Kamilah Forbes is an award-winning director and producer for theater and television. She currently serves as the executive producer at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She is committed to the development of creative works by, for, and about the hip-hop generation. A proud Howard University alum, Forbes has won awards for both directing and producing, including the 2019 NBTF Larry Leon Hamlin Producer Award and an NAACP Image Award. Directing credits include By the Way, Meet Vera Stark written by Lynn Nottage, Blood Quilt written by Katori Hall, and Sunset Baby written by Dominique Morisseau. She has also worked closely with Kenny Leon on The Wiz Live, A Raisin in the Sun, Mountaintop, and Stick Fly on Broadway. Forbes’ most recent directorial work for television is HBO’s Between the World and Me.

Rebecca Carroll is a writer, creative consultant, editor-at-large, and host of the podcast Come Through with Rebecca Carroll, 15 essential conversations about race in a pivotal year for America (WNYC Studios). Most recently, she was a cultural critic at WNYC, where she also developed a broad array of multi-platform content, and a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Essence, the Guardian and New York Magazine, among numerous other publications, and she is the author of several books about race in America, including the award-winning Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America. Her latest book, Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir, was published this month, and has been optioned by MGM Studios and Killer Films with Rebecca attached to adapt and executive produce for TV.

Monica L. Williams is a creative executive and conceptual performance artist. She is the founder of Creative Legacy Projects, L.L.C, a boutique consulting firm dedicated to creating memorable live experiences with care. Her work has been presented at the Apollo Theater, John F. Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and TED Women. Her two most recent long-form installations, #LoveHustle and As Quiet as It’s Kept, explore home, community service, artist wellness and legacy. She is a 2021 and 2020 MAP Fund recipient, a member of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, and was a 2016 CCCADI Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellow and Rockwood Leadership Institute Arts and Social Justice Fellow.

Zainab Johnson is a stand-up comedian, actress, and writer. Zainab’s comedy is based on her unique point-of-view, which was shaped growing up in Harlem as one of thirteen siblings in a black Muslim family. After getting a degree in Education and Math and taking a job as a teacher, she quickly learned that she had a different calling. Zainab is currently a series regular on the Amazon Original hit series titled Upload from Greg Daniels, she is one of the hosts for Netflix's show 100 Humans, and starred as Dr. Hanniel in the brilliantly written web series Avant-Guardians. She made her first late night stand-up appearance on NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers, and had breakout appearances on HBO’s All Def Comedy, NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and has performed at the JFL Comedy Festival in Montreal first as a "New Face of Comedy," then as one of "Variety's Top 10 Comics to Watch," and most recently on the longest running JFL show "Just for the Culture". She is a paid regular at The Comedy Store, The Improv, and Laugh Factory in Los Angeles as well as the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Her first hour-long special, Hijabs Off, is now available to stream on Amazon.

Amanda Seales is a comedian and creative visionary with a Masters in African American studies from Columbia University. You know her as "Tiffany DuBois" of HBO’s Insecure and her HBO stand-up special, I Be Knowin. She is a former co-host on daytime talk show The Real, host of NBC’s Bring the Funny, and hosted the groundbreaking 2020 BET Awards. The creator/host of the hit live—and now virtual—music/comedy game show Smart Funny & Black, she speaks truth to change via her wildly popular Instagram, weekly podcast Small Doses, and book by the same name. Always an advocate for Black voices, she founded Smart Funny & Black Productions to produce and create art as edu-tainment across the media landscape by any joke necessary!

A Jedi Khaleesi with a patronus that’s a Black Panther with wings, she keeps audiences laughing, thinking, and living in their truth!

Mahogany L. Browne, selected as Kennedy Center's Next 50 and Wesleyan's 2022-23 Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, the executive director of JustMedia, artistic director of Urban Word, is a writer, playwright, organizer, and educator. Browne has received fellowships from All Arts, Arts for Justice, Air Serenbe, Baldwin for the Arts, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research, and Rauschenberg. She is the author of recent works: Vinyl Moon, Chlorine Sky (optioned for Steppenwolf Theater), Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby, and Black Girl Magic. Founder of the diverse lit initiative Woke Baby Book Fair, Browne is currently touring her latest poetry collection Chrome Valley, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and was highlighted in the New York Times.

She is the first-ever poet-in-residence at the Lincoln Center and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Revolutionary art-rock, new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx is a vocalist, songwriter, musician and multimedia artist. Tackling social issues, love and politics, Hendryx’s career spans decades of sound and style evolution. Longtime Nona Hendryx fans know her as one of the groundbreaking group Labelle and their No. 1 worldwide hit "Lady Marmalade (Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi C'est Soir?)." The Songwriter, Hendryx, came into her own as a solo artist post-Labelle on rock-infused albums. On her 2012 album Mutatis Mutandis (changing those things which need to be changed), Hendryx blends her music with lyrics expressing a global social and political zeitgeist. Nona is an Ambassador for Artistry in Music for Berklee College in Boston Conservatory and Berklee NYC. She curated and performed in a production she created for The Metropolitan Museum, "Nona Hendryx and Disciples of Sun Ra in the Temple of Dendur." Nona composed music for The Roundabout Theater's production of the Broadway debut of Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress, directed by Charles R. Wright, and received a grant from Jazz South Arts to compose music for a new play about people of Color in the fields of science, Young Nerds of Color by Melinda Lopez, directed by Dawn Meredith Simmons at Boston’s Central Square Theater. An Afrofuturist and visionary, Nona develops XR installations, incorporating Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Nona is passionate about Music, Visual Art and Technology and continues to be a prolific artist.

Sol is a multidisciplinary artist and creative strategist based in New York City. Her work utilizes dance, film, writing, sculpture, and social experimentation to architect life beyond the Anthropocene. Sol’s praxis are devoted to truth telling, marronage, and shifting global paradigms toward increased environmental and spiritual consciousness. After working in political organizing and media, Sol recently returned to the meditation of full-time artmaking. In 2022 she graduated with highest honors from Harvard University with a degree in Art, Film and Visual Studies. In 2023 @Instagram featured her as one of their six inaugural "Futuremakers" for her work as an avant-garde artist.

Dr. Sami Schalk is a writer, educator, pleasure activist and associate professor of Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women's Speculative Fiction and Black Disability Politics. Schalk's research focuses on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She identifies as a fat Black queer disabled glitter femme.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.