Dr. ‘Biodun Ogundayo is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature, and Director of the Africana Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford. He recently published a collection of essays on African sacred spaces. A professional translator, he has also served as peer and editorial reviewer for Common Ground Publisher and Research Networks and SAGE Publications.

Dr. Erik Steinskog is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. His work addresses Afrofuturism across musical genres, including gender/sexuality and relations between music and technology. He is author of Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (Palgrave, 2018).

Dr. Griff Rollefson is Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland. Rollefson is author of Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality (University of Chicago Press, 2017) and Critical Excess: Watch the Throne and the New Gilded Age (University of Michigan Press, 2020).

John Jennings is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of California Riverside, and former Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He is a two-time Eisner award winner, as illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred with Damian Duffy (2018), and as co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (2015), with Frances Gateward.

Dr. Julian C. Chambliss is Professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. In addition, he is a co-director for the Department of English Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC) and a core participant in the MSU College of Arts & Letters’ Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR). His research interests focus on race, culture, and power in real and imagined spaces.

Dr. Pavithra Prasad is Associate Professor of Communications, California State University Northridge (CSUN). A performance studies scholar and artist from Tamil Nadu in southern India, her work addresses futurist historiography, speculative non-fiction, and subcontinental futurism to imagine and center global anti-racist and anti-caste coalitions.

Dr. Reynaldo Anderson is Associate Professor in Communications and Chair of the Humanities Department at Harris-Stowe State University and Founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM). He is co-editor of Afrofuturism 2.0 (2015) and The Black Speculative Arts Movement (2019) on Lexington.

Dr. Roy Christopher is author of Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future (Repeater, 2019) and is editor of the forthcoming volume Boogie Down Predictions: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism (Strange Attractor/MIT P, 2020). He has taught hip-hop studies at University of Illinois at Chicago, and holds a doctorate in Communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

Stacey Robinson is Assistant Professor of Design and Illustration at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Robinson’s work explores “black utopias” in self-sustaining black communities, protests, and art movements. As part of the collaborative duo Black Kirby with John Jennings, he creates graphic novels and visual arts to reimagine black resistant spaces, while curating exhibitions and publications as MotherBoxx Studios. His graphic novels include Kid Code: Channel Zero (Rosarium, 2014), Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners (For Beginners, 2016) and I Am Alfonso Jones (Lee & Low, 2017). 

Dr. Tiffany Barber is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. A scholar, curator, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century visual art, new media, and performance of the black diaspora, she recently co-organised the Afrofuturist new media exhibit Curating the End of the World (2020), hosted by New York Live Arts and the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM).

Dr. Valorie Thomas is Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English and Africana Studies at Pomona College. As a scholar of African Diaspora studies, Thomas originated the concept of Diasporic Vertigo as a motif of decolonization. Thomas studies literature, music, film and visual art, and recently curated the Afrofuturist exhibition Vertigo@Midnight.