Mi'Jan Celie Tho-Biaz, Ed.D. is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist who moves between realms of oral history, art, media & ritual to produce forward-facing cultural projects and events. As a Huntington Library Short-Term Fellow, Mi'Jan is researching Octavia E. Butler's archives. She is also a 2023 Fulbright Specialist Awardee, a 2023-2024 New America Us@250 inaugural Fellow, and an expert speaker for the U.S. Department of State. 

Previously, Mi'Jan curated and hosted Unfinished Network's 2022 salon on the theme of multiracial democracy with CNN's Van Jones and MSNBC's Maria Teresa Kumar, and led the Gloria Steinem Initiative's public policy digital storytelling pilot at Smith College.

One of Mi'Jan's greatest joys is connecting to audiences through her story-rich talks at a range of institutions, from Carnegie Hall to the Institute of American Indian Arts to SXSW. Making history contemporary, personal and futures-dependent, she surfaces the stories that need to be heard.

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A small tin box with a sliding lid, partially opened to reveal a piece of paper covered in handwriting.

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Free Black Women’s Private Pleasures and Rest

Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is a Puerto Rican curator and writer, and currently Assistant Curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum. Previously, she was the 2018–2020 Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and has also worked at the Video Data Bank and The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture. She has collaborated with several film festivals, and was selected to be the Inaugural Curatorial Fellow for the Chicago Underground Film Festival in 2021. She is a member of Blue Sky/The Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts Exhibitions Committee and is Michigan state representative for the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. She holds an MA in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BA from the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez.

Interior view, Treasury Department exhibits in the United States Government Building.

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Panorama of Possessions: Film, Photography, and the War of 1898

Wendyliz Martinez is 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She earned a PhD in English and African American Studies at Penn State University. She is a City College of New York and Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow alumnus. She is writing about how Black girlhood is represented in film, social media, and literature. Particularly, she is interested in how Afro-Caribbean women writers depict Black girlhood compared to U.S. Black women writers. She also researches Black portrait photography from the 19th Century and beyond and its influence on Black visual culture. 

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A young girl looks out of the window of a log cabin. The window is covered with newspapers.

Reconstructing Black Girlhood: Reading Photos Alongside Journal Entries

Shweta Sachdeva Jha is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is an Associate Professor of English at Miranda House, University of Delhi. Her research lies within interstices of histories, archives and literature anchored by a feminist core. She did her doctoral studies as a Felix Scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her research publications range from studies of contemporary children’s picture books in India, history of tawa’if (courtesans and Nautch Girls) in colonial India to digital archives on college women and twentieth century genre fiction in Urdu by Muslim women. Recently awards and small grants have helped her begin a new journey into digital history, archives and writing on the visual arts. 

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Bathing Women: Desire, Wonder, and Water in Versions of a Persian Tale

Chin-Jie Melodie Liu is a 2024 Curationist Fellow. She is a Taiwanese-American artist/curator and writer based in Kamberri/Canberra, Australia. Her research and interdisciplinary practice is informed by her heritage with a focus on contested histories and collective memory. She is interested in varying forms of creative collaboration and the use of text as visual material. 

Liu is Publication Manager at _Art Monthly Australasia_, Australasia’s flagship visual arts publication, and the Events & Collections Officer at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University (ANU), where she manages the centre's gallery and collection.  

She holds a Master of Museum and Heritage Studies and a double degree with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts (French & International Relations) from the ANU. Liu studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris on exchange in 2019. 

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Illustrating Taiwan: Travelogues and Their Visual Narratives

keondra bills freemyn is a 2024 Curationist Critic of Color. She is a DMV-based archivist, writer, Wikipedian, and former diplomat originally from South Central, Los Angeles. keondra serves as Archives Director at Black Lunch Table, a radical archiving project centering Black visual artists and operates the small press 67th Street Storytellers. A poet, essayist, and scholarly writer, she is author of the poetry collection _Things You Left Behind_ and is founder of Black Women Writers Project, a digital archival initiative highlighting the contributions of Black women and gender-expansive writers to the literary canon. Her research interests include digital archiving, memory work, and Black cultural production.

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A sepia tone carte-de-visite of a young woman, captured at the Ball & Thomas Photographic Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. Standing in front of an elaborate outdoor backdrop, a dark-haired woman poses before the camera, slightly smiling, dressed in a floor length checkered dress with her hair styled in a chignon. She holds a feathered dark hat in her proper left hand, with her proper right hand resting on the high back of an ornate wooden chair. The front of the chair, which faces the camera, features a patterned fabric seat, scroll and floral carvings, and an oval painting of a man and child on the chair’s back.

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