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Mireille Miller-Young, PhD, is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.  The former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries.  Her groundbreaking book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Duke University Press, 2014), was awarded the Sara A. Whaley Prize for Best Book on Women and Labor by the National Women’s Studies Association and the John Hope Franklin Prize for Best Book by the American Studies Association. Dr. Miller-Young is co-convener of the New Sexualities Research Initiative as well as the Black Sexuality Studies Collective at UC Santa Barbara, and she is a former convener of the Black Sexual Economies Project at Washington University School of Law. Serving on the editorial boards of journals like Porn Studies and Signs, as well as book series like Screening Sex (Edinburgh University Press) and Feminist Media Studies (University of Illinois Press), Miller-Young has won prizes for her research and teaching, including UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

crystal am nelson, PhD, is Assistant Professor of African/Diasporic Visual Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at CU Boulder. Prior to joining the faculty at CU Boulder, they were a Just Transformations Postdoctoral Fellow at Pennsylvania State University. They teach about race and representation, Black art histories, and Blackness in the visual field.  www.thecrystalamnelson.com.

Boreth J. Ly is an art historian who writes about the visual cultures of Southeast Asia (including its diaspora and Southeast Asian America). In addition, she is an interdisciplinary scholar, an essayist and a critical pleasure seeker who always find pleasure in her work and in her life.

She asks herself: Do you work to live or live to work?

Cathy Thomas is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing. She is a creative critical scholar working on Caribbean diaspora writing and culture with a focus on the ‘Black Fantastic.’ Her decolonial feminist work is enriched by discovering modes of play and resistance in comic books, through cosplay, while wining up at Carnival, in science, and from on-screen and stage that examine the carnivalesque logic in text, image, experiment, and performance. Her current projects  are a monograph, two collaborative books, an installation, and comic books in various states of completion, delay, ecstasy, and exhaustion. She is currently working on an experimental textile+digital+sound art installation called “Echolocating the Caribbean Diaspora” that examines space as a fabrication and fabulation of modernity's cartography.