ADENRELE SONARIWO

Adenrele Sonariwo award-winning curator, founder of Rele Art Gallery and Rele Art Foundation. She holds a Masters of Fine Art - Academy of Art University San Francisco, CA, a Curating Contemporary Art Certificate – University of the Arts, London and a B.A. Business Administration/Accounting (Honors) Howard University, Washington, DC.

She has curated several commercially and critically successful high profile art exhibitions; exhibitions that challenge the boundaries of art, engaging innovative subjects and techniques. She has also led the movement to break art out of ivory tower, with Rele Gallery exploring and partnering with fields of tech, community social causes & health.

She was the first person to curate an art exhibition at Nigeria’s seat of power, The Presidency (Abuja) and has been featured in global publications such as the Financial Times, The Art Review, Forbes Africa, and Vogue. In 2016, she won the Future Awards Africa Prize for Arts and Culture. In 2017, she curated the first ever Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she was selected as a member of the jury for the 13th edition of the Dakar Biennale.

AARON BRYANT

Curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary History and Curator of the Johnson Publishing Archives at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Prior to the Smithsonian, Bryant was curator of collections and exhibitions at Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis Museum of Art in Baltimore.   

He has lectured at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke, the Metropolitan Museum, the University of Cambridge, Oxford, and the British Museum. Additionally, Bryant has traveled with the U.S. State Department to present lectures at universities and cultural institutions throughout Spain.

His research has received honors from the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, the New York Public Library, the Maryland Historical Society, the University of Maryland, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Association of Museums, and the Organization of American Historians and Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Additionally, he has received special honors and recognition from the U.S. Congress and U.S. Justice Department, and in 2014, Bryant was elected a fellow with the Royal Anthropological Institute in the United Kingdom for his research in visual anthropology and social justice movements.   

He served as Chair of Baltimore City's Special Commission to Review Confederate Monuments and is currently Chair of the City’s Public Arts Commission. He also serves as a commissioner with the Baltimore City Commission on Historical and Architectural Preservation. Bryant earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, an MFA from Yale , and an AB from Duke. 

DEXTER WIMBERLY

Dexter Wimberly is an independent curator, entrepreneur and Senior Critic at New York Academy of Art who has organized exhibitions and developed programs with galleries and institutions throughout the world including The Third Line in Dubai; Contemporary Art Museum CAM Raleigh in North Carolina; The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco; Koki Arts in Tokyo; and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

His exhibitions have been reviewed and featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, and Hyperallergic; and have received support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Dexter Wimberly has served as Director of Strategic Planning at Independent Curators International in New York City. He is the founder of ART WORLD CONFERENCE, a business and financial literacy conference for visual artists. He was recently listed in the Observer's "Arts Power 50: Changemakers Shaping the Art World in 2019." In 2020, Wimberly founded the Hayama Artist Residency in Hayama, Japan.

NANCEE LYONS

NANCEE LYONS leads MuralsDC, Washington DC’s largest public mural program. She has coordinated the installation of more than 120 original murals on buildings throughout the nation's capital by identifying walls, bringing in local, national and international artists and coordinating community involvement in the design and approval process.

Most recently the notable street painting of Black Lives Matter Plaza a two-block-long section of 16th Street NW in Downtown Washington, D.C. in yellow capital letters. The plaza was renamed by Mayor Muriel Bowser as part of the George Floyd protests. She is also a public affairs specialist for the District of Columbia’s Department of Public Works (DPW) In this role, she is responsible for the dissemination of information about Department’s of programs and services to citizens and members of the media.