Bios
Marla McLeod
Marla L. McLeod (b. 1981, CA) explores black identity and social constructs through her portrait paintings, textiles, and sculptures. She received a Bachelor of Science degree at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), and an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (SMFA). In 2019, she received the Will and Elena Barnet Painting Award, a Tisch Library Graduate Research Fellowship, and presented at Black Portraitures, NYU. She was awarded a Post Graduate Teaching Fellowship for the Senior Thesis course at SMFA and was an Adjunct Professor in Beginning Drawing at SCSU in 2020-2021. McLeod co-curated the Special Exhibitions section of the 2020 Area Code Art Fair (Boston, MA), and following her MFA Thesis exhibition in 2020, she was featured as one of The Boston Globe’s “5 Outstanding Art School Grads.” In 2021, she received the Walter Feldman Fellowship, awarded by the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston and was a spotlighted artist interviewed by Cristela Guerra at WBUR/NPR Boston. In 2021, her work was exhibited in the Gallery 1832 (Boston, MA), Nearby Gallery (Newton Centre, MA), as well as at Tufts University Art Galleries (Medford, MA). McLeod is currently based in Connecticut, and is an Adjunct Professor at Maine College of Art (MECA).
K. Melchor Quick Hall
K. Melchor Quick Hall (she/her/hers) is the author of Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness and the co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging with and beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. She is a popular educator who works with students of all ages. Information about her single-authored manuscript, Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework, and Café Darkness, a virtual writing community that she co-hosts monthly, is available at writingindarkness.
Kimberly Juanita Brown
Kimberly Juanita Brown is an associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Her book, The Repeating Body: Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press) examines slavery’s profound ocular construction, the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space and the women represented there. She is currently at work on her second book, tentatively titled “Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual.” This project examines images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan, and Haiti. Brown is the founder and convener of the Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Seminar. The Dark Room is a working group of women of color whose work gathers at the intersection of critical race theory and visual culture studies.