Rooted Knowledge
Collaboration, Trust, and Community Storytelling

Speaker Biographies

• David Anasagasti, aka Ahol Sniffs Glue

  

  Artist David Anasgasti, aka Alouishous San Gomma, aka Ahol Sniffs Glue, is a South Florida artist best known for his soaring urban murals depicting expansive fields of drowsy eyes, reflecting his unique vision of life, labor and unrequited love of the mean streets of Miami.

  Learn more at AholSniffsGlue.com

• Julio Capó, Jr.

  

  Julio Capó, Jr. is Associate Professor of History and Deputy Director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at Florida International University. His first book, Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940, received five awards. In addition to curating museum exhibitions, his research has appeared in top academic journals. A former journalist, his work has also been published in mainstream outlets, including Time, El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico), The Miami Herald, and The Washington Post, where he serves as an editor of its Made by History section. Capó has held fellowships at Yale University and the University of Sydney.

  Learn more at wphl.fiu.edu

• Jacqui Colyer

  

  Jacqui Colyer is Executive Director of The Historic Hampton House, a Green Book Museum Hotel and Cultural Center located in the Brownsville neighborhood of Miami. The Hotel was once known as the ‘Cotton Club of the South’ hosting the greatest Black entertainers, social justice and thought leaders, artists and athletes! Nat King Cole, Sara Vaughn, Josephine Baker, Sammy Davis Jr. Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Gordon Parks, Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson to name a few; all stayed at the Hampton House out of necessity of the apartheid Jim Crow Laws of the country.

  Learn more at historichamptonhouse.org

• Nicole Crooks

  

  A graduate of SUNY Albany with a B.A. in Africana Studies, Nicole is currently the Overtown Community Engagement Manager, a community where she lives and serves. With a strong commitment to eliminating wealth, education and health disparities in marginalized communities of color, Nicole’s passion has been that of bridging the gaps affecting Black women's overall well-being. This, she attributes to her belief that educating and helping to empower a woman liberates an entire community. The legacy that Nicole endeavors to leave is one of love, faith, peace, joy and hope.

  Learn more at catalystmiami.org

• Rebecca Friedman

  

  Dr. Rebecca Friedman, Director of the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at FIU, has been a leader at Florida International University in a number of capacities. She served as the Director of the European Union Center of Excellence/European and Eurasian Studies for over eight years. Her research focuses on the history and culture of modern Russia. Her books include the monograph Modernity, Domesticity and Temporality in Modern Russia: Time at Home (2020) Masculinity, Autocracy and the Russian University, 1804-1863 (2006).

  Learn more at wphl.fiu.edu

• Emmanuel George

  

  Born in Miami, Emmanuel's love for history started with his father teaching him black history at home so he can learn black history that wasn't taught in schools. In 2016, two bodies of work mobilized Emmanuel to new heights, Black Miami in the Twentieth Century by Dr. Marvin Dunn and Voices of America:Race and Change in Hollywood, Florida by Dr. Kitty Oliver propelled Emmanuel to get more into archiving through oral history, scanning, digitizing and even directing short documentaries. In recent years, Emmanuel launched the Black Orchid Foundation, a 501C3 non-profit centered around preserving the stories of Black High Schools in Florida and the South that were phased out after integration via the Brown V Board of Education. Emmaneul is a fellow with Encore.org, a non-profit focused on bridging generational divides through the fellowship.               

  Learn more at encore.org/emmanuel-george and facebook.com/people/Black-Orchid-Foundation/100070331041049/

• Leonie Hermantin

  

  Leonie M. Hermantin was born in Haiti and grew up in New York City. Ms. Hermantin’s serves as Director of Special Projects at SantLa, Haitian Neighborhood Center. Her career reflects her commitment to her community and to her chosen professional path in community development. She has more than 20 years of grassroots community experience in Miami’s Haitian community. One of her most profoundly rewarding experiences has been to work with PRODEV, a Haitian-led Foundation whose mission is to provide poor children access to quality education. Hermantin Consulting provides services to the Children’s Trust, FOKAL, and FIU.

  Leonie holds a Juris Doctorate from University of California at Berkeley as well as a master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Planning. She has served on multiple boards and currently sits on the Center for Haitian Studies’ Board of Directors. She is a proud and engaged member of Coral Gables Congregational Church UCC.

  Learn more at Santla.org

• Tameka Bradley Hobbs

  

  Dr. Hobbs serves as Library Regional Manager for the African American Research Library and Cultural Center (AARLCC) in Fort Lauderdale. She was founding president (2016-2018) of the South Florida Branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). She is currently the chair of the board of directors for South Florida People of Color (SFPoC), a non-profit organization based in Miami Shores, Florida, which is dedicated to eradicating racism through education and advocacy. Dr. Hobbs serves as a member of the board of directors for the Florida Historical Society. The author of Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida (2015), Dr. Hobbs won the 2015 Florida Book Award for Florida Nonfiction and the 2016 Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award from the Florida Historical Society.

  Learn more at broward.org/Library/Pages/AARLCCStory.aspx

• Carl Juste

  

  Under the threat of persecution, Haitian-born Carl–Philippe Juste and his politically active family were forced to flee their homeland in 1965, eventually settling in Miami’s Haitian community. Since 1991, he has worked as a photojournalist for The Miami Herald. Juste has covered national and international stories for the Herald, including assignments in Haiti, Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he has worked on various documentary projects for the HistoryMiami Museum, including At the Crossroads: Afro-Cuban Orisha Arts in Miami (2001), South American Musical Traditions in Miami (2002), and Haitian Community Arts: Images by Iris PhotoCollective (2006-2007).

  Juste has been a guest lecturer for various national and international organizations and universities. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and a shared Pulitzer Prize as a member of the Miami Herald staff. His work has been exhibited in Cuba, Dominican Republic and The United States. As part of his ongoing independent work, in 1998, Juste co-founded Iris Photo Collective. In 2016, Juste won a prestigious Knight Arts Challenge grant to complete Havana, Haiti: Two Cultures, One Community, a book and exhibit of photographs and essays about Cubans’ and Haitians’ lives and shared humanity. This project is further supported by two Knight Miami Arts Champions: columnist and author Dave Barry and Perez Art Museum Director Franklin Sirmans, along with a grant from the Green Family Foundation.

  Learn more at IrisPhotoCollective.com

• Alan Ket

  

  Alan Ket is the co-founder of the Museum of Graffiti. He is an American graffiti artist who for the past 25 years has been creating art on streets and trains around the world. He has documented the graffiti movement thru photography since childhood and is the author of numerous books surveying the art form both domestically and internationally. Ket is a historian, archivist, and expert in the topics of street art and graffiti. He is committed to preserving this important artform. 

  Learn more at museumofgraffiti.com

• Jacek Kolasinski

  

  Dr. Jacek J. Kolasiński is an associate professor of art and the founding director of the Ratcliffe Incubator of Art + Design at Florida International University (FIU). He has a PhD in Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and an MFA in Visual Arts from FIU. He lives in Miami, Florida, and grew up in Kraków, Poland, where he studied history and philosophy at Jagiellonian University. His work has been supported by grants from the Getty Library and Oolite Arts, among others, and exhibited internationally. He is an honorary member of the Art Academy of Latvia.

  Learn more at carta.fiu.edu/ratcliffe

• Marianne Lamonaca

  

  Marianne Lamonaca is the program director of The Humanities Edge at FIU. A leader in the field of non-profit arts management and curatorial affairs, she served as Associate Gallery Director and Chief Curator at Bard Graduate Center, NYC; Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs and Education at The Wolfsonian-FIU; and Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts at the Brooklyn Museum. She has published and taught courses on twentieth-century decorative arts, design history, and curatorial practice. She holds an M.A. from Parsons The New School for Design and a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Marianne is an affiliated fellow of the American Academy of Rome and the recipient of a 2001 Presidential Award for Achievement and Excellence from FIU. She currently served as President of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Art Museum Curators and AAMC Foundation from 2019–2022.

• Shewonda Leger

  

  Dr. Shewonda Leger is an Assistant Professor of Multilingual Writing and Pedagogy in the Department of English at Florida International University. She received her doctorate in rhetoric and writing: with an interdisciplinary graduate specialization in women's and gender studies at Michigan State University. Dr. Leger is a recipient of the Florida Education Fund Junior Faculty Fellowship.

• Ana Menéndez

  

  Ana Menéndez has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. A fifth book, The Apartment, is forthcoming in June 2023. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. 

  She has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and an M.F.A. from New York University. From 2008 to 2009, she lived in Cairo as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt. She has also lived in India, Turkey, Slovakia and The Netherlands, where she designed a creative writing minor at Maastricht University in 2011. For the past 20 years, she has taught at various writing conferences and programs including, most recently, Bread Loaf and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is currently an associate professor at FIU with joint appointments in English and the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab. 

  Learn more at wphl.fiu.edu

• Chris Norwood

  

  Originally from Newark, New Jersey, where he attended the Newark Boy Chorus School, a world-renowned professional boy choir and private middle school dedicated to the musical arts, founded in 1966 in conjunction with the New Jersey Symphony. He studied at Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia where he received a bachelor's degree in social work (1995). He studied for his master's in public administration at Cornell University’s Institute for Public Affairs (1995-1997) and a Juris Doctorate from St. Thomas University School of Law (2002). Norwood is committed to public service as a founding board member of the Social Work Program at Florida Memorial University where he was inducted into the Phi Alpha National Honor Society for Social Work, Pi Theta Chapter. Norwood also serves as the Chairman of the Audit and Budget Advisory Committee of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, member of the Miami-Dade Economic Advocacy Trust Board and secretary of Our Little One's Learning Center (Federal Head Start Center).
   
  An avid art collector, in 2017, Norwood founded Hampton Art Lovers with friends to accentuate the inspirational unifying and enriching aspects of African-American fine art in new and old settings. As passionate supporters of Hampton University's long-standing commitment to African-American art, and its Hampton University Museum Collection, Norwood serves on the editorial board of the International Review of African American Art (Published by the University since 1976). Hampton Art Lovers operates and curates the Historic Ward Rooming House Gallery in Historic Overtown. Built in 1925, the Historic Ward Rooming House opened its doors to both out-of-town African-American and Native Americans, who were typically unable to find welcoming accommodations in Downtown Miami during the first half of the 20th century. It has been transformed from a safehouse for African Americans and Indigenous people gathered during segregation to an immaculate gallery under the curatorial direction of Hampton Art Lovers.

  Learn more at hamptonartlovers.com

• Gray Read

  Gray Read is the MAA Director and an associate professor at the Department of Architecture at the College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts (CARTA). Gray Read teaches history, theory and sustainable design in the School of Architecture. She holds a PhD from University of Pennsylvania and is a licensed architect. She has written two books on historical urbanism, focusing on human scale and the theatrical nature of public spaces, design qualities that can contribute to more sustainable cities. She has also written a visual history of climate to a billion years ago, offering an accessible summary of the current crisis.

  Learn more at wphl.fiu.edu

• Dan Royles

  

  Dan Royles is an Associate Professor of History at Florida International University, where he teaches courses on United States, African American, LGBT, public, and oral history. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: the African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. As part of the research for To Make the Wounded Whole, he also launched the African American AIDS Activism Oral History Project, which gathers the life stories of African American AIDS activists, and the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of responses to HIV/AIDS in black America. His current projects include a biography of Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, and a historic context study for the National Park Service on violence against people of African descent in the U.S. and its territories from 1500 to the present.

  Learn more at sipa.fiu.edu/people/faculty/history/royles-daniel.html

• Dionne Stephens

  

  Dr. Stephens' is a Professor of Psychology at FIU. Her research examines socio-historical factors shaping minority populations' sexual scripting and sexual health processes, with emphasis on gender and ethnic/ racial identity development. Her research is conducted through the Heath Disparities and Cultural Identities Lab. With an ultimate goal of reducing health disparities, her research specifically examines diverse cultural beliefs' influence on intimate relationships and sexual health decision making in marginalized populations. Dr. Stephens' publication record reflects the development of concepts and the path to her current thinking about the ways in which cultural beliefs and expectations influence health disparities, identity development, and popular culture frameworks.

  Learn more at faculty.fiu.edu/~stephens

• John Stuart

  

  John Stuart is a Distinguished University Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean for Cultural and Community Engagement at FIU’s College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts. Additionally, he serves as the Executive Director of FIU’s Miami Beach Urban Studios and the FIU CARTA | Mana Wynwood facility, both community-focused innovation and collaboration spaces. With three decades of experience living in Miami Beach, Stuart is a registered architect in Florida and has been heavily involved in the community, serving on the Mayor’s Art Deco Cultural District Panel, the Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board, and the Board of Governors of the Miami Beach Chamber of Commerce. Stuart's interdisciplinary research, funded by organizations such as the NEA, NEH, NSF, Graham, and Knight foundations, examines the intersections of historic preservation, the environment, resilience, technology, and design. He co-authored the Florida building entries for Archipedia, the online encyclopedia of the Society of Architectural Historians. Stuart's current work with graduate architecture students at FIU involves exploring resiliency strategies and visualizations in Miami Beach’s Historic Districts, focusing on building community consensus around future resiliency policies related to the built environment.

  Learn more at carta.fiu.edu/architecture/profile/?smid=13802

• Rick Tardanico

  

  Rick Tardanico is an Associate Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies at FIU. His research focuses on socioeconomic aspects of contemporary urban and regional restructuring in Latin America. He is the co-editor of Global Restructuring, Employment and Social Inequality in Urban Latin America and Poverty or Development: Global Restructuring and Regional Transformations in the U.S. South and the Mexican South.

• Marcie Washington

  

  Marcie Washington is an Associate Teaching Professor for the Department of Politics and International Relations. Her research interests include conflict, peace, and cooperation, migration, and transnational and domestic security. Marcie focus is on delivering an understanding that refugees, the diaspora, and internally displaced persons are challengers who have the capacity in certain political and social environments promote peace. Her efforts demonstrate that understanding collective action with groups such as civil society organizations and diasporas is impractical in the absence of close attention to how memories influence collectives to re-frame a 'real and/or perceived' grievance from the past and/or present to reinforce their desired identity and promote justice.

  Learn more at pir.fiu.edu/people/faculty-a-z/marcie-washington1/marcie-washington.html