Collin Riggins
Collin Riggins is a photographer and conceptual artist from Kansas City, Missouri. He received a BA in African American Studies and Visual Arts from Princeton University. Collin developed an interest in photography as a teenager when he participated in a free high school photography program at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. That moment fundamentally changed everything, inspiring Collin to not only develop his own unique photographic practice, but also champion accessibility and learning throughout that process. Today, Collin seeks to create socially engaged images that capture the intimacy, interiority, and wonder of black living. He often leans into the personal, chasing familial histories, geographies, and people that define his African American heritage. Although Collin sees himself working within the tradition of documentary photography, he is always trying to challenge the genre’s aesthetics to more faithfully carry the complexity (and abundant beauty) of everyday culture. In short, Collin doesn’t shy away from contradictions. He embraces them as a fertile starting points to get somewhere closer to truth – if such a thing exists.
Max Diallo Jakobsen
Max Diallo Jakobsen is a visual artist and writer from Conakry, Guinea and Stockholm, Sweden. He received a BA in History and Visual Arts from Princeton University where he maintained a strong focus on Pan-Africanism. Max is interested in the opportunities Pan-Africanism offers to expand and deepen the ways in which the African diaspora exists in fruitful relation to ourselves, our homes, and each other. Max believes that art abounds in his home country, Guinea — and it has done so for generations through rich, folkloric traditions that are, importantly, losing significance every day as forces of displacement and migration continue to shape Guinea. In this sense, his practice is one of looking back at history to critically engage the traces of these historic practices to place them in conversation with the present. This, Max believes, is how we can achieve a more complex memory of familial and national history that refuses the erasure brought about by decades of colonialism and change.
Majora Carter
Majora Carter is a real estate developer, urban revitalization strategy consultant, MacArthur Fellow and Peabody Award winning broadcaster. She's responsible for the creation of numerous economic development, technology inclusion & green-infrastructure projects, policies and job training & placement systems. She is also a lecturer at Princeton University's Keller Center.
Majora is quoted on the walls of the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History and Culture in DC: "Nobody should have to move out of their neighborhood to live in a better one” - which is also the subtitle of her 2022 book, Reclaiming Your Community.
Carter applies corporate talent-retention consulting practice to reduce Brain Drain in American low-status communities. She has firsthand experience pioneering sustainable economic development in one of America's most storied low-status communities: the South Bronx, as well as cities across North America and abroad.
She and her teams develop vision, strategies and the type of development that transforms low-status communities into thriving mixed-use local economies. Her approach harnesses capital flows resulting from American re-urbanization to help increase wealth building opportunities across demographics left out of all historic financial tide changes. Majora's work produces long term fiscal benefits for governments, residents, and private real estate developments throughout North America.