How can memorializing, reporting, and storytelling sustain us in the movement toward a more equitable and expressive society?
Join us at MacDowell NYC for a conversation on the role of memorials and storytelling in contemporary struggles for justice. How are organizations that foreground collective healing and resilience in community work articulating new ethical frameworks? Jeanelle Austin (Rise and Remember), Yukari Kane (Prison Journalism Project), and acclaimed musician and composer Samora Pinderhughes (The Healing Project) join us for an intersectional dialogue that approaches the charge of defining a clear and practicable vision for navigating the most significant ethical challenges of our time.
MacDowell and the Henry Luce Foundation are proud to bring you a new year of MacDowell Presents—conversations that explore the challenges facing democracy and artistic freedom and the role of artists and organizations in devising new strategies for resilience. MacDowell expands its mission of creating space for artists and into creating space for ideas and vital conversations between prominent figures in the arts and leading thinkers, organizers, and cultural voices.
About the Panelists
Jeanelle Austin is Executive Director of Rise and Remember and engages the work of racial justice through memorial preservation. She is also a current candidate for MN State Senate in MN District 62. In 2022 she was honored as a Community Visionary for the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub at the University of Minnesota, and a Leonard I. Beerman Foundation Fellow. She consults and speaks nation-wide on various topics as they intersect with race in America.
Yukari Kane is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Prison Journalism Project. She is an author, educator and veteran journalist with 20 years of experience, including at the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. She co-authored A Prison Writers’ Guide to Media Writing, and her book Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs was a best-seller, translated into seven languages. She has taught at Northwestern University, UC Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison. She is a member of Institute for Non-Profit News’ board of directors and News Literacy Project’s advisory council.
Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work examines sociopolitical issues through the lens of prison abolition and anti-capitalism. A graduate of The Juilliard School, he is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University in the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry program under Vijay Iyer. Pinderhughes is a recipient of the Art for Justice and Soros Justice Fellowships, a Creative Capital awardee, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Sundance Composers Lab fellow. He is also the founder, Executive and Artistic Director of The Healing Project, a community arts organization that creates narrative change and collective healing in partnership with individuals impacted by structural violence to build a world based around healing rather than punishment.