Professor Jamelia Morgan

Co-sponsored by UW-Madison’s Disability Cultural Center

Thursday, April 10, 2025 at 4:00pm CST

Image of Professor Jamelia Morgan Professor Jamelia Morgan is an award-winning and acclaimed scholar and teacher focusing on issues at the intersections of race, gender, disability, and criminal law and punishment. Her scholarship and teaching examine the development of disability as a legal category in American law, disability and policing, overcriminalization and the regulation of physical and social disorder, and the constitutional dimensions of the criminalization of status.

Kristin Welch

Co-Sponsored By UW-Madison’s Center for Research on Gender and Women

Friday, April 11, 2025 at 10:00am CST

Kristin Welch is the Founder and Executive Director of Waking Women Healing Institute, an Indigenous & Survivor-led nonprofit organization. The Institute centers healing through direct action, policy work, storytelling, data activism, and advocacy for and with survivors of Domestic Violence/Sexual Assault (DV/SA), and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women/People (MMIWP) families.

A descendant of the Menominee Nation, with German, Irish, and Norwegian ancestry, Kristin holds a Bachelor of Arts in Leadership Studies with an emphasis on Human Development. For over a decade, she has been immersed in resilience and healing work, systems change, and Indigenous life-span models for wellness.

Kristin’s impactful work includes the development of several key resources:

The MMIW/P Healing & Response Teams Training

The MMIW/P Digital Resource Map

The “We Are Brave” curriculum for survivors

The Liberation Healing Resistance resource kit.

Her leadership extends to significant policy work. Kristin was an active member of the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) MMIW Task Force for three years, playing a key role in its early development. She also served as a commissioner on the federal Not Invisible Act Commission (NIAC), where she contributed significantly to the NIAC “Not One More” Report, which presented findings and recommendations to address MMIW/P and Human Trafficking against Indigenous peoples.

Mimi Khúc

Co-sponsored by the UW-Madison’s Center for Research on Gender and Women and the Disability Cultural Center

Friday, April 11, 2025 at 4:30pm CST

Image of Mimi Khúc Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the creator of the acclaimed mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot, and the author of dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, a deep dive into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

Artists’ Panel

Co-Sponsored by UW-Madison’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and funded by the Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities Program

Saturday, April 12, 2025 at 10:00am CST

Image of Harmony Hill Harmony Hill is a Milwaukee based artist and enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin with lineal and cultural ties to the Ho Chunk and Stockbridge Munsee Nations. She is a mother, singer, dancer and multi-media artist with a focus on woodwork, beading, sewing and painting. Harmony’s work focuses on cultural pride, issues and the empowerment of women. She has a passion for native history and uses art to make it more accessible. Through strong cultural and ancestral imagery, she strives to give voice to and empower indigenous people across the continent, particularly women. As a victim of physical and sexual violence she feels a responsibility to be a voice for the empowerment of women. She chooses to direct the focus of her work on the power, medicine and potential of women rather than the negative aspects of victimization. With humility, she strives to create work for the people and to heal the people.

As the a board member for the Southeastern Oneida Tribal Services, and chairwoman of the Oneida Nations Arts Board and her non-profit, Red Magic, Hill works to celebrate, preserve and advance Native American arts and culture while strengthening community ties through education and representation.

“I measure my success by how my work touches the hearts of my people, and consequently heals my own heart.” -Harmony Hill

Charlie Barbara Wetzel (b. Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist who works inside the intellectual cul-de-sac where sculpture, photography, and performance reside. Wetzel graduated from Lawrence University with a BA in Studio Art, and she lives and works in Chicago. She is a 2023 Thomas J. Watson Fellow and has shown her work in the U.S. and Europe in group and solo exhibitions.

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong American artist whose practice engages primarily with legacies and potentials of landscape, portraiture, and documentary photographic traditions and aesthetics, creating works that examine identity, longing, and belonging in Hmong diasporic communities.

Among Her’s solo exhibitions include Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2022–2023), Emplotment at Or Gallery in Vancouver, Canada (2020), and My grandfather turned into a tiger at Midway Contemporary Ar in Minneapolis (2018). Recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (2022), her work has been included in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; the Milwaukee Art Museum; MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; among many others. A prizewinner in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition (2022), Her was the recipient of the McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship (2022 and 2016), and the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2019). Notable public collections include the Singapore Art Museum, The Met, The Whitney Museum and the Walker Art Center.

Image of Dr. Kantara Souffrant Dr. Kantara Souffrant is the Senior Director of Community Dialogue and Adult Programs at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she oversees art experiences rooted in vulnerability, feeling interconnected, and building sustainable community partnerships. Souffrant is a Haitian-American artist-scholar, museum educator, trained facilitator, and curator who brings her passion for community engagement, dialogue, and facilitation to her work as a performer, educator, and community member. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, with certificates in Critical Theory, African and Diaspora Studies, and Teaching. Her scholarship examines visual and performance art in the Black Atlantic, Black feminist aesthetics, and museum pedagogy.

Souffrant has curated and facilitated performances, educational and community programming venues such as New York’s Judson Church, The Field Museum in Chicago, Links Hall, the Haitian American Museum of Chicago (HAMOC), and the Whitney Museum as part of the Whitney Biennale. Souffrant continues to write and publish and has taught at Oberlin College, Northwestern University, and Illinois State University and is co-editor, along with Dr. Marianna Pegno, of the volume Institutional Change for Museums: A Practical Guide to Creating Polyvocal Spaces from Routledge Press.