Nakia Hill is the director of communications for Mayor Michelle Wu’s Cabinet of Community Engagement for the City of Boston. She edited  “Revel in Black Excellence,” a section in Boston Art Review’s sixth issue celebrating Black artists in Boston. In 2018, she was named one of seven Boston Artists-in-Residence by Mayor Marty Walsh exploring how art influences government policy impacting our community. As a writer, her work focuses on how women can use writing as a tool for healing and advocacy. Her first collection of poetry entitled Water Carrier inspired by Solange’s “A Seat at the Table” was released in October 2018. She is the creator of the Boston’s Most Resilient Women project which tells the resiliency stories of women of color. She developed the Boston Women in the Workplace survey. She is also the founder of Girls, Write! a creative writing and publishing program for girls of color in Boston. 

Courtney Jacobovits has a deep love for people and culture. Art—expressions of what communities deem worthy of exploration, documentation, and/or celebration—has provided a refuge through which she has frequently found relief as well as a deeper understanding of the world. A wealth advisor at Goldman Sachs, Courtney is also an urban planner by training. She previously served as the Senior Urban Planner for the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Mattapan, Back Bay with the Boston Planning & Development Agency and later as the city’s Director of Cultural Planning within the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture. Courtney is an undergraduate alumna of Northwestern University. She earned her Masters in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She also serves on the Board of Governors for the Harvard Club of Boston and in her free time enjoys reading, eating, and traveling.

Beau Kenyon earned music composition degrees from Berklee College of Music and Tufts University and has contributed to research in the fields of music cognition, curiosity-based education, and community engagement strategies. He first aligned these four disciplines as Composer-in-Residence for the Boston Public Library (2017), where he created a 40-minute immersive performance installation of live music and dance. His recent piece, Of Gravity and Light (2022) is a 55-minute concert score and staged contemporary ballet that explores the science of the solar system through music, contemporary ballet, and video projection. Kenyon has cultivated a deeply collaborative practice and has worked with choreographers, projection artists, and sculptors across the country as well as with notable institutions, such as PBS, GBH, NASA, SITE Santa, and the MFA.

Cher Krause Knight is Professor of Art History at Emerson College. Her publications include the books: Museums and Public Art? (co-edited with Harriet F. Senie); A Companion to Public Art (co-edited with Senie); Power and Paradise in Walt Disney’s World; and Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism. She is the co-founder of Public Art Dialogue, an international professional organization providing an interdisciplinary critical forum for the field. Professor Knight also co-founded the journal Public Art Dialogue (Routledge/Taylor & Francis), was its co-editor through Spring 2017, and now serves on its editorial board. Additionally she is on the advisory board of Now + There (a nonprofit bringing temporary and site specific public art to Boston). Knight served as the Memorial / Public Art Research Advisor for the One Boston Resilience Project (Boston Art Commission and Mayor’s Office of Arts + Culture, City of Boston), as well as the Public Art Scholar for the King Memorial (Boston Art Commission, City of Boston, jointly with King Boston nonprofit). Her current book project, Memorials Now, is under contract with Wiley (co-authoring with Senie).

Mallory Ruymann is a curator, art advisor, and art historian working with emerging artists in all media. She is the Managing Partner of art_works, which partners with individuals and companies across the United States and Canada to build significant contemporary art collections, create visionary art programs, and execute experiential, site-specific art commissions through a mission-driven lens. She is also an independent curator; her ongoing collaboration with Leah Triplett Harrington includes the exhibitions shape_shifting_ support_systems, Praise Shadows (2022); A Romance Of…, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery (2023); and STUFFED, Boston University Art Galleries (2023 forthcoming). 

Mallory is Visiting Curator at Boston University Art Galleries. She has also worked at Tufts University Art Galleries, MassArt Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and Fabric Workshop and Museum. Her writing can be found in academic journals and community publications, including Boston Art Review. She is Co-Chair of the Tufts University Art Galleries Acquisition Committee.

Gabriel Sosa is a Cuban-American artist, educator, linguist, and curator. Often drawing upon his upbringing in Miami and over a decade of work as a court interpreter in Boston, he uses legal proceedings, personal archives, and contemporary visual culture to explore the mutability of language, the imperfection of memory, and the misinterpretation of both. His work has been shown at Tufts University Art Galleries; O, Miami Poetry Festival; A R E A, Boston; Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, Cuba. He has organized exhibitions at Haley House in Roxbury, and the Nave Gallery in Somerville. He was also part of the curatorial team of Area Code, the first art fair to showcase artists with ties to New England. Gabriel teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is Deputy Director of Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. A research affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sutton also serves on the Advisory Committee of the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Voices in Contemporary Art. In 2017–19, she collaborated with the artist Renée Green on a series of interlinked public programs and exhibitions at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, culminating in the volume Renée Green: Pacing (D.A.P., 2021). In 2021, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her book Against the Immersive: Shigeko Kubota’s Video Sculptures and a French translation of her book, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome was published by Éditions B2 in 2022 with a foreword by Olafur Eliasson.

Sarah ‘Val’ Valente, is a Boston-based artist, educator, and arts administrator. She has shared her project management and business operations skills with various local arts initiatives throughout Massachusetts, including Roslindale Village Main Streets, the Magafan Mural Project, and Leonard Bernstein Festival for the Creative Arts. Community engagement plays a significant role in her creative practice, where she explores themes of identity and sustainability. Her work has been shown at Beacon Gallery, Boston, MA; Kingston Gallery, Boston, MA; Brookline Art Center, Brookline, MA; Sprinkler Factory, Worcester; Abigail Olgilvy Gallery, Boston, MA; Springfield Art Association, Springfield, IL; Driezer Gallery, Waltham, MA; and Padaria Veras, Torreira, Portugal. Sarah is a certified Project Management Professional with an MBA from Assumption College and a Bachelor’s in Chemistry with minors in Studio Art and Art History from College of the Holy Cross. Sarah is also an alumna of the Brandeis Post-Baccalaureate program.