Craig is an associate professor of practice for Virginia Tech’s Academy of Transdisciplinary Studies and VTDITC: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech’s program director. He started DJing in 1997 and is a proud member of the Table Rok Crew. He co-founded VTDITC: Hip Hop Studies at Virginia Tech shortly after starting work at his alma mater in 2016. Since that time, we’ve hosted more than 1200 events both on campus and in the larger community. 

Adam is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University interested in bringing critical theory and theology to bear on the intersection of hip hop consumption and empire. Going beyond previous research, which focused on hip hop artists, Adam's research critically explores how dynamics of gender, class, race, and history place constraints upon and/or create possibilities for enactments of resistive agency for black consumers of hip hop in the U.S. While engaging in doctoral studies, Adam serves as Pastor of First Baptist Church in Springfield, OH. 

Rob is an educator, cultural critic, and theorist from the Westside of Chicago, IL. As a PhD. Candidate and Graduate Teaching Associate in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University, Rob employs Black critical theory, Black feminisms, Black masculinities, and Black visual culture & media to examine historical processes of Black un/gendering in the afterlife of slavery. Specifically, Rob's research is concerned with the ways in which embodiments and performances of Black genders function as affective remnants of chattel slavery, animating and haunting those traditionally and non/traditionally rendered masculine across diasporic spaces a/temporally. 

Tyler is the Assistant Professor of cultural studies and Program Director of the cultural studies major at Johnson C. Smith University. He also works as a journalist covering local hip-hop and R&B in Charlotte and as a manager and PR consultant for local artists. 

Ajanaé is a theologian, poet and educator. She studied at Methodist Theological School of Ohio, Delaware, OH, M.A. in Theology, May 2023 Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA, MFA in Creative Writing: Poetry, June 2022 [2022-Present] Co-host, VS Podcast, Poetry Foundation [2022-Present] Theology Editor, EcoTheo Review 2024 Ohio State University, Urban Arts Space Artist-in-Residence Specialties: Black theologies, Black church history, docu-poetics, Black pop culture and spirituality, hip-hop theater, performance poetry and oral storytelling traditions. 

Damaris C. Dunn, PhD. is a postdoctoral researcher and manager of external partnerships at Drexel University’s Justice-Oriented Youth (JoY) Education Lab. As a community-engaged researcher, her work is structured around three interrelated strands: the effects of anti-Blackness within and outside educational settings; the innovative and creative contributions of Black educators, namely, Black women, in both formal and informal educational contexts; and geographies of Radical Black Joy. 

Heidi is David Lucile Packard Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College, President of the National Women’s Studies Association, and Editor-in-Chief of the forthcoming Oxford’s Women’s & Gender Studies Bibliography. Her scholarship and teaching are primarily focused on feminism (emphasis on Black Feminisms), Hip Hop (emphasis on Rap), and Critical Media Studies. Her manuscript, Make Rappers Rap Again: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Preorder here https://heidirlewis.com/makerappersrapagain/ 

Chloe is an adjunct professor from Detroit, MI, with academic roots at Alabama A&M University and North Carolina A&T State University. Currently a PhD. student at Wayne State University, her research focuses on culturally relevant pedagogy, hip-hop-based education, and the rhetoric of health and medicine. She also explores Black technical and professional communication, aiming to bridge the gap between education, culture, and professional discourse.

IG: @chlocacolaa
LinkedIn: Chloe Leavings

Sheikia, lyrically known as Purple Haze was born in The Bronx, NY.  This Johnson C Smith University & Goddard College Grad, currently resides in Newark, the Brick City, NJ. Purple’s performance experiences are dynamic and unforgettable! This independent international performance emcee  rocks with funk & soul to naturally connect with ease to inspiring movement, both hearts, and minds. Haze has mastered her own rich style of balancing power and substance in classrooms or boardrooms as founding Director of the Hip Hop Education Program at New Jersey Performing Arts Center.  Enthusiasts appreciate her energy, impeccable flow, and clever deliverance of truth. Acknowledgments as a trailblazer are from piloting programs at Bergen PAC, Newark Public Schools, The Grammy Museum (Newark), Hip Hop Cultural Center (Harlem), and Next Level US Hip Hop Diplomacy Team India.  This “Lady’s First Fund” recipient is curating transformative experiences for communities with Hip Hop art, education, and performance. Purp is a diversified talent poised for success in a host of areas. 

Crystal Leigh Endsley Taylor, PhD. is an internationally renowned spoken word artist. She is an award-winning poet, performer, and professor, and works to serve her community as an artist, advocate, and academic. She was honored with the 2016 and 2021 Distinguished Teaching Award at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York where she is Professor in the department of Africana Studies and Faculty Deputy Director of the Honors Program. Since 2015, she has co-directed the Girls Speak Out! performance at the United Nations each October under the auspices of the Working Group on Girls. Dr. Endsley’s project for more than a decade has been to connect global youth to each other through spoken word poetry and performance. Whether she is rehearsing theater with high school students in the Bronx, writing curriculum with girls in New Orleans, or performing her poetry on stage at the United Nations, Dr. Endsley uses spoken word to shine a light in the darkness. 

Dr. Lauron J. Kehrer is an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology in the Irving S. Gilmore School of Music at Western Michigan University. They are the author of Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Michigan Press 2022). They were recently awarded the 2024 Marcia Herndon Article Award for exceptional ethnomusicological work in gender and sexuality for their article, “‘Sissy Style: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in New Orleans Bounce Dance.” 

Elijah is Writing Center Coordinator at Sussex County Community College. 

Detroit-born Anamaría Flores, PhD. (she/her) is a Queer, Black and Latina Decolonial Feminist Literary Studies and Hip-Hop Feminist scholar-activist. A Black Studies Adjunct Assistant Professor at Hostos Community College-CUNY in the South Bronx where she’s lived for over two decades, anamaría recently completed her award-winning dissertation, “‘The Power Of Three Will Set Us Free’: Witchy Womanist Readings of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Opal Palmer Adisa’s It Begins With Tears, and Migdalia Cruz’s The Have-Little and Miriam’s Flowers.” 

Brittany Rogers earned a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry 2022, Randolph College (Blackburn Fellow) 2024 Good Dress,Forthcoming October 15th, 2024, Tin House Press 2022–Present Co-host, VS Podcast,Sponsored by the Poetry Foundation 2024 Finalist, DNA Emerging Filmmaker Fellowship2023 Gilda Snowden Awardee. Specialties: Making theory accessible, rap/hip hop, the interior lives of Black Women, using the mundane to highlight larger truths. 

Aiesha Turman, PhD. is an Afrofuturist ethnographer, trauma and memory theorist, and lecturer in the Writing & Critical Inquiry (WCI) Program at the University at Albany. Her work explores Black speculative fiction, womanist theory, and cultural memory, particularly how Black women’s stories and artistic traditions reclaim history and envision liberatory futures. She created Legacy Weaver’s Lab, where she curates educational resources on Afrofuturism and Black speculative fiction. A curriculum developer, she fosters critical conversations on Black futures, cultural resilience, and healing. 

Jaleesa Harris, PhD., is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. She teaches Africana courses on the sophomoric and graduate levels, British literature, and Southern literature. She also serves on the board of the Women’s Symposium, a community and university collaboration that connects women of all educational and professional levels. She also serves as the co-faculty advisor for the ULM Black Student Union, a student-led group whose purpose is to foster growth in diversity, academics, and outreach. 

Ana Maria Mina Hernández is an Afro-Colombian writer, poet, and independent scholar from Chicago, IL, whose work explores culture, race, self, identity, and spirituality. Her work has appeared in Latinx Experiences Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Exposition Review.  They currently work as a Program Coordinator with a place-based, youth-focused, intergenerational initiative that places artistic practice at the center of community wellness. She holds an MSW in Leadership and Social Change from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

Jaden Janak (they/he) is an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College. Their research focuses on U.S. prison abolition organizing, LGBTQ+ radical politics, and popular culture. His current book project, Experiments in Freedom: Present Histories of an Abolitionist Future, explores U.S. prison abolitionist organizing from the 1990s to the present. Their scholarship can be found in journals such as GLQ, Behemoth, Social Education, and Communication/Critical Cultural Studies. 

Lauren Leigh Kelly is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She is also the founder of the Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism Conference. Lauren Kelly taught high school English for ten years in New York. She is the author of Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7-12 Grade Classroom: A Guide to Supporting Students’ Critical Development through Popular Texts, published by Routledge and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy.

Instagram/Facebook: @djdutchesss 

Yaribel Mercedes is a dedicated scholar, practitioner, and advocate leading with a social, racial, and moral justice lens. She advances racial equity and access in education through innovative platforms like Live Brunch Sundays and HipHopED Spaces. In 2023, she was honored as a Barbara Jackson Scholar by the University Council for Educational Administrators. Yaribel earned her doctorate in Organization and Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation, Critically Race-Conscious and Responsive Leadership as a Site of Resistance, underscores her unwavering dedication to transformative, equity-driven leadership in education. 

Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Dilshan Weerasinghe is an artist, musician, and music scholar. Dilshan holds a music degree from Dalhousie University, where he studied jazz guitar with local artist and educator Scott Macmillan, and performed with artists such as Michael Kaeshammer, Regina Carter, multi-JUNO award winner Hilario Duran, and GRAMMY nominee Ignacio Berroa. He completed his Masters in Musicology from Dalhousie in 2019, and spent years working and performing with numerous bands and artists in Halifax, as well as teaching, writing and researching, where his academic work centers on Hip-hop, Blackness and Black performance, sonic Afro-Modernity, and creative scholarship. He has studied and performed with artists from a range of disciplines, from jazz guitarist Lorne Lofsky, to composer and Chance the Rapper collaborator JoVia Armstrong, to Guggenheim award winners such as poet Brian Teare and composer and flutist Nicole Mitchell. In 2022 and 2023, he was a collaborating artist alongside Nathaniel Cole and Nathan "DB" Simmons on two sound installations, debuting at Nocturne Halifax, one of which was listed as one of the five can't miss projects of the festival. In the summer of 2024, he wrote and recorded the live album re:fuge (read as "refuge") alongside a band of acclaimed Halifax-based musicians, artists, and producers, set to release in the summer of 2025. Dilshan’s artistic interests include Hip-hop, jazz, neo-soul, improvisation, as well as questions around artistic form, creative practice, and storytelling. He is currently exploring these artistic and academic topics as a PhD. candidate in Music at the University of Virginia, working with award winning Hip-hop artist, educator, and scholar, A.D Carson. 

Gloria is an Associate Professor of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at The Ohio State University, co-editor of A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back and founder of Racial Justice Studio (University of Arizona). gloria is recognized for her work in Black Studies, hip hop and transnational feminisms, fugitive praxis, Afro-Asian solidarities, and as a facilitator for anti-racism workshops in museums and community spaces utilizing arts-based methodologies. Also a practicing artist, gloria’s work broadly examines notions of liberation, power,access, and representation across arts modalities and specifically examines the intersections of identity and arts participation. gloria has been an invited artist/speaker for Spelman College’s Museum of Art BLACK BOX series and actively participates as a steering committee member for the Coalition on Racial Equity in the Arts and Education (crea+e), a national collective of artists, educators, activists and thought leaders of color who advocate, teach, research, and publish on issues related to race in the arts and education. In the field of art education, she is past-Chair of the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) Committee on Multiethnic Concerns (COMC) and Associate Editor of the Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education. Her current art-making practices are grounded in garment and printmaking and the continuation of the Blackademic Project and forthcoming art installation dedicated to honoring the lives of the descendants of Clotilda survivors in Africatown, Mobile, Alabama. Her work has been exhibited in museums and universities across the U.S.

Shanbrae (pronounced Shan-bray) McFarland is a proud Autistic woman and recent graduate from The Ohio State University where she earned a Master’s Degree in Comparative Studies. She locates her research in the fields of Postcolonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, Anti-colonial Feminism, and Literary Criticism. Her research questions the knowledge of being, space, and power as it pertains to the experiences of people within the slums of majority Black spaces globally, especially those deemed racial safe havens like Atlanta, Georgia. 

In addition to her academic aspirations, Shanbrae is a grassroots advocate for childhood literacy and improving life outcomes for survivors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and human trafficking. She works with several local organizations within the East Columbus community. She spends her free time cooking, reading Mao Zedong, and pouring into her genealogy research hobby. 

Treva B. Lindsey is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University and the co-founder of Black Feminist Night School at Zora’s House. Her research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics.  Her most recent book, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and The Struggle for Justice (University of California Press) was described as “required reading for all Americans” a starred Kirkus review.  Her first book, Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C was a Choice2017 “Outstanding Academic Title.” She has published in The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Souls, African and Black Diaspora, the Journal of African American Studies, African American Review, The Journal of African American History, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Urban Education, The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, and Signs. She was a 2020-2021 ACLS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellow. She was the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellow at Harvard University (2016-2017). She also writes for and contributes to outlets such as Time, CNN, Al Jazeera, NBC, BET, Complex, Vox, The Root, Huffington Post, PopSugar, Billboard, Bustle, Teen Vogue, Grazia UK, The Grio, The Washington Post, Women’s Media Center, Zora, and Cosmopolitan. 

Producer// DJ// Author// Educator// Speaker

Dr. Jason Rawls-J Rawls, Ed.D., known for his music production work with artists like Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Domo Genesis (Odd Future), Capital Steez (Pro Era), Beastie Boys, Del tha Funky Homosapien, Aloe Blacc and more, Dr. Jason Rawls is an educator with over two decades of teaching experience. A leader of the #HipHopEd movement, Dr. Rawls is an Assistant Professor of Hip Hop at THE Ohio State University. He is a part of the team that is creating a trailblazing Hip Hop curriculum program in the School of Music. Before this, at Ohio University, Dr. Rawls helped develop the first Hip-Hop Based Education program in a College of Education. The program called H.O.P.E. is a series of four courses rooted in Hip-Hop Based Education using both Culturally Relevant and Relational Pedagogy and he was the coordinator of the Brothers R.I.S.E. program at Ohio University. Dr. Rawls is also co-author of a book entitled, Youth Culture Power: A #HipHopEd Guide to Building Teacher-Student Relationships and Increasing Student Engagement. Rawls is also featured in an exhibit on Hip Hop at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Specialties: Hip Hop Based Education, Hip Hop Studies, Hip Hop Culture,Youth Culture Pedagogy, Hip Hop Music Production, Hip Hop Music Engineering, DJ'ing.