Kwame Samori Brathwaite, son of photographer Kwame Brathwaite, is the Director of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive, through which he manages his father’s photographic archive and collaborative projects that are concordant with the themes in his father’s work, namely activism, politics, fashion and music. Kwame Samori authored a chapter entitled Fashion and Consciousness in the book Mod New York: Fashion takes a Trip and has lectured at numerous institutions including the Museum of the City of New York, Cal State Fullerton and Harvard Art Museum. He co-curated Celebrity and the Everyday at Philip Martin Gallery along with Jesse Williams and curated Black is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite, a touring exhibition in partnership with Aperture Foundation. The exhibit is currently on view at The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco and will travel to the Columbia Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society this year. Kwame Samori, also a real estate professional, graduated from Amherst College in 1996 with a B.A. in Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business in 2018. He resides in Pasadena, CA with his wife and three children.
Tanisha C. Ford is an award-winning writer, cultural critic, and historian. She is the author of Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award; Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019) and Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martin’s, 2019). Ford’s work centers on social movement history, feminist issues, material culture, the built environment, black life in the Rust Belt, girlhood studies, and fashion, beauty, and body politics. Her scholarship has published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Black Scholar, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. Ford’s public writing and cultural commentary have been featured in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Elle, and the Root. Her research has been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ford is Professor of Africana Studies and History at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Organised by Dr Rebecca Arnold (The Courtauld), Leah Gouget-Levy (The Courtauld) and Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld).
