Erika N. Witt is a dynamic force in the world of Museology, serving as the Director and Chief Curator of Southern University at New Orleans Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor in Museum Studies. Based in the vibrant city of New Orleans, Louisiana, she is driven by a passion for collections management and museum education, with a particular focus on the arts of Africa and the African diaspora, along with a specialization in Egyptology.
Michael Wallace is a retired military intelligence officer with 20 years of active service. His military assignments included Naval Special Warfare, Defense Human Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Post-military, he worked as a senior intelligence analyst in the Joint Chiefs of Staff Intelligence Directorate. He has experience in counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, special warfare, and intelligence collection and analysis.
Doug Thornton is a prominent sports and venue management executive who serves as the regional vice president for SMG, overseeing the Superdome and other major facilities in Louisiana. A native of Shreveport and a graduate of McNeese State, Thornton played a pivotal role in the rebuilding and reopening of the Louisiana Superdome following Hurricane Katrina, coordinating the largest stadium reconstruction project in U.S. history.
David Shipley has served as opinions editor at The Washington Post and Bloomberg and as Op-Ed editor at the New York Times. He is the co-author of SEND, a guide to email.
Mark Schleifstein retired at the end of 2024 as an environment reporter for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate | NOLA.com, and a member of its four-person environment reporting team.
In 2025, he is advising that newspaper’s environment reporting team and the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a journalism collaborative covering the nation’s largest watershed.
Michael Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard University. His books--on justice, democracy, ethics, markets, and meritocracy--have been translated into more than 30 languages. He has been described as “a rock star moralist” (Newsweek) and “the world’s most influential living philosopher.” (New Statesman)
Jacinta Saffold is currently a visiting faculty fellow in the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. She is also an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Culture at the University of Delaware and a digital archivist. She researches and teaches 20th and 21st century African American literature, Hip Hop Studies, and the Digital Humanities.
A native New Orleanian, Mark is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of New Orleans & Company, the New Orleans tourism industry’s destination marketing and sales organization.
His public relations career has spanned more than four decades and has taken him from teaching in college classrooms to the 1984 Louisiana World’s Fair, from working as a Staff Assistant to U.S. Dept. of Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole and the 1987-88 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Bob Dole, and to corporate and non-profit public relations and marketing counseling.
Nicole Richie is an American actress, TV personality, and fashion designer. She rose to fame, costarring with Paris Hilton on the reality series The Simple Life from 2003 to 2007. Richie appeared as a judge on NBC's Fashion Star and VH1's Candidly Nicole. Since 2020, she has served as a judge on AppleTV+'s Making the Cut. Richie also launched the lifestyle brand House of Harlow in 2008.
Tamara Payne served as the principal researcher and co-author on The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Award for Nonfiction, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other publications. Les Payne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who served as an editor and columnist at Newsday, worked on The Dead Are Arising for nearly thirty years.
