Troy Landrum Jr. is a native of Indianapolis, IN and has lived in Seattle, WA for 9 years. His passion for reading and writing bloomed as he navigated a path of self-rediscovery through identity, faith, culture and his family’s migration stories from Jim Crow South to the Midwest. These intersections are at the helm of his human experience and literature process as a Black artist and oral historian. Troy graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Washington Bothell and is currently a Program Producer for KUOW's RadioActive Program, a freelance journalist for the South Seattle Emerald, and a Novelist. His novel In Progress explores the question of "Home" through the Historical American time period of The Great Migration. A period in American history where millions of African American people moved from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities. He dedicates his work to the brilliance of African American History and the brilliance of his family history through the work of literature and preservation.

Born in Seattle, Washington, and raised in both the Central District and the Southend, Nacala comes from a background of art, community organizing, and healing work. As a jewelry artist, Nacala's art centered on jewelry making traditions of West Africa.

While jewelry remains her first love, Nacala's art currently lives in the space of oral histories. Right now she is curating a collection of filmed interviews of Seattle-based Black Elders and their accounts of the ways they have experienced joy in the course of their lives. Nacala currently chairs the Board of Directors for The Tubman Center For Health and Freedom and sits on the Board of Directors for Inspired Child Community.

marco farroni leonardo is a movement & performance artist, from Bonao, Dominican Republic & based in Seattle and New York. They hold a BFA in dance from The University of the Arts. Their work engages with themes and ideas around home, the body as archive, the Diaspora, and memory. Artistic collaborations include nia love, dani tirrell, David Rue, Aisha Noir, Nia-Amina Minor, Amanda Morgan, and Donald Byrd amongst others. They have presented work in various venues in Seattle including Velocity Dance Center, Wa Na Wari, Base Arts Space, 10 Degrees Arts, The School of Spectrum Dance Theater, and The Aids Memorial Pathway.
Photo by Victoria Kovios

Mei'lani Eyre (they/them) is a child of Washington. A recent graduate of the University of Washington's Masters in Library and Information Science, Mei'lani combines cultural reconnection, reconciliation, and ancestral remembrance with information justice as a librarian and genealogist. Centering Black, Native, Queer and Trans communities in Seattle, Mei'lani has worked on a variety of cultural projects as the curator of digital exhibit LANDBACK: Establishing Sovereignty in the Urban Native Era, co-creator of the Black Panther Party Newspaper Digital Archive with Estelita's Library, and writer of the award-winning Black trans short film Transcendance.

William “Bill” Butler was born in Norfolk, Virginia, but was raised in Seattle, Washington. Bill supports the various missions and visions of organizations through the use of his skills and talents: Digital Storytelling, Audio Visual, Educator and Community Activist, and Cultivator of Children’s Dreams. He works for the Seattle Public Schools as a teacher and holds degrees in Urban Affairs from Connecticut College; Visual Communications from Seattle Central; Teaching from Heritage College; and Media Literacy from Antioch. He is an active member of Holgate Church of Christ. His favorite scripture is “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Bill serves the community through his involvement with several organizations, including the Black Child Development Institute, the Black Genealogy Research Group, South End Stories and Multi-Care Communities. He feels that everyone needs a creative outlet. Wa Na Wari’s “Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute” is an amazing channel to challenge his creativity.

Brooklyn Jamerson-Flowers is still pretty new to Seattle, has a couple of years of podcast creating/producing/hosting under her belt, and has loved history for a very long time. Podcast production and history first came together for her when she launched We the (Black) People: An American History Podcast in 2020. Then she moved to Seattle and it happened again with the Black Arts Legacies Podcast. And now, just as Seattle is starting to feel like home, it's all coming together with SBSHI.

Valerie Curtis-Newton: The Head of Directing and Playwriting at the University of Washington’s School of Drama, Valerie also serves as the Artistic Director for The Hansberry Project. Her recent work includes Steppenwolf Theatre Company, The Guthrie Theater, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Intiman Theatre, Denver Center Theatre, West of Lenin, ArtsWest, Mark Taper Forum/Center Theatre Group, New York Theatre Workshop, among others. Valerie holds a BA from Holy Cross College and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has been awarded the National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Career Development Grant for Directors, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation’s Gielgud Directing Fellowship, Theatre Puget Sound’s Gregory Falls Award for Sustained Achievement, Seattle Times’ 13 Most Influential Citizens of the last decade, the Seattle Stranger Genius Award in Performance and the Crosscut Courage Award for Culture. Valerie is a member of the Stage Director & Choreographers Union and serves on its Executive Board.

Bitaniya Giday is a first-generation Ethiopian American residing in Seattle.

As a community organizer, she works to dismantle internalized carcel logics through storytelling, community care, and healing to incite imaginative capacities for abolition. Her first collection of Poems, Motherland, explores the preserved oral histories and experiences as a first-generation black woman, focusing on reflecting her own family's path of immigration across the world. As a cultural worker and university student, she works to restore autonomy to history's originators by researching black women's erasure and contradictory relationships to historical geographies.

SBSHI Co-Director
Zola Mumford is an academic librarian, researcher, and writer. From 2003 to 2022, she was Curator of the Seattle Black Film Festival, a program of LANGSTON, a nonprofit arts organization. Mumford has served as a Washington State Book Awards judge and continues to be a speaker and panelist on subjects ranging from archival research to film history to science fiction/speculative fiction. Her professional background also includes media and arts production; historical research; and preservation work with film and print materials in university and private film and art archives.

Faculty
Alissa Rae Funderburk is the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Oral Historian for the Margaret Walker Center at the HBCU Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She maintains an oral history archive that, like the Center, is dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture. Previously, she created an oral history course for high school students at the Roger Lehecka Double Discovery Center and conducted freelance oral history interviews for the city of Jersey City.

While completing coursework in the Oral History Masters Program at Columbia, Alissa Rae served as the Deputy Director of the Columbia Life Histories Project alongside its co-founder Benji de la Piedra. Her OHMA thesis on the religious and spiritual experiences of Black men in New York City was based on her studies of race, culture, religion, and the African diaspora, when graduating from Columbia College in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology as a John W. Kluge Scholar. Alissa Rae is a native New Yorker, OHA council member, OHMA advisory board member, avid reader, and yoga enthusiast with a passion for travel.

SBSHI Co-Director
Jill Freidberg co-founded Wa Na Wari and the Shelf Life Community Story Project. She is a documentary filmmaker, oral historian, radio producer, and youth media educator. Her work reflects her belief that responsible storytelling can build understanding and solidarity across borders and across the street.

Freidberg has produced and directed four award-winning feature-length documentaries, including the ground-breaking collaborative effort This is What Democracy Looks Like (2000), and countless documentary shorts. She also teaches media production at the University of Washington Bothell.

Sierra Parsons is a community organizer who works and lives in southeast Seattle. She helps to lead WA-BLOC, a community-based organization rooted in the Rainier Beach neighborhood. Some of Sierra’s work includes advocating for and designing restorative alternatives to youth incarceration in King County, disrupting the relationship between police and Seattle Public Schools, and fighting for tenant rights to hinder displacement amongst a coalition of other community organizers and local political leaders. Sierra is invested in cultivating intergenerational leadership and elevating youth voice. She shares Ella Baker’s belief that knowledge of Black history is the foundation of grassroots collective action. In her free time, Sierra enjoys learning how to computer program, eating mac and cheese, and occasionally roller skating. ​

Ariel Paine, father, music producer and local hip hop artist. Born and raised In the Central District. I love spending time with family, travelling, making music and doing art or archiving projects. Also known as ampfire 206, I use music to paint pictures of my life growing up in the district.

Brenetta Ward is a Seattle-based fiber artist, third-generation quilter and community advocate. Using cultural textiles, vintage photographs and symbolic embellishments, she designs narrative quilts that tell personal stories. Brenetta is committed to discovering, sharing and preserving her family history and helping others do the same. She serves on the boards of the Black Genealogy Research Group and Grandmothers Against Gun Violence Foundation. Brenetta believes we must tell our stories, write them down and claim our legacy for generations to come. If we don’t, we run the risk of being omitted from Seattle’s history.

Ricky Reyes is a Seattle-based, Tacoma-born, researcher, creative, and arts administrator. An avid musician, writer, and photographer, Rick finds community in creating with and performing alongside fellow musicians, writers, and creatives.

Akoiya Harris was born and raised in the Central District of Seattle, Washington and is a proud alumni of Garfield High School. She graduated from The Ailey School’s Certificate Program where she had the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of her body's relationship to movement through technique and choreography. While her main practice is dance, Akoiya also creates using poetry and collage. She is currently a company member with Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater. Through her art, Akoiya hopes to give voice to the stories, both known and unknown, of her community and honor those who came before her.