Invited Speakers

PAINTER

Jordan Casteel (b. 1989, Denver, CO) received her BA from Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA for Studio Art (2011) and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT (2014). In 2020, Casteel presented a solo exhibition titled Within Reach at the New Museum, New York, in conjunction with a fully illustrated catalogue published by the institution. Other recent museum solo exhibitions include Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, presented at both the Denver Art Museum, CO (2019), and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, CA (2019–20). In recent years, Casteel has participated in group and permanent collection exhibitions at institutional venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2021 and 2022); Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2022); The Modern, Fort Worth, TX (2022); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2022); Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2022); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2021); Art Institute of Chicago, IL (2021); Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (2019); MoCA Los Angeles, CA (2018); Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2017 and 2016); and MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017). Most recently, Casteel presented a solo exhibition entitled In bloom at Casey Kaplan, New York. Casteel is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2021).

WRITER

Born and raised in Nashville Tennessee, Harvard graduate Caroline Randall Williams is an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, and cookbook author as well as an activist, public intellectual, performance artist, and scholar. She joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in the Fall of 2019 as a Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society while she continues to work and speak to the places where art, business, and scholarship intersect, moving people closer to their best lives and corporations closer to their ideal identities. She has spoken in twenty states: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia, in venues that range from as small as a classroom in a neighborhood school to as large as the Superdome mainstage during Essence Fest. To every speaking engagement, Caroline brings a fierce intelligence, disarming charm, a touch of glamour, and a depth of lived experience that belies her thirty-two years. She has taught in two of the poorest states in the union — Mississippi and West Virginia — and she has been educated at two of the richest universities on the globe — Harvard and Oxford. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections, and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe, Garden and Gun, Essence and the New York Times.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Dylan Robinson is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator, and writer. From 2015 - 2022, he was the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. Dr. Robinson’s curatorial work includes the international touring exhibition Soundings (2019-2025) co-curated with Candice Hopkins. His current research project xoxelhmetset te syewa:l, Caring for Our Ancestors, involves working with Indigenous artists to reconnect kinship with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums.

His book, Hungry Listening (University Minnesota Press, 2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening, and was awarded best first book by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and the Labriola Centre American Indian National Book Award. Other publications include the edited volume Music and Modernity Among Indigenous Peoples of North America (Wesleyan University Press, 2019); and Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). As co-chair of the Indigenous Advisory Council for the Canadian Music Centre, he is currently leading a process for the reparation and redress of music that appropriates Indigenous songs, and misrepresents Indigenous culture.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

Dwanna L. McKay is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and joined the Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies program at CC in 2016. Professor McKay centers her teaching, research, service, and activism on an overall commitment to social justice. Raised within the boundaries of her tribal nation in Oklahoma, McKay understands the definitive disadvantage of growing up in a rural area steeped in discrimination and how that manifests in constrained access to basic needs like housing, healthcare, employment opportunities, and equitable education. McKay fuses active research and teaching agendas in social inequality, intersectionality, critical race theory, and indigenous identity with broad interdisciplinary knowledge.