Lerin is the founder of The Cultural Heritage Collective and has been the driving force behind our mission to promote cultural understanding through community-based preservation and cultural initiatives. She is an ethnomusicologist, community-based archivist, and musician. In addition, she has created culturally competent curriculum as a K-12 certified music educator in the public school sector. With over 20 years of experience in the music, archives, and global heritage sectors, Lerin brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to our organization. Most recently, she has conducted heritage research and archival preservation work in Nigeria during a Fulbright research fellowship. Williams participated in a heritage training with a delegation from eleven diverse countries in the Netherlands. Her heritage work, research, and performance trajectory has led her to South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa.
Roxy Wright is a retired social and community activist. Most of her work has been in the local and state government sector. In the non-profit sector, Mrs. Wright has served as a board member of the Free Southern Theater, The Jazz and Heritage foundation, and Thugs United (working with recently released, previously incarcerated community members). She also served as a board member of the Velocity Foundation (which used sports to deter young people from crime). Mrs.
Wright was on the grants committee of the National Endowment for the Arts for theater, the New Orleans Arts Council, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation. She was appointed by former governor Foster to the Louisiana music commission, and federally appointed by the secretary of the interior to serve as a commissioner on the New Orleans jazz commission. Lastly, Mrs. Wright
was a consultant for the Southern Organizing Committee.
Bernard Singleton is a conservationist, heritage farmer, and land steward. For forty years, his life’s work has been to connect the heritage, foodways, and knowledge systems of Gullah Geechee and West African ancestry. As founder of Nebedaye Farms and the Bennu gardens project, Bernard specializes in cultivating the African and Indigenous botanical legacies of native species of vegetables, medicinal plants, and crops used for fiber and textiles including cotton, rice, indigo, and okra. His research, workshops, and partnerships include regional and national agricultural organizations, collaborations with farms on the African continent, and sustainable programs with NC A&T, Duke University, and South Carolina State University.
Luciana Brito holds a PhD in history from the University of São Paulo and was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the seminar “Cultures & Histories of Freedom: Ideology, Slavery, and Creolization, 1500-1900” at CUNY University. She was a visiting professor at Trinity College in Hartford-CT and a Greenleaf fellow at Tulane University. Currently, she is an adjunct professor in the History Department of the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), located in Cachoeira, Bahia, Brazil. Her research interests are on slavery, abolition and race relations in Brazil and the United States. Dr. Brito is the author of Temores da África: segurança, legislação e população africana na Bahia oitocentista. She has several articles published in academic and widely circulated journals in Brazil and the United States. Currently, she is researching the history of freed black women in Bahia from an Afro-pessimist perspective and critical fabulation to understand their emotions and freedom projects in a slave society. She is a columnist for Nexo Jornal.
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