Demond Melancon (b. 1978) works solely with a needle and thread to sew glass beads onto canvas. He began this form of art in 1992 when he first became part of a 200+ year old culture known as the Black Masking Culture of New Orleans. Today as a Big Chief, Melancon is well known for creating massive suits which he wears as a Black Masker in ceremonial battles on Mardi Gras day. The suits he creates are sculptural forms based on the size of his body and are composed of intricately beaded patches revealing a collective visual narrative.

Big Chief Demond Melancon is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Writer, public speaker, researcher, zinemaker, and provacateur Jeffery U. Darensbourg, Ph.D., is member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana and Southeast Texas. He is the founder and Editor-Who's-not-a-Chief of Bulbancha Is Still a Place: Indigenous Culture from New Orleans. Recently a writer and residence at Tulane University's A Studio in the Woods and a Monroe Fellow of New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane, Jeffery is working on a book-length study of the Atakapa-Ishak of Southwest Louisiana.

Photo by Benry Fauna, 2020

Jeffery Darensbourg is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Mauricio Tenorio is the Samuel N. Harper Professor of History, Romance Languages & Literatures, and the College; Affiliated Faculty, CLAS; Profesor Asociado, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Mexico City) (on leave Winter and Spring 2022). His work focuses on the cultural and social history of Mexican urbanism, particularly of Mexico City. His book, I Speak of the City, connects the realms of literature, architecture, music, popular language, art, and public health to investigate the city in a variety of contexts: as a living history textbook, as an expression of the state, as a modernist capital, as a laboratory, and as language.

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Julieta Gil is a visual artist based in Mexico City. Her creative research incorporates three dimensional form. Whether it’s creating installation, sculpture, 3D renderings and animation, she works with computers as means to reflect on how we are altered by the digitization of our existence. She’s interested in the overlaps that occur in the interaction between physical and digital realities. Through her work, she creates narratives that reflect upon institutional pasts, presents, and futures.

She is currently interested in themes like feminism, subversive technologies, fiction and memory and how these can be used to resignify, reimagine and reshape our understanding of institutions, and monuments to be more precise.

Julieta holds an MFA from the Media Arts program at UCLA, and a B.Arch from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City. In 2015-16, she was a grant recipient of Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and Arts in the field of art and technology research and production. Her work has been presented in spaces such as: the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), Palm Springs Art Museum (CA), Future Gallery (Mexico City and Berlin), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), and Zuecca Projects (Venice, Italy).

Julieta Gil is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Abdul Aziz, a freelance New Orleans-based photojournalist brings a rich background of chronicling imagery of global communities, from the Middle East to Africa, Asia, and the United States to his work. He has worked in documentary filmmaking worldwide for over 2 decades chronicling social issues related to race, exploitation of indigenous cultures, and unfair labor practices. His most recent work has focused on the resurgence of White Supremacy in the United States and the Movement for Black Lives. He was recently named Documentary Photographer of the year by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and is a contributor to publications such as the New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Abdul Aziz is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Guadalupe García specializes in the history of cities and colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her research examines the intersections of colonialism, empire, and urban space and focuses on free, black, and enslaved peoples in Havana. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies and Cultural Studies. García's fellowships and awards include a Distinguished Fellowship at the CUNY Grad Center's Advanced Research Collaborative and research and digital fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island. She has also held a Transatlantic Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick in the UK. Professor García is currently at work on a second book project that explores the use of digital humanities to interrogate how space, scale, and mapping can be used to counter the logic of the archive and expand our contemporary understanding of urban areas.

Guadalupe Garcia is part of Seminar 3: Monumental Iconoclasms: New Orleans & Mexico City.

Artist La Vaughn Belle is based in St Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, and her practice addresses the legacy of colonialism in the built environment and in historical memory. With Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers, Belle has worked to monumentalize Mary Thomas, leader of the 1878 “Fireburn” revolt by formerly enslaved indentured laborers in the Danish colony of St Croix. The two artists created I AM QUEEN MARY based on combined 3D scans of their own bodies, radically reformulating the hegemonic memorial forms of monumental statue. By intentionally placing the statue before the elegant brick building that formerly housed the Danish West India Company on Copenhagen’s waterfront –and which today houses the National Gallery of Denmark’s plaster casts of canonical Western European sculpture – the artists made the violent history of Danish colonialism in the Caribbean present in the heart of the metropolis.

Image by Kevin Moolenar.

La Vaughn Belle is part of Seminar 2: From River Road to Copenhagen: Revising our Remembrance of the Past.

Professor Adderley works primarily as a comparative slavery historian focusing particularly on the 19th century, and the era of slave trade abolition and emancipation. Although the bulk of her research has concerned British slave trade suppression and the Africans affected by it, because of the nature of the 19th-century Atlantic slave trade, her research work has various transnational components across multiple colonial and geographic boundaries, including most significantly interaction between the British and Spanish colonized Caribbean and North America. Adderley is author of “New Negroes from Africa” : Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (2006). The book was a co-winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize for African Diaspora History, jointly awarded by the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History (ASALH). Her current book project is entitled “Practicing Emancipation: Slave Ship Survivors, Atlantic Abolition, and the Everyday Politics of Freedom.”

Dr. Adderley is part of Seminar 2: From River Road to Copenhagen: Revising our Remembrance of the Past.

Laura Kilcer VanHuss is a curatorial consultant specializing in the development of ethical narratives at sites of enslavement. She has served as curator at Oak Alley Foundation, an institution dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Oak Alley Plantation, a historic site in Vacherie, Louisiana, and is the editor of Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans (2021).

Laura Kilcer VanHuss is part of Seminar 2: From River Road to Copenhagen: Revising our Remembrance of the Past.

Following a long and successful career as a professor of Communicative Disorders and as Dean of the College of General Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. Hayes has emerged an important voice in Louisiana Studies and in the Acadiana community as the Founder and President of the Iberia African American Historical Society (IAAHS). Founded in 2017, the IAAHS seeks to explore, understand, and make accessible the full story of African American history and culture in Iberia Parish and rural southern Louisiana in general, with a particular focus on the often neglected contributions of African Americans to the region's civic life. Dr. Hayes' work has already led to numerous successes, including the creation of historic marker honoring, Dr. Emma Wakefield Paillet, Louisiana's first black female physician.

Dr. Phebe Hayes is part of Seminar 2: From River Road to Copenhagen: Revising our Remembrance of the Past.

Dr. Lorraine Leu holds a joint appointment with the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS), and is an affiliate of the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her new book Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) explores how race makes space in Brazil, a country with one of the largest populations of color in the world, but where race injustice has been notoriously obscured by powerful national discourses of social harmony and color blindness. The book examines how urbanization in the capital city in the run up to the Centennial celebrations of 1922 functioned as a technology of racial oppression and how racialized subjects defied the implantation of dominant spatial orders and engaged in their own mappings of their city.

Dr. Lorraine Leu is part of Seminar 1, Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, Exploring urban displacement in Treme and Valongo Wharf.

Sara Zewde brings years of experience leading complex design processes across the Americas, with a design approach that works explicitly to illuminate the distinct cultural and ecological qualities of a place. She is Assistant Professor of Practice at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Sara was named the 2014 National Olmsted Scholar by the Landscape Architecture Foundation, a 2016 Artist-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and in 2018, was named to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's inaugural "40 Under 40" list. She designed the memorial for Rio de Janeiro’s Valongo Wharf as a space for the performance of Afro-Brazilian identity, and drew on Afro-Brazilian practices such as samba and capoeira as inspiration for the memorial. Most recently, she was named a 2020 United States Artists Fellow. Sara is a registered landscape architect and holds a master’s of landscape architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a master’s of city planning from MIT, and a BA in sociology and statistics from Boston University.

Sara Zewde is part of Seminar 1, Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, Exploring urban displacement in Treme and Valongo Wharf.

Freddi Williams Evans is an author, independent scholar and arts education consultant. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on Congo Square, a world-renown landmark of African and African American culture in New Orleans. Her book, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, the first comprehensive study of the location, received the 2012 Louisiana Humanities Book of the Year Award. Her research and advocacy influenced the New Orleans City Council ordinance, which changed the name Beauregard Square, named after Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard in 1893, to Congo Square in 2011. As a community activist, she co-chaired the New Orleans Committee to Erect Historic Markers on the Slave Trade to Louisiana, helped to erect the UNESCO Site of Memory Middle Passage Marker, and currently serves on the New Orleans Legacy Project Committee. Working in arts education, she administered programs in the Jefferson Parish Public School System, the Contemporary Arts Center, and the Ashé Cultural Arts Center for over 30 years combined. She is a native of Madison, Mississippi and holds degrees in music and psychology from Tougaloo College, Tougaloo MS and a graduate degree in creative arts therapy (music) from Hahnemann University, Philadelphia, PA.

Freddi Williams Evans is part of Seminar 1, Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, Exploring urban displacement in Treme and Valongo Wharf.

Luther Gray has been active in the New Orleans arts community since 1984. He co-founded the Congo Square Foundation in 1989, which was renamed the Congo Square Preservation Society in 2011. The Society has been instrumental in the resurrection of drumming and cultural activities in Congo Square. In 1993, the Congo Square Foundation was successful in placing Congo Square on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1997 the Foundation led the effort to erect the Congo Square historic marker. In addition, he with a team of drum makers including Douglas Redd carved three Bamboula drums from a one hundred year old cypress tree that are now on display at the new Louisiana State Museum of History in Baton Rouge. The Congo Square Preservation Society sponsors weekly Sunday drum circles in Congo Square that date back to 1988. In 2013, the Congo Square Preservation society launched the Congo Square Living Classroom Fieldtrip which consists of a on-site tour of the Armstrong Park Sculpture Garden followed by the Congo Square Drum & Dance Workshop. He also founded two major musical groups, Percussion Incorporated in 1985 and Bamboula 2000 in 1994. Luther Gray and Bamboula 2000 annually teach approximately 5,000 students in elementary, middle, high schools and universities around the country with The Imagination Tour.

Luther Gray is part of Seminar 1, Sites of Memory: New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro, Exploring urban displacement in Treme and Valongo Wharf.