Senior Advisor, North Carolina Environmental Justice Network

Naeema has been Organizing Co-Director with NCEJN since 2013. She’s married to Saladin Muhammad and together they have 3 children, 10 grandchildren, and 7 great-grandchildren. They have been married for 52 years and reside in Rocky Mount, NC.

Naeema has worked on two NIEHS-funded grants. The first was Community Health and Environmental Reawakening (CHER) in which she served as a community organizer working with communities dealing with waste from industrial hog operations. In this position, she worked with the late Dr. Steve Wing, a founding member of NCEJN and Associate Professor at UNC Gillings School of Public Health, and was supervised by Gary Grant, Executive Director of Concerned Citizens of Tillery. She has co-authored publications with Dr. Wing regarding community-based participatory research (most recently in the New Solutions Health Journal). She also serves on the NC Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) Secretary’s Environmental Justice & Equity Advisory Board.

To learn more about Naeema's work, visit North Carolina Environmental Justice Network

Executive Producer, Mossville: When Great Trees Fall

Michelle Lanier is a Documentary Doula, helping makers birth films. She has served on the faculty of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University since 2000. Michelle uses her background as an oral historian and folklorist to connect communities around personal narratives and cultural expression. She has traveled to Panama and Ghana to document African Diaspora funerary traditions, and her ethnographic work in a South Carolina Gullah community led to her role as a liaison to the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Growing up in a family that includes veterans of five American wars has inspired her current work in training students to collect veterans’ narratives through a Service-Learning course. In 2008, Michelle successfully advocated for legislation creating the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, which she led as its founding executive director. As a seasoned public humanities and museum professional, in 2018, Michelle was named as the first African American director of all of North Carolina's 25 state-owned historic sites. Michelle is also a proud founding member, along with her daughter Eden, of a multi-media and multi-modal coalition called DOADA, the Documentarians of African Descent Alliance.

To learn more about Michelle's work, visit her LinkedIn page here.

Daniel Bennett grew up in Mossville, Louisiana, the son of Delma and Christine Bennett, longtime Mossville residents and environmental activists. Daniel brings a crucial perspective to the project, helping to ensure that the story is being told accurately and in the spirit of the place and the people who live there. Daniel has years of experience as a photographer, videographer, and storyteller with his company, Snapshots by D. Bennett Photography. He has a degree from McNeese State University

To learn more about Daniel's work visit Mossville Project.