Lambert Family Photography Symposium

Sampada Aranke, PhD (she/her) is an associate professor of History of Art and Comparative Studies at Ohio State who researches performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and Black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and October. She has written catalogue essays about Sadie Barnette, Betye Saar, Rashid Johnson, Faith Ringgold, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She is the recipient of the 2021 Art Journal Award for her article “Blackouts and Other Visual Escapes.” Her book Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2023) examines the ways artists and activists reconceptualized death as a generative visual and political force in the Black Power era.

Terron Banner, PhD (he/him), a Columbus native, is the manager of community learning and engagement at Ohio State’s Urban Arts Space. He earned his PhD from the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy at Ohio State and recently developed a course there titled Black Art in America: Arts and Cultural Policies from Reconstruction to Afrofuturism. As an artist and blackademic (Black + academic), Terron’s research examines the art-historical impact of Black arts movements and what he’s coined as the “Critical Afro-Nostalgia Framework,” which examines the intersections of Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, Afro-nostalgia, and Black archival practice.

Groundbreaking artist and MacArthur Fellow Dawoud Bey examines the Black past and present. His photographs and film installations have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States and Europe. Bey’s work has been the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions, including Dawoud Bey: An American Project organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2020–2022), and Elegy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) (2023–2024) and New Orleans Museum of Art (2024–2025). Bey was recently recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2024) and has been the subject of several monographs, including Elegy (Aperture and VMFA, 2023), which chronicles Bey's history projects and landscape-based work. Bey lives and works in Chicago and New York. He is an alumnus of Yale University and is Professor Emeritus at Columbia College Chicago.

Ian Bourland, PhD (he/him) is an art critic and historian who writes about the cultures and politics of the modern Atlantic World. His 2019 book Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s was the first in the Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas series with Duke University Press, was supported by a Mellon Art History Publishing Initiative (AHPI) grant, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Bourland is the author of two other book projects—one for the 33 1/3 series and another on histories of gold mining, forthcoming in 2025. He has also written about contemporary art and pop culture for publications such as Artforum, Aperture, and frieze.

LeRonn P. Brooks, PhD (he/him) is an art historian and curator of the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) as well as curator of African American collections and acquisitions at the GRI. He builds and develops collections to promote advanced research in the study of African American art history. Brooks earned a Doctor of Philosophy, Art History, from City University of New York and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) from Hunter College in New York City. In his capacity at the GRI, Dr. Brooks is also the curator and cocurator of several archives, including those of Maren Hassinger, the Johnson Publishing Company, architect Paul Revere Williams, and sculptor Richard Hunt, among others. Currently, he is a lead curator working on an exhibition on Williams’s life and career as an African American architect at Getty.

Ronald K. Brown (he/him) was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and founded EVIDENCE, A Dance Company in 1985. He worked with Mary Anthony Dance Theater, Jennifer Muller/The Works, as well as other choreographers and artists, and served on the faculty at The Juilliard School. Brown has set works on Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ailey II, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble, Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Jeune Ballet d’Afrique Noire, Ko-Thi Dance Company, PHILADANCO!, Muntu Dance Theatre, Ballet Hispánico, TU Dance, and Malpaso Dance Company. He has collaborated with composer/designer Wunmi (Ibiwunmi Omotayo Olufunke Felicity Olaiya); writer Craig G. Harris; director Ernie McClintock’s Jazz Actors Theater; choreographers Patricia Hoffbauer and Rokiya Kone; composers Robert Een, Oliver Lake, Bernadette Speach, David Simons, and Don Meissner; and musicians Jason Moran, Arturo O’Farrill, and Meshell Ndegeocello.

Arcell Cabuag (he/him) is a first-generation Filipino American from San Jose, California. He moved to New York City in 1996 to attend the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, where he was introduced to Ronald K. Brown. Soon after, he joined EVIDENCE, A Dance Company as its first apprentice, became a company member one year later, and has served as its associate artistic director since 2004. He currently teaches EVIDENCE repertory at Princeton University and is thrilled to be the newly appointed Billie Holiday Theatre Youth Arts Academy’s director of education. Performance credits include dancing with Camille A. Brown; Makeda Thomas; Rock the House for Paramount Pictures; The Shoji Tabuchi Show (Branson, Missouri); the Richard Rodgers Centennial Production of The King and I; and dance festivals worldwide.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, MFA (he/him) was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1955 and died in London, United Kingdom, in 1989. He emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping civil war as political exiles. He relocated to the United States in 1976 to pursue undergraduate art studies at Georgetown University and continued his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. Returning to London in 1983, Fani-Kayode became an active participant in the Black British art scene, exhibiting at London’s Brixton Art Gallery, among other community-oriented spaces, and publishing his photography in magazines such as Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became a cofounding signatory of Autograph (London, UK), a visual arts charity devoted to supporting photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation.

Wendy Grossman, PhD (she/her) is an independent scholar, art and photo historian, writer, educator, and curator based in the Washington, DC, area. She has lectured and published internationally on topics in the history of photography, twentieth-century modernisms, intersections between African and Western art, Dada, Surrealism, contemporary art, and the artist Man Ray. An article and video she completed as an Andrew W. Mellon Senior Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021–22), “Mode au Congo: Travails of the Traveling Hats,” are featured on the museum’s website. She is widely published in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and international journals and is author of the award-winning catalogue Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens.

Orlando Hunter-Valentine, MFA (he/they) is a choreographer who researches, illustrates, and creates from a same-gender-loving, African American, US-born perspective. A descendant of the Great Migration and great-grandchild of farmers, their work tackles issues resulting from a capitalistic, imperialist, patriarchal, white-supremacist system. Hunter-Valentine is the cofounder of Brother(hood) Dance!, a 2020 Bessie honoree for Afro/Solo/Man (Outstanding Production and Visual Design), and a certified Ohio urban master farmer. They work as a hood agroartupreneur encouraging dance, agriculture, and technology for embodied and ecological sustainability. They received an MFA in dance with a graduate interdisciplinary studies specialization in fine arts program minor from Ohio State in May 2024.

Ricarrdo Hunter-Valentine, MFA (he/him) is a second-generation Black, Jamaican American/estadounidense, same-gender-loving movement and visual artist, who finds value in collaboration, individuality, and intimacy. His photographic work has been exhibited at Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí in Mexico; Centro Universitario de las Artes in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; and FiveMyles gallery in Brooklyn, New York. Hunter-Valentine is a cofounder of Brother(hood) Dance!, a 2020 Bessie honoree for Afro/Solo/Man (Outstanding Production and Visual Design), a 2023 Greater Columbus Arts Council Elevated Artist, a 2023 Thiossane West African Dance Institute Artist Incubator Fellow, and a certified Ohio urban master farmer. He received an MFA in dance with a graduate interdisciplinary studies specialization in fine arts program minor from Ohio State in May 2024.

Kelly Kivland, MA (she/her) is director and lead curator for the Michigan Central Art Program in Detroit. As an interdisciplinary curator and cultural producer active in the field for over 20 years, her collaborative practice explores the intersection of born-digital art, new media, performance, sound, and spatial practice. In her prior roles as head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2021–24) and curator at Dia Art Foundation (2011–21), she convened a multitude of artists, practitioners, and thinkers to advance critical discussions on the role of art today. She holds a bachelor’s degree in interarts and technology from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Nyama McCarthy-Brown, PhD (she/her) is an associate professor of dance pedagogy through community engagement at Ohio State and the university’s first artist laureate. She teaches dance education and contemporary dance with Africanist underpinnings. She is also an established scholar, with numerous academic publications. Her book Dance Pedagogy for a Diverse World: Culturally Relevant Teaching in Research, Theory, and Practice was published in 2017. Her second book, Skin Colored Pointes: Interviews with Women of Color in Ballet, was released in 2024. Dr. McCarthy-Brown is a workshop facilitator and consultant for diversifying dance curriculum for organizations such as San Francisco Ballet School, Dance Educators Coalition, Rutgers University Dance Department, BalletMet, National Dance Institute, and Dance Education Laboratory.

Marcus Morris (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist and imagemaker exploring queerness, Blackness, and performance. He was an MFA Fellow in photography at Ohio State and received his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design. He studied at The Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Marcus cofounded Cinéseries at the Wexner Center for the Arts, is cocurator of the 2024 Fotofocus Biennial exhibition I Was Here at Beeler Gallery, and is the Fall 2024 Artist Fellow at the Annex at The Gund at Kenyon College. He is a lecturer at Ohio State.

Professor Mark Sealy is Director of Autograph (London) and Professor of Photography, Rights and Representation at University of the Arts London. Author of two celebrated books published by Lawrence Wishart, Photography: Race, Rights and Representation (2022) and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time (2019), Sealy is interested in the relationship between art, photography, social change, identity politics, race, and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide.  

Ming Smith (she/her) is a Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist who attended Howard University in Washington, DC. She was the first female to join Kamoinge, a New York collective of Black photographers, and the first Black woman photographer included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In addition, her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC; among other institutions.

Gaëtane Verna (she/her) is the executive director of the Wexner Center for the Arts, a role she assumed in 2022 after serving a decade as leader of Toronto’s The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Her accomplishments during her time in Columbus include representing the Wexner Center at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Verna has over 25 years of experience working with renowned contemporary artists. She has held leadership positions at Canada’s Musée d’art de Joliette and Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop’s University and has taught in the art history departments of Bishop’s University and the Université du Québec à Montréal. In 2017, she was appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government to recognize her significant contribution to furthering the arts throughout the world.

Ajamu X is a darkroom/fine art photographic artist, scholar, and cofounder of Spit & Spider Press. Ajamu’s visual philosophy through experimentation and risk-taking unapologetically celebrates Black queer bodies, the erotic senses, pleasure, imagination, play, and the sensual material attributes of both photographic process and production. In 2022, Ajamu was canonized as the Patron Saint of Darkrooms by the Trans Pennine Travelling Sisters/Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and received an honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. Ajamu’s work has been shown in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces worldwide and sits in private and public collections.