Speaker Bios

Dr. Christine Checinska is the Victoria and Albert Museum’s inaugural senior curator of Africa and Diaspora textiles and fashion. She is also lead curator of the museum’s international touring exhibition Africa Fashion. Checinska is a board member of the British Textile Biennial and director at large for the Textile Society of America; she also serves on the visual arts committee at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Tremaine Emory, founder of Denim Tears, uses visual storytelling in his clothing designs to traverse the intersection between fashion, music, and culture. At No Vacancy Inn, the global creative collective that Emory co-founded, he spearheads collaborations centered on contemporary art. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Emory has worked with Theaster Gates, Hank Willis Thomas, Virgil Abloh, Frank Ocean, André 3000, and Serge Becker, among many others.

Joelle Firzli is a multicultural independent fashion scholar who explores the intersection between fashion and cultural sustainability, particularly in West Africa and the Middle East and North Africa regions. Firzli serves as part-time faculty at Parsons School of Design and at the College of DuPage. She holds a BA in political science from the Lebanese American University and an MA in fashion studies from Parsons School of Design.

Teleica Kirkland is a lecturer in Cultural and Historical Studies at the University of the Arts London: London College of Fashion; a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London; and the founder and creative director of the Costume Institute of the African Diaspora (CIAD), an organization dedicated to developing resources and building curricula about dress and adornment cultures from the African Diaspora.

Lia Samantha Lozano is a fashion designer and a pioneer of Afro-Colombian fashion. She was inspired by her community’s aesthetics to create her eponymous brand, Lia Samantha, which translates the power of Black and Indigenous peoples’ cosmovisions, traditions, wisdom, spirituality, and beauty into contemporary design. 

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square is the assistant professor of Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Cornell University. Previously, he taught in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University and was a fellow in the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Dr. Pamela Newkirk is a journalist, author, New York University professor, and multidisciplinary scholar whose work examines contemporary and historical depictions of African Americans in popular culture. Her last book, Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business (2019), was included in Time magazine’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2019.” Newkirk was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Christopher L. Richards is an associate professor of African art history at Brooklyn College. He specializes in African fashion, dress, and personal adornment. Richards has published extensively on dress and fashion in Ghana and South Africa, including his most-recently published book, Cosmopolitanism and Women’s Fashion in Ghana (2022).

Dr. Tamara J. Walker is an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research interests focus on slavery, gender, and racial formation in Latin America; their legacies in the modern era; and global Black mobility. Walker is the author, most recently, of Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (2023). Her first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (2017), won the 2018 Harriet Tubman Prize. She is currently working on a book about whiteness in Latin American visual culture.

Elizabeth Way is associate curator of costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the curator of Africa’s Fashion Diaspora. She edited Black Designers in American Fashion (2021), Ann Lowe: American Couturier (2023), and Africa’s Fashion Diaspora (2024). She holds an MA in costume studies from New York University.

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