Linda Goode Bryant creates functional spaces she calls “living installations” that involve people in collaborative activities and creative actions capable of changing conditions where they live. Art that is meant to be discovered, experienced, and lived during daily life. Art with real life consequences. Just Above Midtown Gallery (JAM) was her initial space. Started in 1974, it was the first gallery to showcase work by African American and other artists of color in a major gallery district. After producing the documentary, The Business of Being an Artist, she shifted JAM’s focus to provide artists with space and money to experiment and create freely, away from art market pressures. She began making films in the 1990s and co-produced Flag Wars with Laura Poitras in 2003, which received an Emmy nomination and numerous awards including a Peabody Award. In 2004, she created Active Citizen Project (ACP) to involve disenfranchised and nonvoting youth and adults around the country in creating and campaigning for local and national platforms that addressed issues and solutions they wanted implemented. Her current “living installation” is Project EATS, which joins with residents in New York City’s low-income communities to create small-plot, high-yield vegetable farms where fresh, healthy food is needed. Goode Bryant has a master of business administration from Columbia University and a bachelor of arts degree in painting from Spelman College.

Peggy Shepard is co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and has a long history of organizing and engaging Northern Manhattan residents in community-based planning and campaigns to address environmental protection and environmental health policy locally and nationally. She has successfully combined grassroots organizing, environmental advocacy, and environmental health community-based participatory research to become a national leader in advancing environmental policy and the perspective of environmental justice in urban communities—to ensure that the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment extends to all. She has been named co-chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and was the first female chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the US Environmental Protection Agency. She also serves on the Executive Committee of the National Black Environmental Justice Network and the Board of Advisors of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. Her work has received broad recognition: the Jane Jacobs Medal from the Rockefeller Foundation for Lifetime Achievement, the 10th Annual Heinz Award For the Environment, the William K. Reilly Award for Environmental Leadership, the Knight of the National Order of Merit from the French Republic, the Dean’s Distinguished Service Award from the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, and honorary doctorates from Smith College and Lawrence University.

Harriet A. Washington is a science writer and medical ethicist and author of influential books that include Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind (2019), and Medical Apartheid, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been the inaugural Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a visiting fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law, and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University and is a lecturer in bioethics at Columbia University. She has written widely for popular publications and has been published in refereed books and scientific journals.

Dr. Courtney D. Cogburn is an associate professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work and faculty of the Columbia Population Research Center and Data Science Institute where she co-chairs the Computational Social Science working group. She employs a transdisciplinary strategy to improve the characterization and measurement of racism, and in examining the role of racism in the production of racial inequities in health. She is also a member of the American Medical Association’s External Equity & Innovation Advisory Group and the RWJF Health Equity Collective. Dr. Cogburn’s work also explores the potential of media and technology in creating and eradicating racism and racial inequities in health. She is the lead creator of 1000 Cut Journey, an immersive virtual reality experience of racism that premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. She is also the co-founder of the Justice Equity and Technology Studio. Dr. Cogburn is the chief equity officer and knowledge transfer director of the Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP), an NSF Science and Technology Center (STC). Dr. Cogburn completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University in the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar Program and at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in education and psychology, MSW from the University of Michigan, and her BA in psychology from the University of Virginia.