Center for the Arts and Humanities

James Claiborne

Native Philadelphian James Claiborne is a self-taught visual artist, curator and arts advocate. After spending 8 years with the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance working to develop its community engagement and advocacy work, Claiborne served as the editor of Philly360.com, a multicultural tourism campaign for Visit Philadelphia.

Currently James Claiborne serves as the Public Programming Manager for the  African American Museum in Philadelphia—where he is charged with building thoughtful, relevant programs for adult audiences. As a curator, James has led the gallery program of black arts institution Art Sanctuary, presenting exhibits by James Dupree, Amber Arts, Richard Watson, Deborah Willis, Barkley Hendricks, among others. James also serves as a consultant, advisor and board member for several cultural groups throughout the city, including Art Sanctuary, FringeArts, and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund.

Photo: Andrew Amorim

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, originally from Detroit, MI, is a Bessie Award nominated Nigerian-American curator, poet, and time-based performance installation artist. He is a 2017 Princeton Arts Fellow, a 2017 Jerome Artists in Residence at Abrons Arts Center, a 2017 APAP Leadership Fellow, and a 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Fellow. He is a 2016 Gibney Dance boo-koo resident artist and a recipient of a 2017 and 2016 USArtists International Award from the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. His work has been presented throughout Europe and the United States. He has created original roles in the performance works of visual artist Nick Cave, Pig Iron Theatre Company, Keely Garfield Dance, Miguel Gutierrez and The Powerful People, Headlong Dance Theater, among others. Kosoko’s poems, interviews, and essays can be found published in The American Poetry Review, Poems Against War, The Dunes Review, Silo, Detroit Research v2, Dance Journal (PHL), the Broad Street Review (PHL), Movement Research Performance Journal, and Critical Correspondence (NYC). He continues to guest teach, speak, lecture, and perform internationally. His piece #negrophobia is currently touring throughout Europe with forthcoming dates in Belgium (Beursschouwburg) and Munich (Spielart Festival) Visit jaamil.com or philadiction.org for more information.  

Juli Grigsby

Juli Grigsby is an U.S.-based Anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. Her areas of expertise include critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, urban ethnography, violence, women’s health and U.S Social Movements.  The past recipient of Davis Putter Fellowships and a Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology & Advanced Collaboratory Scholar (HASTAC) her photographic work has appeared in the Black California Dreamin’ journal and at the Metro Art Gallery in Pomona, California.  Her current book project is Grim Sleeper: Gender, Violence, and Reproductive Justice in Los Angeles, which explores black women’s experiences of structural violence and black women’s commitment to social transformation through reproductive justice.

Tiona Nekkia McClodden

Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores, and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Themes explored in McClodden's films and works have been re-memory and more recently narrative biomythography.

Kelli Morgan

Kelli Morgan, The Winston & Carolyn Lowe Curatorial Fellow for Diversity in the Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has recently received her doctorate in African American Studies and a graduate certificate in Public History-Museum Studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a critical race cultural historian, Morgan specializes in American art and visual culture. Her work then examines, critiques, and theorizes the ways in which American artists, art objects, art history, and art institutions both challenge and reify the systematic mechanisms of anti-Black violence and oppression in the United States. Morgan is also a recipient of awards from both the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Jumatatu Poe

Jumatatu Poe is a choreographer and performer based between Philadelphia and New York City who grew up dancing around the living room and at parties with his siblings and cousins. His early exposure to concert dance was through African dance and capoeira performances on California college campuses where his Pan-Africanist parents studied and worked, but he did not start formal dance training until college with Umfundalai, Kariamu Welsh’s contemporary African dance technique. His work continues to be influenced by various sources, including his foundations in those living rooms and parties, his early technical training in contemporary African dance, his continued study of contemporary dance and performance, his movement trainings with dancer and anatomist Irene Dowd around anatomy and proprioception, his sociological research of and technical training in J-sette performance with Donte Beacham. Through his artistic work, he strives to engage in and further dialogues with Black queer folks, create lovingly agitating performance work that recognizes History as only one option for the contextualization of the present, and continue to imagine options for artists’ economic and emotional sustainability. He is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College.

Photo: Tayarisha Poe, http://www.tayarishapoe.com

Lindsay Reckson

Lindsay Reckson is Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College. She teaches and writes at the intersection of American literary and cultural studies, performance studies, media studies, and religion. She is currently at work on two book projects. The first, Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, examines the entanglements of race, reenactment, and ecstatic temporality in turn-of-the-century American realism. The second, Experimental Gestures, explores how minimal or routine gestures—touching a button, saluting a flag, going through the motions—become crucial sites of ethical inquiry in times of attenuated political possibility. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, American Religious Liberalism (ed. Schmidt and Promey), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, The Pocket Instructor: Literature, and Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Before coming to Haverford, Lindsay Reckson was a Presidential Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 2011, and her B.A. in English and Creative Writing from New York University in 2004.

Imani Roach

Imani Roach is a Philadelphia-based scholar, visual artist and musician. Across disciplines, her interests include the surveillance, consumption and containment of black emotion, vulnerability and entitlement practices in urban space, gender and the public/private divide, and aging bodies in the American imaginary. She is the Managing Editor of Artblog, an artist member at Vox Populi gallery and collective, a co-founder of The Lonely Painter Project (a bi-coastal performance collaborative), and an instructor at the University of the Arts, where she teaches the art of Africa and the black diaspora. She is also a doctoral candidate at Harvard, writing on the first generation of black South African photojournalists under Apartheid. She performs regularly as a vocalist in the soul, folk and jazz idioms.

Raél Jero Salley

Raél Jero Salley is a conceptual artist, cultural critic and art historian living and working in the USA and South Africa. Salley's work on modern and contemporary art analyses the making of visual culture and everyday imagination. Salley offers over a decade of diverse experiences in art, education, program development, research strategies, collaborative creativity and global impact.

Salley received a BFA degree from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1999, his MFA in Fine Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, and a PhD in the History of Culture from The University of Chicago in 2009. He has exhibited and curated internationally. Salley is currently a Professor in Art History at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); Visiting Faculty in African American Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles; and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Salley’s work is represented by Gallery MOMO (South Africa). www.raelsalley.com

Monique Scott

Monique Scott is an anthropologist with a career as both a scholar of museums and as a museum professional working within museums. After Monique Scott received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2004, she worked for more than ten years as head of cultural education at the American Museum of Natural History. Monique specializes in how diverse museum visitors make meaning of race and culture in museums, as well as how diverse audiences experience traditional anthropology and natural history museums as a whole, the basis for her 2007 book Rethinking Evolution in the Museum: Envisioning African Origins. Her recent research focuses on the representation of Africa in contemporary art and anthropology exhibitions—exploring the dense tension between African objects as art and artifact. At Bryn Mawr College, Monique teaches about museums in the History of Art and Anthropology Departments and is building a new interdisciplinary Museum Studies program, a model of engaged liberal arts. Monique is also a Consulting Scholar for the Africa Section at the Penn Museum, a Research Associate in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and is on the African-American Collections Committee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Sosena Solomon

Sosena Solomon is an award winning social documentary film and multimedia visual artist from Ethiopia.

Intuitively selecting subjects and stories, she is particularly interested in spaces of transition and change, acting as a cultural preservationist. Her work, whether presented as a film or an immersive 3-dimensional experience, explores cross sections of various subcultures and communities in flux, carefully teasing out cultural nuances and capturing personal narratives via arresting visual storytelling and cinéma vérité stylings.

Sosena has worked for many years in the commercial and nonprofit sectors and has worked as a Director and Cinematographer on many short film projects including “Sole”, a documentary on sneaker culture that premiered on PBS affiliate MINDTV, and “MERKATO”, filmed on location in one of Africa’s largest open-air markets and exhibited internationally as an audio, visual, and sensory installation.

Sosena earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Social Documentary Film from The School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Television Production from Temple University. She is a recipient of The Leeway Foundation Art and Change grant (2013) and the Transformation Award (2014).

Sosena is a freelancer currently lecturing in the Fine Arts Department at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and in the Film and Video Department at the University of the Arts.  She has previously lectured at Temple University’s School of Media and Communication (SMC).

Brittany Webb

Brittany Webb is Curatorial and Research Assistant at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) and a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Temple University. Since 2012 she has worked on AAMP’s special exhibitions across several genres, including fine art, costuming, textiles and history. An anthropologist of visual culture and race, her research itinerary includes museum anthropology, material culture, exhibition history and the construction of heritage in the Americas. Her dissertation research examines Black exhibition production and its relationship to the sociopolitical landscape. She is the recipient of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Fellowship in Museum Practice and holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Southern California.

William Williams

"Something happened here," you might say to yourself as you look at William Williams's photographs. Somehow, the sun soaked porch in his 1995 photo of the Harriet Beecher Stowe House is haunted by the echo of creaking floorboards where the author walked. Pictures of the Orantange River or springs in Delaware where once soldiers camped seem pregnant with stories. The viewer is obliged to re-examine the influence of terrain and architecture on the course of history when looking at Mr. Williams's photograph of Abraham Lincoln's boyhood room. Did Lincoln dream of becoming President after putting out a lamp after some late night reading? Is greatness stuck in the space between those rough beams? How could so much change be contained within such a tiny structure? Did Lincoln have any idea of the journey he was setting out on when he last passed through that sliver of a door? Mr. Williams's photos ask these questions, and in so doing bring ordinary life to larger-than-life history. Curiously, this transaction does not diminish the heroes, on which it focuses, but instead makes their achievements all the more remarkable. We can see how similar to us they were in the matter of fact aspects of life. And we can begin to wonder about what greatness, what capacity for change, and what power to pursue justice we may contain. The Esther Klein Gallery and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia, Smith College, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio have all mounted solo exhibitions of Mr. Williams's work. His photographs have also been included in exhibitions at Historic Yellow Springs in Pennsylvania, the Baltimore Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Tampa Museum in Florida and the Princeton University Museum. Mr. Williams's photographs are on permanent exhibition at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art Washington among others. He has been honored with a grant from the Ford Foundation and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. Mr. Williams has also received numerous faculty research grants from Haverford College, where he has been a professor of Fine Arts since 1978 and Curator of Photography since 1981.