Biographies

Jared Ball (US)
Jared A. Ball is a father and husband. After that, he is a Professor of Communication Studies at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. Ball is the founder and curator of imixwhatilike.org, a multimedia hub of emancipatory journalism and revolutionary beat reporting. Ball is also author of ‘The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power’ (Palgrave, 2020). Also in 2020, he cofounded Black Power Media, a Black-radical independent media project that seeks to challenge the narrative about Black politics and the Black condition. Ball has been active as a journalist for many years and ran for vicepresident of the US on the Green Party ticket in 2008 with Rosa Clemente.

Lisenne Delgado (NL)
Lisenne Delgado is Assistant Professor at Tilburg Law School in the department of Public Law & Governance. As a multidisciplinary researcher, she teaches and consults on human rights law, human rights discourses, human rights education, identities and identifications, and knowledge production, related or not to the United Nations, Council of Europe or the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten and the Netherlands). As speaker, writer and moderator she is involved in projects related to diversity and inclusion in different types of storytelling. Think of storytelling through the arts such as in books and theater, and artistic and cultural organisations such as museums.

Mohammed Elnaiem (UK)
Mohammed Elnaiem is a PhD Candidate in Sociology who is training to become a historical sociologist with a focus on the history of capitalism and the global reparations movement. His project is to investigate whether capitalism, patriarchy and slavery can be seen as disparate phenemona or different facets of the same totality. He is also studying the CARICOM reparations commission, which he sees as a unique policy case study for state-level legislative action. Elnaiem’s other research interests include imperialism, settler colonialism and racial capitalism.

Baruch Gottlieb (CA)
Baruch Gottlieb, trained as a filmmaker at Concordia University Montreal, has a doctorate in digital aesthetics from the University of Arts Berlin. He is active member of the Telekommunisten, Arts & Economic Group and laboratoire de déberlinisation artist collectives. Author of ‘Gratitude for Technology’ (ATROPOS 2009), ‘A Political Economy of the Smallest Things’ (ATROPOS 2016), and Digital Materialism (Emerald 2018). Gottlieb also works as a curator of exhibition, convenor of symposia and large scale event and festival director. He is curator of the project Paul Robeson: Artist as Revolutionary.

Gerald Horne (US)
Professor Horne holds the Moores Professorship of History and African American Studies at University of Texas, Houston. His research has addressed issues of race in a variety of relations involving labor, politics, civil rights and war. Horne received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and his J.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Horne is the author of more than 17 books and 100 scholarly articles and reviews. His current research focuses on a variety of topics such as the U.S., Brazil and slavery; Black labor at sea; the Communist Party in Hollywood; and Negro fascism. Most pertinent in this context is that Dr. Horne is the uuthor of the biography of Paul Robeson from which our project takes its name “Paul Robeson: Artist as Revolutionary” Pluto Press 2016. His most recent books include Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of the Music (Monthly Review Press 2019) and The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (Monthly Review Press 2020)

Machiri (ZW)
Machiri is a sound worker. He is a hoarder of things and ideas inspired by a biographical recollection of music; an embodied source for sonic study and memory. His work exists at the interstice of two streams of practice; his curatorial concepts and art which are presented through embodied critique as learning-through-unlearning, interwoven by sound, music and image-making. His most notable project PUNGWE is an interdisciplinary project circling sound in Africa with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces. Pungwe has produced collaborative works ‘Pungwe Nights’, ‘Listening at Pungwe’, and ‘Sugar free///Pungwe

Tania Cristina Monteiro (NL)
Tania Cristina Monteiro is an artist, teacher, cultural entrepreneur and Research Associate at the Research Centre for Material Culture (NMvW). She teaches and directs Performance Art at Toneelacademie Maastricht. The combination of art, culture and education is a common thread in Monteiro's work.

Anne Wetsi Mpoma (BE)
Anne Wetsi Mpoma is an activist and an artistic and cultural researcher who has founded an epynomous artspace in Brussels. She is interested in the strategies of resistance deployed for a more coherent society in terms of social, racial and environmental justice around the world. She programmed the Afro Brussels City days with discussions on contemporary African art, bringing together artists, researchers and the general public. She collaborates with numerous European associations and institutions (Paris, London, Hamburg, Berlin) with a view on decolonising public space and offering greater visibility to African creativity in Belgium. She works together with international, national and regional media (Mediapart, Austrian Radio National Channel, RTBF, Radio 1, Medor, Elle Belgium, De Standaard, Het Laatste Nieuws, Radio Campus, BX1, etc.). Belgian associative and institutional partners include Bamko-Cran asbl, Café Congo, Bakushinta, No No Name Collective, Africa Museum, Bozar, Le Space.

Shana L. Redmond (US)
Shana L. Redmond is an interdisciplinary scholar of music, race, and politics. Prior to receiving her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University, Redmond studied Music and African American Studies at Macalester College where she trained as a vocalist. Her focus has been to understand the ways in which music is used as a strategy within the liberation politics and social movements of the African world. She is the author of ‘Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora’ (New York University Press, 2014), which is an interdisciplinary cultural history that tracks the songs that organised the modern Black world. Her most recent book, ‘Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson’ (Duke University Press, January 2020), develops the theory of ‘antiphonal life’ in order to track Robeson’s sonic travels, form, and animation throughout the twentieth century.

Mireille Tsheusi Robert (BE)
Mireille-Tsheusi Robert is a Belgian author, instructor and researcher. Since 2015, she has been the president of Bamko-CRAN asbl, a women's committee for equality, justice and racial equity. She is co-author of several books, including ‘Racisme antiNoirs, entre méconnaissances et mépris’ (antiBlack racism, between misconceptions and mistrust) (2016), ‘La couleur du risque, jeune afrodescendants et entrepreneuriat’ (2017). She was named ‘Woman of the Year 2019’ by the French-speaking Belgian Radio and Television - RTBF/ Les Grenades.

Louna Sbou (DE)
Louna Sbou is among other things cofounder, managing director and artistic director of Oyoun, an anti-disciplinary art and cultural institution that focuses on decolonial, queer, feminist and migrant perspectives in Berlin and worldwide. She works at the intersection of social justice and empowerment as well as art and culture and brings in her perspectives and experiences as a queer, Muslim, indigenous Afro-Arab woman.

Sylvana Simons (NL)
Sylvana Simons is a Surinamese-born Dutch politician and former television presenter. She has been a member of the House of Representatives since 2021 on behalf of BIJ1, an egalitarian anti-racist party founded by Simons in 2016.