Jean Eddy Saint Paul Jean Eddy Saint Paul is a professor and the founding director of the Haitian Studies Institute at Brooklyn College. Dr. Saint Paul earned a Ph.D. in Sociology in 2008 at El Colegio de México and he has conducted theoretical and applied research in Haiti and Mexico. His ample publishing history includes book, articles, and contributions dealing with civil society, political sociology of the Haitian state and ruling class; the intersection between politics and religion. His works have been published in international academic and commercial publishers. 
An accomplished scholar, Dr. Saint Paul has been a member of the National System of Scholars at the National Council of Science and Technology, in Mexico. He was in residence in Paris as a Visiting Fellow at the CERI-SciencesPo. Also, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Woodson Institute for AA & AS at the University of Virginia. Currently, he is working on three book project: Between Two Worlds: Jean Price-Mars, Haiti and Africa; Civil Society and Politics of Memory in Haiti and Duvalierism, Rhetoric and Political Practices.

In 1977,  Lida Orzeck co-founded Hanky Panky, the globally distributed Made-in-USA lingerie brand whose goals have always been quality, comfort and great looks provided by an ethically-focused business. 
Her circuitous path to the fashion industry began with a BA in Psychology from Barnard, a PhD in Social Psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University and research stints with the NYC Police Department and Health and Hospitals Corporation, studying the interview process of detectives in the Sex Crimes Unit and then the emergency medical services delivery system, and making recommendations for improvement in both. Lida’s philanthropic interests are various, including the arts, educational equity and social justice.  She is currently on the boards of Barnard College, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the International Organization for Women and Development (which provides obstetric fistula repair surgery in Rwanda) and is a past board member of Doug Varone & Dancers.
Lida served as co-executive producer of the award-winning webseries, Anyone But Me, and lead producer of the Off-Broadway play, 20th Century Blues.  In 2015 she endowed the rotating Distinguished  Artist-in-Residence chair at Barnard, whose inaugural recipient was the illustrious dancer, Wendy Whelan, and which is currently funding the globally-recognized visual artist, Toyin Ojih Odutola.

Myriam Augustin is presently a Resource Specialist at the NYS Language RBERN at New York University. She has many years of experience in the field of education in the U.S., southern and West Africa, and Haiti. Her expertise encompasses bilingual and ESL/EFL education, teacher education and training, international education, elementary education, girls’ education, youth and parent development, and educational research. She has held various positions at the NYC Department of Education. She has taught at several universities, including: Seton Hall University, NJ; City College of CUNY; Teachers College, Columbia University; and Hunter College of CUNY. She has been a director of programs for several American international NGOs in many countries in West Africa.
As an educational leader, she has co-developed early childhood programs in southern Africa. As part of the CUNY/Haiti initiative, Ms. Augustin has taught at two public universities in Haiti. She is also a respected leader in the NY Haitian community, for her advocacy for immigrant students and their families. Ms. Augustin holds two Masters Degrees from the Bank Street College of Education and is completing an Ed. D. in International Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Jessica Dell graduated from CUNY School of Law in 2005. At CUNY Ms. Dell spent three semesters in the school’s award-winning clinical programs including The Economic Justice Project. She represented indigent clients in family court and administrative proceedings and authored successful immigration petitions under the Violence Against Women Act. 
Ms. Dell interned at the Urban Justice Center and was the recipient of an Everett fellowship for her work in the HIV/AIDS division and at Human Rights Watch.   Ms. Dell focuses her practice on securities fraud litigation.  She has also worked in complex Pro Bono litigation at Pomerantz. Ms. Dell is admitted to practice in New York.

Marsha Jean-Charles is a Ph.D. student in Africana Studies, interested in transnational literary studies of black women’s coming-of-age, (im)migration novels and conceptualizations of black feminisms in the contemporary moment. Ever intrigued by the transformations of protagonists in texts that enhance understandings of cosmologies and revolutionary politics aroused from intersectional identity formation, forced migration, and statelessness, Marsha’s research itself exists at the intersection of radical politics, identity, and art. She explores these sites by advancing two concepts, “Black Feminist Citizenship” and “Dyaspora Saudade.” In discussing artists of the African—and principally Haitian—diaspora in the USA, Cuba, and Brazil, she seeks to use these terms to catalogue their rebellions.
An organizer at her core, she fuses her academic work with her activist work and expands understandings of the uses of literary and performance art as tools for activism.

Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of English and Africana Studies at Cornell University. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce Davies has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), and Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2).

Michel Frederic DeGraff is a Haitian creolist who has served on the board of the Journal of Haitian Studies. He is a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a founding member of the Haitian Creole Academy. His field of scholarship is Creole language, also known as Lang Kreyòl Linguistics. He is known for his advocacy towards the recognition of Haitian Creole as a full-fledged language. In the fall of 2012, he received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce online Creole language materials in the teaching of STEM in Haiti.
He believes that Haitian children should be taught in their native language at all levels of instruction, contrary to the tradition of teaching them in French. Degraff believes that instruction in French, a foreign language for most Haitian children, hinders their creativity and their ability to excel.