Ray Warren Symposium on Race and Ethnic Studies Speakers

Illustration by JoJo Baccam Illustration by JoJo Baccam

JJJJJerome Ellis JJJJJerome Ellis Credit: Gema Galiana JJJJJerome Ellis is a stuttering, Afro-Caribbean composer, performer, and writer. His current practice explores blackness, music, and disabled speech as forces of refusal and healing, and his works are invitations to transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Through an interdisciplinary practice that focuses on oral storytelling, improvisation, and the interrelations between speech, silence, disability, and religion, he has collaborated with choreographers, rappers, playwrights, booksellers, typographers, podcasters, toddlers, and filmmakers. He was a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a writer in residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and a 2015 Fulbright Fellow in Brazil. He collaborates with James Harrison Monaco as James & Jerome, a music-storytelling duo whose recent work explores themes of border crossing and translation through music-driven narratives. They have received commissions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova.

 

 

Jason De León Jason De León

Jason De León is professor of anthropology and Chicana, Chicano, and Central American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and executive director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP). The UMP is a long-term anthropological study of clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States that uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic approaches to understand this violent social process. He has published numerous academic articles, and his work with the UMP has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets. He is the author of the award-winning book The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (featuring photos by Michael Wells) and head curator of the global exhibition Hostile Terrain 94. De León is president of the Board of Directors for The Colibrí Center for Human Rights and a 2017 MacArthur Foundation fellow.