Alisa Swindell
Associate Curator of Photography, The Hood Museum
Alisa is an art historian specializing in the history of photography with a focus on race and sexuality. Most recently she was a curatorial research associate at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She has been an independent curator, a Romare Bearden Minority Graduate Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum, and a Dangler Intern and curatorial researcher in the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Photography. She is completing her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a concentration in gender and women's studies; she holds MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of New Orleans as well as a BA from Bryn Mawr College.

Jason Moran
Pianist and composer Jason Moran has established himself as a risk-taker and trendsetter for new directions in jazz. Moran's incomparable talent and unyielding drive toward innovation earned him a prestigious MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship and the title of Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz. Since 2000, Moran and his trio The Bandwagon (Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits) have dazzled audiences at elite venues worldwide. Moran has also performed with many acclaimed artists such as Charles Lloyd and Dave Holland, he composed a ballet for Alzonzo King LINES Ballet, conceived a jazz and skateboarding collaboration, wrote the film score for Selma, and paid homage to two legendary pianists in his Blue Note album, All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller, and his multimedia program, In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall 1959. A prolific composer, Moran released two albums in 2018 – Looks of a Lot, which was commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Center, and Music for Joan Jonas, a collaboration with performance artist Joan Jonas containing excerpts from three of their major collaborations. The Los Angeles Times hails Moran, "a startlingly gifted pianist with a relentless thirst for experimentation."