Because my metier is black … (after Toni Morrison)

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, the Believer, Frieze, the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and Oxford American, where she was a contributing editor. Lynne is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is the inaugural recipient of the Beverly Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association. From 2023 to 2025, Lynne was an editor for Momus.

Erica N. Cardwell is writer, critic, and educator based between Brooklyn and Toronto. She is the recent recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a New York State Council for the Arts Grant for Artists in support of her first book, Wrong Is Not My Name. Her writing has appeared in BOMB, The Believer, Brooklyn Rail, Artsy, frieze, Hyperallergic, C Mag, Art in America, and other publications. Erica is on the editorial board of Radical Teacher Journal. Wrong Is Not My Name will be published by The Feminist Press in 2023.

Margo Jefferson is the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. She has previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts. In 2022 she published a memoir titled Constructing a Nervous System.

Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and since 2021, the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American, a quarterly literary and culture magazine that explores the complexity and vitality of the American South. During her tenure, the magazine has been a finalist for awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors and the James Beard Foundation, and has received the Whiting Foundation’s Literary Magazine Prize. Her writing on books, music, and film has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Bookforum, the Criterion Collection, and more. She is at work on her first book, about women in the blues, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 

Stefanie Jason works at the intersection of research, curating, and archiving. Currently an Art History PhD student at Rutgers University, Stefanie’s work is focused on memory and desire in contemporary African diasporic art. With an MA in Curatorial Practice from Wits University, Stefanie’s thesis centres the absence of pioneering photojournalist Mabel Cetu from South Africa’s official records, which she produced alongside a zine featuring a collection of responses to Cetu’s memory. Stefanie is a 2022 ArtTable Fellow working with Amant Foundation on the forthcoming exhibition Jayne Cortez: A Poet’s Guide to the World, and has written for publications such as Contemporary And, Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), and ARTS.BLACK.

Yaniya Lee is a writer whose work, research, and collaboration focus on the ethics of aesthetics. She taught Art Criticism at the University of Toronto from 2018-2021 and she has written about art for museums and galleries across Canada, as well as for Vogue, Flash, FADER, Art in America, and Vulture. She was a member of the editorial team at Canadian Art magazine from 2017-2021 and joined the editorial team at Archive Books in 2021. Lee frequently works with collaborators on symposiums, programs, and workshops, most recently Ideas From Moving Water (2022); WhAt She SaId: Promiscuous References & Disobedient Care (2021); Song. Prayer. Scream. A praxis of looking (2021), Bodies, Borders, Fields (2019), and Desire x Politics (2019).

Colony Little is a Raleigh-based freelance writer and creator of Culture Shock Art, a site dedicated to the synergies among art, music, and design. She focuses on underrepresented artists who examine race, culture, and identity. As a Black woman with familial ties to the South, Little presently writes with a focus on Black creators who create work in the American South. Writing credits include Abstractions Magazine, Art News, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, ARTS.BLACK, The Black Oak Society, CARLA, Hyperallergic, W Magazine, and Walter Magazine. Little is a 2020 recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.

Tarisai Ngangura is a Zimbabwean journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in Oxford American, Lapham’s Quarterly, Rolling Stone, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and The Believer. She lived and worked in Salvador, Brazil for three years documenting Afro-Brazilian arts, culture, and food. She is currently a senior content strategist at The Atlantic and a Pitchfork contributor. Her debut novel, The Ones We Loved, is forthcoming from HarperCollins Canada in 2023.

Rianna Jade Parker is a critic, curator, and researcher based in South London where she studied her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is a founding member of interdisciplinary collective Thick/er Black Lines, whose work was exhibited in the landmark exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers at Somerset House, London. She is a Contributing Editor of Frieze magazine and co-curated War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Her first book A Brief History of Black British Art was published by Tate in 2021 and she is represented by The Wiley Agency. Her writing has been published in print and online by ARTnews, Frieze Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Harpers Bazaar, Artnet, Phaidon Press, Thames and Hudson, Tate Liverpool, Frieze Masters, Camden Art Centre, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Aperture, The Guardian, and BOMB Magazine.

Still Nomads (Samira Farah and Areej Nur) is a Black African collective and research platform co- founded by Areej Nur and Samira Farah, based on Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung country. The work of Still Nomads aims to create meaningful and long-term collaborations between African artists in Australia. Areej Nur is a radio presenter and educator.  Samira Farah is a curator, creative producer and radio presenter.

Camille Bacon is a Chicago-based writer and the editor-in-chief of Jupiter Magazine. She is building a “sweet black writing life” as inspired by the words of poet Nikky Finney and the infinite wisdom of the Black feminist tradition more broadly.

Allison Noelle Conner is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. She is an Editor at Momus, and has contributed writing to Hyperallergic, East of Borneo, and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in the monographs The Site of Whispers (2024) and Art + Practice: Year 10 (2024), as well as in the anthologies Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction (2019) and Rockhaven: A History of Interiors (2017). Her fiction has been published by The Kenyon Review. She participated in the Momus Emerging Critics Residency in 2022, and received an editorial fellowship from X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in 2023. She is also a contributing editor at Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.

Sabrina Greig is a Haitian-American curator, writer, and arts administrator born and raised in NYC. At the intersection of social activism and Art History, her arts criticism focuses on power, equity and representations of the Black diaspora in contemporary art and architectural history. She received her M.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has published essays in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio Magazine, Arts.Black, ContemporaryAnd and featured in Smithsonian Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Chicago Tribune, and The Observer. Formerly, she was a program officer in arts education at the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation. Currently, she works at the Brooklyn Museum in Curatorial Affairs and is a 2022 Recess Art Critical Writing Fellow.

Alysia Nicole Harris is a charismatic Afro-Atlantic writer raised and returned to the U.S. South. She combines arts criticism and journalism to acquaint non-academic audiences with visual vocabularies of the Afro-Atlantic. Originally trained as a linguist and performance poet, her interest extends to all manner of Black vernaculars, be they verbal or visual. Alysia received her PhD in linguistics from Yale University and holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. She serves as Scalawag Magazine’s arts and soul editor and education coordinator for Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency. Alysia hopes to contribute to efforts supporting the development of sustainable arts ecosystems within the South. 

Mia Imani is an international interdisciplinary artivist and arts writer. Harrison interrogates the ways communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in-between the worlds of art and science. This “third-way” mixes unconventional methods (dreams, rituals) and science (ethnography, geography, psychoanalysis) to create new ways of being and becoming. She strives to create generative pieces that allow the works of the artist to have a second breath outside of the confinements of an exhibition. Her written work lives in the pages of Art Papers, Cultured Magazine, Contemporary &, Daddy Magazine, frieze, Hyperallergic, Vice, and more.

t.c. lynch is an art programs specialist, with a focus on democratizing both traditional and unconventional art spaces. Through her work, she explores the relationship(s) between artist, space, and viewer, fostering deeper connectivity of artistic practice, presentation, and interpretation. Her scope of program development includes arts education, museum education, interpretation, community engagement, public programming, and accessibility initiatives. Currently, Tadia supports artist-centered programs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Tadia holds an MBA in Arts and Cultural Management, specialized in exhibitions from L’école internationale des métiers de la culture et du marché de l’art (IESA).

Chayanne Marcano is an artist and writer born and raised in The Bronx, New York. Her research interests include space, place, and belonging. Currently, she is the Associate Producer at the interdisciplinary institution Abrons Arts Center on New York City’s Lower East Side. Formerly, she was the Senior Coordinator of Public Programs & Community Engagement at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Chayanne is training as a full-spectrum doula.

Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh is a curator, writer, and scholar who works as the Constance E. Clayton Curatorial Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was previously a curatorial associate for Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow in New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues, Burnaway, The Iron Lattice, and 64 Parishes. Momoh’s work is most informed by Caribbean theorists and Black feminist thought. She views her curatorial practice, which blends historical scholarship with contemporary art, as a form of social activism rooted in decolonial practices and museum curators as civil servants.

Joshua Segun-Lean is a writer and researcher. His writing engages contemporary issues across visual and literary culture, Black studies, gender, spatiality, and politics. With a background in International Business, Joshua tries to understand how social practices interdict, respond to and intersect flows of capital in the ‘globalized’ world, and by extension how the aspirations of Black cultural production, under the continued strain of coloniality, signify resistance, belonging and self-determination. Current research is informed by the relationship between protest and performance, protest as performance, and subaltern modernisms in music, architecture, and literature. At the moment, he works out of Lagos, Nigeria.

Summer Sloane-Britt is a Los Angeles-based writer and Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Black art, conceptualizations of landscape[s], and racialized built environments. Her work has been published by Artnews, NYU, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Hannah Traore Gallery. She has forthcoming work in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and the second edition of Women and Migrations: Responses in Art and History. She has held positions at the National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Grey Gallery. She received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in Art History and Sociology/Anthropology.

Sarah Stefana Smith is an artist-scholar based between Massachusetts and Washington D.C. whose work communicates between Black art and culture, queer of color critique, visuality and performance. As a studio artist, they work predominantly in photography, sculpture and installation. Abstraction, materiality, space and ecology are explored using barrier materials—deer, bird, and safety netting, chicken wire and fishing line—to comment on boundaries between human and species, lines of demarcation around difference—race, gender, sexuality, and how modes of difference are used to constitute and congeal belonging. Smith has exhibited in spaces,including IA&A at Hillyer and DC Art Center (Washington, D.C.), Arlington Art Center (Arlington. VA), Borland Project Space (State College, PA), Waller Gallery and Gallery CA (Baltimore, MD), and David Spectrum (Toronto, ON). Smith was an artist-in-resident at the University of Pittsburgh with The Creativities Project (2020) and has published writing in the Journal of Women & Performance (2018), The Black Scholar (2019) and Bmore Arts, among others. Smith received their PhD from the University of Toronto, and MFA from Goddard College. They are Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. 

Meshell Sturgis is a scholar, critic, and artist living south of Seattle. Her arts writing, a practice developed through a four-year residency with the Black Embodiment Studio, can be found in the studio’s annual journal A Year in Black Art, as well as with New Archives and Art Practical. She recently served as a research assistant and writer for Crosscut’s Black Arts Legacies project. Additionally, her work has appeared in Lateral, QED, The Journal for Women’s Studies in Communication, and Souls. She is a PhD Candidate and Instructor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington with a MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington Bothell and a BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Neyat Yohannes is a writer and researcher based in Los Angeles. She covers visual art, film, tv, music, books, and pop culture via an intersectional lens. She also contributes exhibition texts, catalog essays, and print/web copy for various arts spaces. Her writing has been supported by residencies with The Black Embodiments Studio and Momus. Her personal practice is rooted in memory work and uses tools like critical fabulation to fill the gaps in narratives that haven’t prevailed in the public consciousness. At the moment, she’s working on a speculative account of Eritrea’s post-independence, 1980s diaspora and its eventual social dissolution.