Christen A. Smith is the founder of Cite Black Women, a Black feminist anthropologist, social justice advocate, Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on the gendered dimensions of anti-Black state violence and resistance in the Americas, examining the immediate and long-term impact of police violence on Black communities, particularly Black families and Black women. Her work on gender and state violence looks at the lingering, deadly impact of state terror on Black women, which she theorizes as sequelae. She has written extensively on this lingering deadly impact and her research has been featured on Democracy Now!, PBS Newshour and The Feminist Wire among others. She is the author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016).
Jenn M. Jackson (they/them) is a queer genderflux androgynous Black woman, an abolitionist, a lover of all Black people, and an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Political Science.n Jackson’s primary research is in Black Politics with a focus on group threat, gender and sexuality, political behavior, and social movements. Jackson also holds affiliate positions in African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBT Studies. They are a Senior Research Associate at The Campbell Public Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, as well. Jackson is the author of the forthcoming book BLACK WOMEN TAUGHT US (Random House Press, 2022). The book is an intellectual and political history of Black women’s activism, movement organizing, and philosophical work that explores how women from Harriet Jacobs to Audre Lorde to the members of the Combahee River Collective, among others, have for centuries taught us how to fight for justice and radically reimagine a more just world for us all.
Erica Lorraine Williams is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology department at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), which won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize in 2011. She is also a co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology, along with Ira Harrison and Deborah Johnson-Simon(University of Illinois Press, 2018). She is Contributing Editor to the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Sociology: Brazil section), and has published in Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography,the Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbook on Gender: Love, Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora (2015), Policing Pleasure: Global Reflections on Sex Work and Public Policy(2011); and Taking Risks: Feminist Stories of Social Justice Research in the Americas(2014). She is currently working on a project on Afro-Brazilian feminist activism in Bahia, Brazil and a travel memoir.
Imani A. Wadud is a PhD candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas. With the support of a Chancellor Doctoral Fellowship, Wadud focuses primarily on the 20th century into our contemporary moment, working at the intersection of visual culture, performance studies, critical ethnic studies, and Blackness. Her research incorporates visual culture theory and scholar-practitioner research that centers transnational, Black diasporic modes of artistic expression. With a background in social activism and performance-based social practices, Wadud works at the Spencer Museum of Art as the Andrew W. Mellon, Integrated Arts Research Initiative Graduate Fellow. Currently, Imani investigates how decentralizing status quo modes of academic (museum) engagement with marginalized cultural expressions ought to promote decolonial modes of thinking, doing, and being. Wadud is excited to spend a year of research working with colleagues at the SMA to bridge theory and praxis around the inner workings of academic programming and, in turn, produce more politically responsible and inclusive encounters with Black womxn as well as other marginalized knowledges in academic, community, and museum spaces.
Michaela Machicote is a co-producer of the Cite Black Women Collective and a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines how state laws and policies enact various forms of violence against Black (queer) women in Chicago and how these same women employ a Black feminist praxis to combat state and urban violence. She holds a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Whitney N. Laster Pirtle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty with Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. She received her B.A. from Grand Valley State University in MI, and earned her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Her areas of expertise include race and racism, identity, inequality, and mental health. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Sociological Perspectives, Social Currents, and Social Science and Medicine, as well as media websites such asHuffington Post and The Conversation. Dr. Pirtle was awarded a prestigious Ford Postdoctoral award for this academic year and will use the time to finish her book, tentatively titled Positioning ‘Colour’: Racial Limbo in the Rainbow Nation, which explores the formation and transformation of the “coloured” racial group in post-apartheid South Africa.
Daisy Guzman is a co-producer of the Cite Black Women Collective and a PhD Candidate in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research centers on Garifuna women as the site of memory and the producers of Garifuna geographies that are intimate spaces of ancestral praxis and cultural preservation. Garifuna people are one of the Afro-Indigenous communities in Central America that continue to grapple with the afterlives of colonialism. she use ethnographic and geographic methods to engage my embodied experience and the lives of my Garifuna Guatemalan community in New York City.
Ozichi Okorom is a co-producer of the Cite Black Women Collective and a PhD student in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies Black femme performance and aesthetics within digital space through an exploration of Black vernacular digital creation. Specifically, she is interested in Black femme engagement in the hip hop subgenre of drill as indicative of a digitally rendered reckoning with the violent and hypersexualized surveillance/violation of Black femme, queer, and trans bodies.