in Leadership Studies from Hampton University, Juris Doctor with a concentration in Civil Rights & Constitutional Law from North Carolina Central University School of Law, Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Government Administration and Public Policy from North Carolina Central University and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University.

Parker graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 with a degree in Economics and Management. Upon graduation, he worked as a College Adviser with the Carolina College Advising Corps. During his two years of service at Beddingfield High School in Wilson, North Carolina, Parker increased access to post-secondary educational opportunities for students from historically underserved communities and marginalized identities. While at Beddingfield he also served as the Site Coordinator for The Gentlemen’s Agreement, a mentoring program for young men of color. Parker mentored forty young men and hosted bi-weekly discussions, workshops, field trips, and presentations intended to address healthy expressions of manhood and the societal construct of race. His experience in Wilson, North Carolina piqued his interest in finding policy related solutions to problems that consistently hinder underrepresented students.

Victor is the Kenan Institute’s external affairs video producer. He is responsible for creating dynamic and impactful visual content that evokes the institute’s mission.

Research Assistant for the Institute of African American Research. Her scholarly endeavors focus on Black folks’ understanding of race within the United States. She is currently the Social Media Coordinator for the Black Communities Conference.

Emily is the Events Coordinator for the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. In this role, she assists in the planning, organizing and execution for conferences, receptions, dinners, galas and speaker events.

Aaron Smithers (MA, Folklore) is Special Collections Research & Instruction Librarian at Wilson Special Collections Library, University Libraries, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an instructor of audio documentary at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and serves as the music editor for Southern Cultures, the journal for the Center for the Study of the American South. Aaron has worked as a folklorist, documentarian, arts programmer, media specialist, and audio engineer for over 20 years in cultural heritage archives and non-profits, including the Southern Folklife Collection, North Carolina Arts Council, Texas Folklife Resources, the International Accordion Festival, and the Austin Music Network. In 2018, he received the Thornton W. Mitchell Service Award from the Society of North Carolina Archivists.

Barrye Brown is the Processing Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Previously, she was the Reference and Outreach Archivist at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.  Brown is an experienced archivist with a demonstrated history of working in academic libraries. Skilled in Archival Research, Editing, Public Speaking, Online Research, and History. Strong education professional with a Master’s Degree focused in Library Science (Archives and Records Management) from UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science.

Melissa Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University. Cooper specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Instructor’s Resource Manual–Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2013) and a contributor to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015). Cooper’s manuscript, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination is an intellectual and cultural history that examines the emergence of “the Gullah” in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s and the 1930s.

Giselle Corbie-Smith is a Professor of Medicine and Social Medicine, and Director of Center for Health Equity Research at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Corbie-Smith serves as the Director of   NC TraCS’ Community Academic Resources for Engaged Scholarship (CARES) Services and the Program on Health Disparities at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at UNC-Chapel Hill.  Her empirical work, focuses on the methodological, ethical, and practical issues faced by mandated inclusion of minorities in research and the need for this research to address racial disparities in health.  She currently holds a K24 to support her mentoring efforts of young scholars, and has been the principal investigator of several grants including the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

William Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at Duke University.  Darity is also Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity (Duke). His research interests include educational policy, educational inequality, segregation in education, stratification economics, race, racial identity and income inequality.  He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke.  He has published or edited 12 books and published more than 210 articles in professional journals.

Maria Esther Hammack is doctoral candidate in the department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.A. in History and an M.A. in Atlantic World History from East Carolina University. Trained as a social historian, Maria emphasizes the experiences of runaway slaves, enslaved women/indentured servants, Black Seminole refugees, smuggled slaves, and free blacks who took solace in leaving the United States to live in a “free” Mexico.

His national consultations include multidisciplinary planning, urban design and historic preservation projects. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA/1995). He chaired the board of Humanities Texas from 1993 to 1994. He served on the State of Texas National Register Board of Review and the City of San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission. President Bill Clinton appointed Everett to two terms on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from 1994 to 2001. President Barack Obama awarded him one of ten 2014 National Humanities Medals for his body of work preserving the integrity of African-American places and landmarks. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Tadayuki Hara is Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow at the Dick Pope Sr. Institute for Tourism Studies, and Associate Dean of Finance and Administration at the University of Central Florida. Among the 100s of publications, keynotes, and publications he has contributed to, he is the sole author of the technical textbook Quantitative Tourism Industry Analysis… He currently serves on the Editorial Board for Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, International Journal of Tourism Sciences, and is the Associate Editor for Journal of Tourism Economics, Policy and Hospitality Management.

Thomas Allen Harris is a filmmaker and artist whose work across film, video, photography, and performance illuminates the human condition and the search for identity, family, and spirituality. Graduate of Harvard College and the Whitney Independent Study Program, member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and published writer/curator, Harris lectures widely on the use of media as a tool for social change.

Heather L. Hodges became the director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission in November 2017. During her tenure she has placed an emphasis on developing educational programs, supporting cultural documentation and historic preservation efforts, encouraging heritage tourism, and fostering new research.

Ellen Hunt, AIA, is a registered architect in the state of Texas with more than 25 years of experience. She went to the University of Texas at Austin and completed a bachelor’s degree in architecture and post-professional master’s degree in architectural history and theory. She has had her own architecture firm in Austin since 2003, and has been working with Everett Fly, FASLA, collaborating on preservation projects since 1996. Their work together focuses on the history, evolution and preservation of historic Black Towns and Settlements in Texas and across the country.

James H. Sills, III has over 30 years of Banking and Technology Management experience. His background includes a unique combination of executive experience within large-scale banking operations, community banks, and government organizations.

Valerie Ann Johnson is the Mott Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies, and the Director of Africana Women’s Studies at Bennett College.  Johnson chairs the NC African American Heritage Commission, serves on the NC Historical Commission, National Register Advisory Committee, Ms. Committee of Scholars, and recently rotated off the board for Scarritt Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee – a nonprofit education, conference and retreat center.  Serves on the Steering Committee for the Anna Julia Cooper Center at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem North Carolina, and as a faculty mentor for the Summer Institute on Tenure and Professional Advancement (SITPA) at Duke University.

Sonny Kelly is a world class performer, story teller, motivator, speaker, and comedian. Currently pursuing a PhD in Communication & Performance at UNC Chapel Hill, Sonny is a graduate of St. Mary’s University (MA, Communication Studies, ’08) and Stanford University (BA, International Relations, ’98). After serving as a U.S. Air Force officer, Sonny has gone on to serve as non-profit organization director, university admissions counselor, award winning pharmaceutical salesman, college communications instructor, and a church youth pastor.

Alicia M. H. Latimer is the African-American Resource Center Coordinator for the Tulsa City-County Library System.  She is the recipient of numerous community awards, including the City of Tulsa Mayor’s Commission on the Status of Women’s Pinnacle Award, The Tulsa YWCA’s Women of the Year Award,  the University of Oklahoma Department of Human Relations’ Distinguished Alumnae Award, and the Williams Companies’/Tulsa Shock Women of Inspiration Award. Alicia is an information specialist with a specific focus on Tulsa Oklahoma’s Black Wall Street and the 1921 Race Massacre.  In 2016, Alicia was selected as a member of a US contingent to Caux, Switzerland which presented on the 1921 Race Massacre.  She is a member of the Greater Tulsa African-American Affairs Commission, The 1921 Race Massacre Commemoration Commission, and on the board of the John Hope Franklin Center for Racial Reconciliation in Tulsa. Latimer received her Master of Human Relations, and Master of Library and Information Studies, degrees from the University of Oklahoma.

Dr. Knight is a lifelong resident of Edgecombe County, NC who served as Mayor Pro Tem for one year before resigning to serve as Interim Town Manager. Knight has over 15 years of experience in organizational management, economic development, administration oversight, budget management and personnel leadership. Beyond her career obligations, Knight has over 20 years of community outreach advocacy in Edgecombe County.

Giselle Mendez is a social entrepreneur who began her community development work at the age of 16 while volunteering at St. Dominic’s Children’s home in Belmont, Trinidad. Giselle launched the Volunteer Center of Trinidad & Tobago in 2012 alongside some truly dynamic Trinbagonian youth & Kirton Communications where they created the first interactive platform for connecting volunteers with community based projects.

Alexa Potashnik has demonstrated a firm commitment to community development and social justice, influencing initiatives across Winnipeg that promotes diversity and inclusion. As the Festival Director of the Afro Prairie Film Festival (Central Canada’s first Black Film Festival) and founder of the annual Afrocentric artist showcase Nuit Noire, Alexa has worked in creating safer spaces for Black folks and people of colour in Winnipeg.

Nina Smith is an Assistant Professor of Human Sciences at North Carolina Central University. Smith’s training and specific research interests center around the impact of economic conditions such as poverty, parental job loss, and parental work characteristics on the well-being of children and families.   Her current research examines parental perceptions of child care, and how economic factors guide parental choices of child care. Currently, she is exploring these linkages among low-income and ethnically diverse populations, as well as the pathways through which these conditions influence children’s cognitive, behavioral, mental, and physical well-being.

Angela Thorpe became director of the African American Heritage Commission in 2019. After completing a B.A. in History (University of Florida) and M.A. in History (UNC Greensboro), she worked at The History Makers video oral history archive in Chicago, IL. She served as the first African American Historic Interpreter at the President James K. Polk State Historic Site in Pineville, NC before joining the Commission as associate director in 2017.

Dwight Tillery is founder and former CEO of the Center for Closing the Health Gap of Greater Cincinnati, whose mission is “to lead the efforts in eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities in Greater Cincinnati through advocacy, education, and community outreach.” He also served as the first African American popularly elected Mayor of Cincinnati in 1991.

Jacquelyn Dupont-Walker is founding president of the Ward Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) in Los Angeles which has built/remodeled/managed low income housing in the city (120 apartments for seniors at Ward Villas, 91 units of family and singles housing at Tuelyn Terrace, 6 scattered sites and 60 senior apartments at Rosa Parks Villas which is Phase I of Crenshaw Gateway – a mixed use community).

Napoleon Wallace is currently a member of the Activest leadership team. He most recently was the Deputy Secretary for Rural Economic Development & Workforce in the North Carolina Department of Commerce. Before this role, he served as the Kresge Foundation’s Social Investments team, and a high yield research analyst at Wells Fargo.

Ansel Wong is a Trinidadian cultural and political activist, who has been influential in many organizations particularly in the black community in the UK, where he has been based since the 1960s. He is the former Chair of the Notting Hill Carnival Board and founder of Elimu Mas Band. He is also an educationist and academic, and in a wide-ranging career has worked at senior levels in various organizations in the public and charitable sectors.