Shonda Rhimes is an award-winning television creator, producer and author, as well as the CEO of the global media company, Shondaland. Rhimes is the first woman to create three television dramas—Grey's Anatomy, Private Practice and Scandal—that have achieved the 100-episode milestone. For five TV seasons, award-winning Shondaland shows Grey's Anatomy, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder occupied ABC's entire Thursday night schedule, creating a powerful brand well-known to fans and advertisers as TGIT.

In 2017, Rhimes shifted the entertainment industry's business model when she left network television to exclusively produce streaming content in partnership with Netflix. Bridgerton, Shondaland's first scripted series with the streamer, has become a worldwide franchise. Seasons of Bridgerton currently hold three of the ten top spots among English language programming for Netflix. Rhimes also scripted the popular Bridgerton prequel series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, limited series Inventing Anna based on the popular New York Magazine article about the fake German heiress, Anna Delvey. Rhimes also executive produced Netflix's recent The Residence, starring Emmy award winner Uzo Aduba, as well as documentaries Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker, highlighting the legendary choreographer Debbie Allen and Black Barbie which chronicles the creation of the first-ever black Barbie doll.

Shonda Rhimes is a New York Times best-selling author for her memoir Year of Yes and has built multi-platform partnerships with such leading brands as Dove, Peloton, St. John, Masterclass, Microsoft and Mattel.

Rhimes is also the founder of The Rhimes Foundation, whose mission is to support arts, education and activism. She serves on the boards of several non-profit organizations—including the American Film Institute, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, Dartmouth College, Lincoln Center and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In addition, Rhimes is on special committees for the USC Film Council and the Obama Foundation.

Rhimes' has three times been included in the TIME 100 list of most influential people, has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her service to US / UK relations and her work has been celebrated with numerous awards including induction into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.

Roopika Risam is Chair of the Film & Media Studies Department and Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies & Comparative Literature. Dr. Risam's research focuses on data histories, ethics and practices at intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, digital humanities and critical university studies. Risam received the Massachusetts Library Association Civil Liberties Champion Award (2018) for her work promoting equity and justice in the digital cultural record and the 2023 International Association for Research in Service Learning and Community Engagement Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award for her work on anti-racist community engagement.

Her publications include authoring New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2019), co-editing four collections: Anti-Racist Community Engagement (2023), The Digital Black Atlantic (2021), South Asian Digital Humanities (2020), and Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (2019). She is currently finishing her second book, Insurgent Academics: A Radical Account of Public Humanities (Johns Hopkins UP), which traces a new history of university-community engagement through the unsung work of Black, Brown and Indigenous scholars.

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