Claire Inouye is a first-year master’s student in Public Humanities at Brown University. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2024 with a degree in Psychology, where she explored the intersections of psychology and social justice. Claire hopes to pursue a career in community-oriented nonprofits and has developed a growing interest in humanities-oriented marketing and engagement, using strategic communication to expand public involvement with cultural institutions and community narratives. This year, Claire has worked within the Japanese American community on oral history and archival projects to highlight community voices and is excited to further explore this narrative within cultural institutions/organizations during her panel.

Monaye Johnson is a first year doctoral student in Africana Studies at Brown University. She is a writer, researcher, curator, and cultural worker. Her work looks at black feminist theory, care ethics, and more.

Christina Young (she/they) is a painter and arts worker whose creative practice weaves together visual artwork production, research, and public engagement. An M.A., Public Humanities Student at Brown, she holds a B.A. in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, where she developed her studio practice alongside studies in modern and contemporary art history, feminist cultural studies, decolonial and postmodernist theory. At Brown, she is researching aesthetics and modes of production at the intersection of queer and mixed ethnicity identities within art history and curatorial practice. 

Ray Zhang is a Public Humanities master student at Brown University. He holds a B.A. in History from Colgate University, with minors in Museum Studies. Ray’s research interests center on public history’s role in shaping collective memory, particularly through museums. His work traces the evolution of Chinatowns in the United States, examining how these spaces reflect resilience, adaptation, and cultural preservation. Ray is passionate about documenting the lived experiences of the Chinese diaspora in New England. Through museum curation, he hopes to amplify underrepresented voices and foster greater understanding.

Erin Aoyama (she/her) is an interdisciplinary historian and public humanities practitioner. Her work is rooted in Asian American studies, relational ethnic studies, and community and public memory. Currently, she is a Mellon Humanities postdoctoral fellow. In the fall of 2024, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Aoyama is co-director of “Seeing Memory: Landscapes of Japanese American Incarceration,” a digital mapping and storytelling project, and part of the curatorial team at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, CA. Aoyama graduated with her PhD in American Studies from Brown University. Her dissertation engaged with the afterlives of Japanese American redress by focusing on Japanese American memory and community formation in New England and in Arkansas, grappling with the legacy of Nisei soldiers, and reckoning with how Japanese American historical storytelling can both hinder and strengthen movements for Black reparations and Native sovereignty. She holds an MA in Public Humanities, also from Brown.

Lisa Doi (she/her) is the President of the Japanese American Citizens League Chicago. She is also a project manager of the new core exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum and a co-chair of Tsuru for Solidarity, where she has worked on campaigns focused on reparations. In addition, she is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Indiana University. Her dissertation project is an ethnographic engagement with Japanese American pilgrimages to World War II incarceration sites.

Leah Hopkins, mother, educator, culture bearer, subsistence practitioner and museum professional, is an enrolled citizen of the Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island.  Leah works to develop and implement programs, curricula and digital content for Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences about Native history, culture, values, lifeways and practices. She also works to ensure cultural continuity of the area’s Indigenous peoples through programs, workshops and advocacy.  She is a professional speaker, consultant, traditional dancer and singer grounded in Narragansett land and sea based practices.

Tess Lukey, an enrolled citizen of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), is the Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Trustees of Reservations, working at both Fruitlands Museum and the deCordova Sculpture Park & Museum. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of New Mexico and a dual BFA in Art History and Ceramics from MassArt. Her curatorial work, including exhibitions at the MFA Boston and Fruitlands Museum, centers Indigenous frameworks and values in the interpretation of Native American art. Beyond her curatorial practice, Lukey is also a traditional potter and basket weaver, practicing the techniques of her own indigenous community.

With over ten years of experience as a curator, educator, and activist in the cultural sector, Dr. Kelli Morgan is widely known as a leader in progressive museum practice whose work develops and advances anti-racist approaches to art curation, fundraising, and community engagement. She is currently the Founding Executive Director of the Black Artists Archive, a new nonprofit arts organization in Detroit, MI that fosters a nurturing environment for creativity, exhibition, learning, and the preservation of Black art history and visual culture.

Brian Niiya is a public historian and the content director at Densho. His professional life has been dedicated to Japanese American public history and information management, having held various positions with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai’i that have involved managing collections, curating exhibitions, developing public programs, teaching, and producing videos, books, and websites. He has published many articles on Japanese American history in a variety of academic and mainstream publications and is the editor of the online Densho Encyclopedia, which draws on his prior Encyclopedia of Japanese American History.

Chrystel Oloukoï is an artist, film critic and curator exploring imaginations of the night, nocturnal environments, black ecologies, and the afterlives of colonial technologies of temporal discipline. They hold a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, and currently work at the University of Washington as an assistant professor of Geography.

Kajette Solomon (she/her) is RISD Museum's first Social Equity and Inclusion Specialist. Her role endeavors to shape, implement, and manage the Museum’s efforts to build an equitable, diverse and inclusive institution for all. Kajette is a graduate of the inaugural class of the Rhode Island Foundation’s Equity Leadership Initiative professional development program and is a board member of the New England Museum Association. Kajette is co-curator of the touring exhibition, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch, as well as co-editor of the accompanying publication. Her writing is included in the recent collection From Small Wins to Sweeping Change: Working Together to Foster Equity, Inclusion and Antiracism in Museums (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and was the 2024 awardee of the American Alliance of Museums Recognition for the Advancement of Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusion. She holds a BA in Art History from Arcadia University and MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from Purchase College.

Paul Soulellis (he/him) is an artist and educator based in Providence, Rhode Island. His practice includes teaching, writing, and experimental publishing, with a focus on queer methodologies, network culture, and archival justice. He is the founder of Queer.Archive.Work, a non-profit project that supports queer and trans artists with access to studio space, tools, and other resources for publishing. His book Queer Typographies is forthcoming from Bikini Books in 2026. He is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at Rhode Island School of Design.

Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD (she/her) is a Filipinx femme curator, writer, and transdisciplinary scholar invested in socially engaged art, site-specific performance, and photographic histories of violence across the Pacific. She holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego, and was the Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2015-16.  Thea's writing has been published in venues including Verge: Studies in Global Asias, frieze, Hyperallergic, and BOMB Magazine. She was co-curator of New York Now: Home, the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York (2023). Dr. Quiray Tagle is the Associate Curator of The Bell and Brown Arts Institute (BAI) at Brown University; while at Brown, she has organized residencies, performances, and solo exhibitions with Autumn Knight + SA Smythe (THEYFXRST), Richard Fung, Barbara T. Smith, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan, Julie Tolentino, and Dorian Wood.

Zalika U. Ibaorimi, PhD (she/they), also going under the artist’s name n0humaninv0lved (N.H.I.), is an antidisciplinary artist, Assistant Professor of Black Sexualities in the Department of African American and African Studies at the Ohio State University and a 2021-2023 Carter G. Woodson Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. She engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes to trace the Human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Their relationality is tethered to the logics of shame, desire, and pleasure. Additionally, they consider the discursiveness of critical and revolutionary Humanism as modes to chart the (de)figuration of the Black wh0re vis-à-vis the counter and anti-Human. They are currently working on two book projects, Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators and (BE)CUM(ING): N.H.I. in Three Acts and a crit-p0rno titled (be)cum(ing): on humanist edging.