Poet, scholar, and cultural advocate; a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, and American society and president of the Mellon Foundation, the largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities in the United States.
A scholar, anthropologist, and academic pace-setter, Johnnetta Betsch Cole’s pioneering work about the on-going contributions of Afro-Latin, Caribbean, and African communities have advanced American understanding of Black culture and the necessity and power of racial inclusion in the US.
Dakotah Sioux/Hidatsa storyteller, historian and educator
McDonald is not only the islands’ best-known practitioner of the art of Hawaiian lei making, but she is also its primary scholar.
Irish academic and writer
Irish Celticist, member of Cumann na nBan, and civil servant
Intan Paramaditha, Indonesian of Sumatran-Sundanese heritage, anticolonial feminist academic and writer based in Australia, is one of the co-founders of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought).
A migrant within her birth country and across oceans, Sukhmani Khorana researches, writes, teaches and engages in activism to improve public understanding of migrants and refugees in the Global North.
No historian has done more to recover the stories of enslaved African-Americans than Annette Gordon-Reed, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, as well as wide acclaim.
Dr Angela Yvonne Davis is a prominent political activist, scholar, and author.