Keith Thompson | Keith Thompson is assistant director of the dance program, associate professor in the School of Music, Dance and Theatre and the inaugural Race, Arts and Democracy faculty. Thompson is one of the nation’s most distinguished dance artists and is recognized for his role with Trisha Brown Dance Company, his company dance Tactics, his collaborations with Herberger Institute Professor Liz Lerman and him shifting of public vocabularies about dance. Professor Thompson thrives by seeking out challenges of discovery that takes place within the moment, compositionally and conceptually. Complex articulation of multiple pathways through and between spaces are a main focus. |
 Liz Lerman | Liz Lerman is an influential choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2002 MacArthur Genius Grant, 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. She has been Deutsch Fellow and in 2023, was honored as a Dance Magazine Award winner. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in bothresearch and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company's unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 2011, and her most recent work, "Healing Wars," toured across the US in 2014-15. Lerman conducts residencies on Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio, among others. |
| Adam Collis is a filmmaker and film professor at Arizona State University’s Sidney Poitier New American Film School. Collis loves making movies, teaching, and helping his students and former students advance in their careers. Months after graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, Collis directed the 20th Century Fox feature, Sunset Strip, starring Simon Baker (The Mentalist) and Oscar-winner Jared Leto. Since then, he has produced and directed a variety of shorts, documentaries, and features. Collis, who joined ASU in Fall 2009, has created one-of-a-kind opportunities for students to learn from world class filmmakers. After earning an MBA and learning how to finance features, Collis produced and directed Car Dogs, starring Patrick J Adams (Suits), George Lopez, Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. The production gave 85 ASU students the opportunity to learn filmmaking on a working set from an Oscar winning cast and crew. Collis is the founder of the industry relations / professional development program, ASU Film Spark, which has connected students with hundreds of top Film & TV creatives and executives including 6 Oscar-winners, 6 Oscar-nominees, 8 studio chiefs, the Presidents of AMPAS and the DGA, as well as dozens of industry executives, blockbuster producers, A-list department heads, and award-winning directors. Hundreds of students benefited from Film Spark’s master classes, special screenings, job fairs and career bootcamps. Currently, Collis teaches "Welcome to Hollywood" in which film production students learn how to understand and appreciate the entertainment supply chain and business ecosystem that surrounds and supports them. Collis has several features and series in various stages of development and looks forward to bringing his students, past and present, onto these shows. |
 Joanna De'Shay Race, Arts and Democracy Fellow | Joanna de'Shay is a Faculty Associate in the ASU/FIDM Fashion School. Born in Accra, Ghana, on the Western Coast of Africa to a Nigerian father and a Russian mother, she grew up heavily influenced by the exotic people, cultures, and textures of her majestic homeland. She holds an MFA in Fashion Design and a Master's in Management. She is the Creative Director and Designer for Black Russian Label, a women's contemporary clothing brand which, since its founding in 2013, has focused on the global, chic woman who is unapologetic, bold, and empowered by her style. de'Shay has received numerous awards, including the 2018 MLK Living the Dream Award and the 2020 Outstanding Women in Business award presented by the Phoenix Business Journal and in 2021, she was named one of the top Non-profit Executives to watch. de'Shay is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in being a part of the solution. |
| Ilana Luna is Associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Arizona State University. She is a writer, translator, scholar and cultural promoter whose books include Adapting Gender: Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film (2018) and the co-edition/ translation of Carlos Monsiváis’s feminist writings, with Norma Klahn, Fatefully, Faithfully Feminist: A Critical History of Women, Patriarchy, and Mexican National Discourse (2024). Her translation of Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Madre Coqa (2019) was a 2020 Sarah Maguire Poetry-in-Translation Prize finalist in the UK. Recent books in translation include Juan José Rodinás’s Koan: Underwater (2018) and Giancarlo Huapaya’s Sub Verse Workshop (2020). Luna has served on the director’s board of Phoenix-based bilingual poetry press Cardboard House Press since 2016, and joined their editorial board in 2023. Along with Mexican poet and Cultural Attaché to the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, Gaspar Orozco, whose work she translates, Luna has coordinated the “Central de poesía” for the LéaLA: The Universidad de Guadalajara’s Spanish Language book fair in Los Angeles since 2021. In 2023, Luna was a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in Translation for her co-translation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s poetry, with Cheyla Samuelson. |
| Sumana Sen Mandala is a Bharata-Nrityam artist and disciple of Dr. Padma Subrahmanyam. She teaches in studio settings as well as higher education. Sumana holds an MFA in Dance. She has been a faculty associate at ASU's School of Music, Dance & Theater, is an ASU Gammage Teaching Artist, trained racial justice facilitator, Co-Director of the Critical Response Process (CRP) Certification Program, and Director of Dansense-Nrtyabodha. She is steeped in research to (1) re-examine the meaning of tradition in dances of India and its value for dance practitioners in contemporary US contexts and (2) to investigate the relationship between belonging and community justice. Mandala focuses on the concept of rasa—deep engagement—to center collective knowledge, the value of every voice, and responsibility and response in any space she enters. In her current projects, Sumana explores the physicality of nritya (expressive dance) in Bharata-Nrityam to facilitate dialogue and collaborative works around hushed narratives, such as intimate partner violence and menstrual health. She has published articles on critical pedagogy and belonging and presented her work at several conferences. Mandala received the 2024 Katherine Lindholm-Lane Award for Arizona Dance Educator of the Year. Her work is supported by various organizations, including the National Dance Education Organization and Arizona Commission on the Arts. |
Khalil Rushdan | Khalil Rushdan is a dedicated advocate and leader in Arizona’s reentry community. Wrongfully convicted of a 1997 murder, Khalil served 15 and a half years before his conviction was overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct, leading to his release in December 2011. Since then, he has been a passionate advocate for wrongful conviction awareness and systemic change, focusing on reentry resources, transitional mentoring, employment training, and housing. As founder of the AZ Village Network, Khalil works to remove barriers for justice-involved individuals and serves as a mentor, consultant, and ally to legal, non-profit, and private sector organizations, fostering second chances and stronger communities.l plan to use this fellowship year to bring more awareness to the drivers of mass incarceration in Arizona, provide leadership opportunities to other formerly incarcerated individuals and expand entrepreneurial opportunities for individuals upon reentry. As a CSRD Community Fellow, Khalil Rushdan looks forward to the opportunities for collaboration with CSRD on addressing laws, policies or practices that create inhumane conditions in communities of color. |
| Christi Jay Wells (they/them, she/her) is an associate professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music, Dance and Theatre. An interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of jazz history, popular music studies, dance studies, and arts & cultural policy, Wells earned a doctorate degree in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed graduate studies with a doctoral dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression. Wells is an award-winning scholar whose honors include the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology, the Videmus’s Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music, a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies, and the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music. A social jazz and blues dancer for twenty years, Wells has been a lecturer and clinician at national and international dance workshops. Their scholarship includes Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance (OUP 2021), articles in the journals such as Women & Music, Jazz & Culture, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Daedalus and chapters on jazz dance history topics for volumes in the Oxford Handbook series. Well's current. book project focuses on the Smithsonian Institution's substantial history of jazz programming and patronage.
|
CSRD Fellows 2018 - 2022 | |
| Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez works to question systems of power that have been constructed to benefit some while purposefully marginalizing others. She endeavors to make visible the exploitation of land and labor. Her areas of artistic focus include extractivism from the beginnings of colonialism and coloniality to the contemporary extractive capitalist system that continuously displaces people and other beings. During her tenure as a CSRD Fellow, Aranibar-Fernandez focused on imagining spaces for conversations around art and its language to address historical and contemporary global issues. |
| Yvonne Rich is the founder and creator of “Did You Know?,” an exhibit-based program that is informed by her decades of experience in STEM. Rich is committed to educating young people about African American STEM innovators and to developing STEM workshops, interactive STEM materials for young people and multimedia resources for children.
|
Kermit Brown | Kermit Brown. Ed.D is a Marine Corps-Gulf War Veteran and has been a long-time ASU affiliate faculty member with the CSRD. His approach to teaching is student focused with a strong commitment to the development of social consciousness. Brown, earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from ASU and his pedagogical goals include developing his students' critical understanding of the importance of social awareness through cross-cultural communication, social awareness, and community action. Brown believes that increased awareness ultimately enables his students to become architects of social change. |
| As an art producer, I support work that shapes wayward futures and builds bold imaginations. My work focuses on bridging artists with community organizers to connect ideas about identity, memory, and political change. I am particularly interested in working with willful and insurgent women artists who make visible the power and politics of living each day. In a historical moment demanding accountability, the arts and culture sector is reckoning with our own racial barriers and exclusions. I hope that during my time with The Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, we can open critical conversations to dismantle structural barriers built on white supremacy, to center the artistic leadership of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQI, and women of color communities. |
