Moderator

Tanya Odom, Program Director, Equity and Inclusion, Walton Family Foundation

Tanya Odom is a global consultant, writer, coach, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, and civil rights thought leader. She has worked globally for over 20 years, in over 40 countries, as a consultant, coach, storyteller and facilitator focusing on areas including: Diversity and Inclusion, Inclusive Leadership, Race/Racism, Challenging Conversations, Mindfulness, Coaching, Wellbeing, Innovation and Creativity, and Educational Equity.

Tanya’s unique portfolio career has allowed her to work in the education, private sector/corporate, not-for-profit/NGO, law enforcement, and in university/college arenas. She is the co-author of "Evaluation in the Field of Education for Democracy, Human Rights and Tolerance.”

Tanya has been a contributor to the Huffington Post, where she has written about diversity, leadership, self-compassion, and mindfulness. Tanya has also written for cnn.com. Tanya’s work and commentary has also appeared in several publications including Diversity Woman Magazine, Bloomberg News, Fortune, among others.

Tanya was named by Diversity Best Practices as “A Diversity Thought Leader to Follow on Twitter.” Entrepreneur Magazine featured Tanya as one of the "3 Women Entrepreneurs Who Unleash Their Energy for the Greater Good."

Tanya was recently named one of the " 2022 Top 15 Coaches in NYC" by Influence Digest.

Tanya is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Speaker

Ali Jafarey, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Lead (worforce) in the People and Change Team, V&A

Ali Jafarey has been involved in the equality for over 20 years, initially  focusing on racism experienced by London’s ethnic minority young people and supporting race -specific case work in all community issues. His passion for the arts led him to the V&A where he heads up the Museums’ equality, diversity and inclusion strategy. He also is an active member of the National Museum’s Directorate EDI Network which brings together the increasing number of employees with EDI in their role within the museum and the arts sector.

He is a highly impactful, strategic human resources, equality, diversity, inclusion and wellbeing thought leader, with a proven ability to improve workforce diversity, cultural change and inclusion and wellbeing in many organizations. He has a strong sense of empathy, which has enabled him to co-design and deliver multiple change programmes, events and activities that promote and improve inclusion, realising benefits across the employee life cycle, service design and provision and developing great community relations.

Speaker

Reyahn King, Consultant, Facilitator and Executive Coach

Reyahn King is a consultant with strategic leadership experience including as Chief Executive of York Museums Trust where she led significant EDI culture change. At York she provided a platform for ethnically diverse artists and introduced the city to issues facing the global majority that few had  previously engaged with. At Birmingham Museums she led a partnership programme that successfully engaged Black and Muslim audiences. As a curator she has brought Black and Asian artists to the fore including curating the first Aubrey Williams exhibition at a national institution at the Walker Art Gallery and a retrospective of Anwar Shemza at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Reyahn was Curator of the ground-breaking National Portrait Gallery exhibition Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters in 1997, an exhibition which is now seen as an early example of decolonising practice. 

Speaker

Virajita Singh, Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Virajita Singh is Minneapolis Institute of Art’s inaugural Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer. She leads the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Division that oversees Mia’s HR Department and partners with all divisions, departments and individuals across Mia to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, access and belonging in the museum’s internal and external work. Virajita was formerly Associate Vice Provost at the University of Minnesota’s Office for Equity & Diversity where she led initiatives with 17 colleges and 5 campuses. Trained as an architect, she was also faculty in the University of Minnesota’s College of Design where she founded and led Design for Community Resilience, a program that worked to bring participatory, sustainable and regenerative design to communities in rural and urban Minnesota and for four years led the initiative Design Thinking@College of Design that partnered with non-profits to innovate in areas of social justice, DEI and sustainability. Virajita brings this expertise in architecture, design thinking, equity, diversity and inclusion and community-based and regenerative participatory practices towards achieving inclusive excellence and innovation in an encyclopedic museum context.

Rachael Browning, Deputy Director of Programme and Policy, Art Fund

Rachael Browning is Deputy Director of Program and Policy. As a senior member of the Art Fund team she is involved in the strategy, planning and delivery of the charity’s grant-making program, policy and advocacy work. As a part of this role she collaborates closely with colleagues across the museums, heritage, funding and visual arts sectors to help shape and inform the program, including the development of new projects, research and campaigns.

Deborah Cullen-Morales, Program Officer, Arts and Culture Office, Mellon Foundation

Deborah Cullen-Morales, PhD, is a program officer for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation. Previously, she served as executive director of the Bronx Museum of the Arts; director and chief curator of the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University; director of curatorial programs at El Museo del Barrio; and curator of the print collection at Robert Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop. Focused on modern and contemporary Latinx, Caribbean, and African American art, Cullen-Morales is currently co-editing A Handbook of Latinx Art (UC Press). Recent curatorial projects include Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking, organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, which toured from 2020 through 2022.

Errol Francis, Artistic Director and CEO, Culture&

Dr. Errol Francis is artistic director and CEO of Culture&. Errol studied photography and fine art at Central Saint Martin’s, University of the Arts London. His doctoral research at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London focused on postcolonial artistic responses to museums.

Errol works with museums on collaborative public programs and consultancy. He also leads the New Museum School (NMS) which partners with the University of Leicester to provide studentships for people from diverse communities. NMS enables them to pursue studies in museum studies and socially engaged practice to progress their careers in the heritage sector. Errol is involved in a number of research projects and is visiting lecturer at UCL, Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Honorary Lecturer at the University of Exeter and Visiting Fellow at the University of Leicester.

susan pui san lok, Artist and Director, UAL Decolonising Arts Institute

susan pui san lok < 駱 佩 珊 > susan, lok pui san is an artist, writer and academic based in London, exhibiting and publishing nationally and internationally since the mid-1990s. Her practice ranges across installation, moving image, sound and text. Recent exhibitions and projects include REWIND/REPLAY (2022-23), commissioned for Netwerk Aalst (Belgium), Van Abbemuseum (NL) and Villa Arson (France ); Found Cities, Lost Objects, curated by Lubaina Himid at  Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Southampton City Art Gallery (UK); and Centenary (2022), commissioned by Create London for the Becontree Centenary programme. She is Professor in Contemporary Art and Director of the Decolonising Arts Institute at University of the Arts London, currently leading the AHRC project, Transforming Collections and the 20/20 programme. From 2015 to 2018, she was Co-Investigator on the AHRC project, Black Artists and Modernism led by Professor Sonia Boyce and UAL in partnership with Middlesex University.

Mia Locks, Co-Founder and Co-Director, Museums Moving Forward

Mia Locks is an independent curator based in Los Angeles. She worked as a museum curator for more than a decade at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), The Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1, New York. In 2020, Locks co-founded Museums Moving Forward, a data-driven research organization that focuses on equity in the U.S. art museum sector, where she is currently Co-Director. She serves as an editorial advisor on podcasts about art and culture, among them "Hope & Dread: The Tectonic Shifts of Power in Art" and “The Art World: What If?!” She also serves on the board of Clockshop, a Los Angeles-based organization that works at the intersection of art and public land. She was a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) in New York and serves as a mentor for the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color (PACC), a program of the American Association of Museum Curators (AAMC). Locks graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Visual Art and holds an M.A. in Public Art Studies with a Certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California (USC).