• Organizer

    Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is a photographer, curator, and writer whose work explores Black diasporic communities, cultures, and memory across the African diaspora. Born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with familial roots in South Carolina, she has worked as a photographer for more than 25 years.

    Barrayn is the author of MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora and We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits, with a third book on Black photographers forthcoming. Her photography and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, BBC, and The Guardian, as well as in books including Reflections in Black: A Reframing, Photography: A Feminist History, and Dandy Lion: The Black Dandy and Street Style, among other titles. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Brighton Photo Biennial (UK), the Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial, MoMA PS1, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, among others.

    She teaches photography at Rutgers University–Newark and at the International Center of Photography, and is a graduate of New York University.

  • Organizer

    As an associate professor of African American/African Diaspora Arts in the Department of Art History at New York University, Emilie Boone studies the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora with a focus on vernacular photography and global encounters. She is the author of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (2023). Her scholarship emphasizes the complex links between the art and visual culture of the United States and global contexts and is featured in periodicals including Art History, Art Journal, American Art, and History of Photography. She is currently working on her second manuscript, a project that examines how the Caribbean can illuminate the nature of photography’s sweeping force on various interlocutors across time. The NYPL Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Clark Art Institute, and the Perez Art Museum Miami Caribbean Cultural Institute are among the most recent supporters of her research and writing. Boone’s ongoing engagement with photographic archives includes her current role as a guest curator for the 2027/2028 exhibition on James Van Der Zee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.