Constance Lewis: Chairperson

Constance Lewis holds a Fine Art degree in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. She founded Opal Gallery, an artist collective that exhibited the work of an international array of artists. She has studied photography conservation in Paris, France and her independent curatorial work includes exhibitions in Paris, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Mississippi.

Constance’s passion is to highlight marginalized artists, and she has a deep interest in promoting photography within a broader context. In addition to her work in photography, Constance holds an advanced degree in Education with an emphasis on Visual Literacy from Rice University. She currently resides in New Orleans and Houston, where she has been lecturer and educator, and where she launched Opal Art Management, offering advising and curatorial services to artists, collectors, and institutions.

Faith Webber Wade: Treasurer

Faith Webber Wade is from Galveston, TX and holds a BA in Art History and Linguistics and an MA in Museum Studies from Georgetown University, as well as a certificate in Art Business from Sotheby's Institute of Art in London, UK. She is a part-time French Quarter resident with deep familial roots in the New Orleans area.

She spent nearly 10 years of her professional career working in arts education for large museum systems and through grant-funded, grassroots Collective Impact initiatives. Faith has also focused her energies on programs and policies to equalize public education opportunities for her community. She has served as Legislative Aide for the Texas House of Representatives, utilizing her expertise on policy related to Public Education and Higher Education. These two passions–equitable access to education and the arts–drive her work in arts education advocacy.

Faith splits her time between New Orleans and Houston, and currently works in marketing and communications for an architectural engineering firm.

Mark Specht: Secretary

Mark Specht is the founder and former president of Cool Roofs St. Louis . He has also created maps for the Preservation Research Office’s nominations that put several St. Louis neighborhoods on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Mark has served Cinema St. Louis’s St. Louis International Film Festival and Classic French Film Festival since 2010, including conducting post-screening, on-stage interviews with scores of filmmakers. Most recently, he has served as co-programmer of the 2024 Roberts Classic French Film Festival, festival organizer and programmer of Still/Motion: the Festival of Photography in Film.

Mark holds a master of social work degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree from Illinois State University. He currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Simon Blake: Advisory Board

Simon Blake is a New Orleans-based collage artist and mixed-media filmmaker. Simon  studied graphic design, illustration and mixed-media film in England. He has created film titles for numerous Hollywood and British screen feature films and had a brief stint at the BBC. He has worked for a number of film production companies around the United States directing commercials and mixed media projects for numerous Fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Crystal Hot Sauce, Sony, Samsung, AT&T, Chase Bank, Levi Strauss & Co., United Airlines, The Jazz and Heritage Festival, American Cancer Society, Crystal Hot Sauce, Entergy, Nestlé, Audubon Zoo, Charles Schwab, Maine State Lottery, Heineken, Hershey, Disney, Crayola, New York Lottery and many others.

His work has been shown at Sundance, has garnered two AICP awards and is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Additionally, his artwork can be found in private collections around the USA, Australia and Europe.

Joy Boyde: Advisory Board

Among her multiple talents, Joy Boyde is an academic, entrepreneur, activist and community organizer from Los Angeles, CA. She is a graduate of Howard University and currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Jerry Cullum, Ph.D: Advisory Board

Jerry Cullum is a freelance curator and art critic living in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Cullum holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Emory University and an M.A. in the history of religions from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of local and national publications, including Art Papers, which he has served in an editorial role since 1984.

He was an art critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1988 to 2008, and the Atlanta contributor to ARTnews, Art in America, Raw Vision, International Journal of African-American Art, and other esteemed art publications. Cullum has taught at Emory University and The Atlanta College of Art. He has continued to publish essays on such topics as religious aspects of visionary folk art and “History of Religions and Cultural Fashions Revisited.”

Binh Danh: Advisory Board

Binh Danh (MFA Stanford; BFA San Jose State University) emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war. His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on nineteenth-century photographic processes, applying them in an investigation of battlefield landscapes and contemporary memorials. A recent series of daguerreotypes celebrated the United States National Park system during its anniversary year.

His work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The DeYoung Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, the George Eastman Museum, and many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, and in 2012 he was a featured artist at the 18th Biennale of Sydney in Australia.

He is represented by Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Phoenix, AZ. He lives and works in San Jose, CA and teaches photography at San Jose State University.

Nell Dickerson: Advisory Board

Nell Dickerson is a published author and an award-winning, internationally exhibited photographer. She divides her time between the USA and Africa, where she photographs endangered wildlife and participates in wildlife conservation.

Nell holds a BA degree in Anthropology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas; a BFA in Film and Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. After a ten-year career working in Hollywood as an art director, Nell earned a Masters of Architecture degree from the University of New Mexico and practiced as a project manager for major infrastructure projects throughout the USA.

A former resident of Los Angeles and New Orleans, when not in Memphis, she is in Africa.

Ernest Jolly: Advisory Board

Ernest Jolly is a visual artist, curator, and community arts advisor. He creates dynamic environments through sculptural forms, video/sound installation, and collaboration with performers. His work, exhibited nationally and internationally, addresses the overlapping social, spatial, and technological systems affecting the industrial city and nature through time, presenting possible outcomes and imagined futures.

Originally from Cleveland, OH, Jolly has earned a BA in Studio Art from San Francisco State University, MFA (Studio Art) from Mills College, and achieved his postgraduate studies at the Budapest Hungarian Academy of Art/Goldsmiths College London.

He has served on the Oakland Public Arts Advisory Committee, Berkeley Art Center Board, and currently holds a position with the Alameda County Arts Commission-District 5. He is the Gallery Manager and Education Coordinator at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, U.C. Berkeley and co-owner of Idora Park Project Space in Oakland, California.

Ernest lives and works in Oakland, CA, a place he considers a “bookend” to his other favorite city of New Orleans.

Hanna Miller: Advisory Board

Hanna Lane Miller is a documentary filmmaker from Collins, Mississippi.  She has partnered with the New York Times, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Rolling Stone, POV, Independent Lens, and more. Her Op-Doc, We Became Fragments, was considered for an Oscar nomination, received an IDA nomination, and won Best Documentary at LA International Shorts Film Festival. In 2020, Hanna won the Best Cinematography Award at Georgia Shorts Film Festival for her camera work, and in 2021, Hanna won an Edward R. Murrow Award in the news documentary category for her editing work. She is currently working on her first feature documentary film, a film supported by the Bay Area Video Coalition's MediaMaker Fellowship, the Mississippi Arts Commission, New Orleans Film Festival's South Pitch, and more.

In 2013, Hanna graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Sewanee: The University of the South, where she earned degrees in Russian, American Studies, and Women's Studies. After a Fulbright year in Russia, Hanna worked in TV Production at Mississippi Public Broadcasting before then enrolling at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. In conjunction with film work, Hanna is the Creative Director for an artist-powered hotel group called Travelers Hotels, where she oversees artist residencies, programming for the community, and creative content.

Dr. Jerry Cullum, Ph.D: Advisory Board

Jerry Cullum is a freelance curator and art critic living in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Cullum holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Emory University and an M.A. in the history of religions from the University of California at Santa Barbara. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in a wide variety of local and national publications, including Art Papers, which he has served in an editorial role since 1984. 

Dr. Cullum was an art critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1988 to 2008, and the Atlanta contributor to ARTnews, Art in America, Raw Vision, International Journal of African-American Art, and other esteemed art publications. Cullum has taught at Emory University and The Atlanta College of Art. He has continued to publish essays on such topics as religious aspects of visionary folk art and “History of Religions” and “Cultural Fashions Revisited.”

Lonnie Graham, Advisory Board 

Lonnie Graham, is an artist, photographer, cultural activist , and educator whose work addresses the integral role of the artist in society and seeks to re-establish artists as creative problem solvers. He is a Pew Fellow and Professor at Pennsylvania State University. Professor Graham is formerly Acting Associate Director of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Graham also served as Director of Photography at Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, an urban arts organization dedicated to arts and education for at-risk youth. There, Graham developed innovative pilot projects merging Arts and Academics, which were ultimately cited by, then, First Lady Hillary Clinton as a National Model for Arts Education.

He also served as an instructor of special projects and as an oral historian for the original Barnes Foundation in Merion Pennsylvania. In 1986, Professor Graham authored a project entitled, “A Conversation with the World,” which has been commissioned in various iterations in a number of countries.   A 2012 collaboration with Carrie Mae Weems, “Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me” now resides permanently at the Smithsonian as it was acquired in December, 2021. Graham’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery for American Art in Andover, MA and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA, and the Datz Museum in Seoul, Korea, where he was artist in residence in 2021.  He has served as Executive Director of the Photo Alliance of San Francisco, CA , and as Chairman of the Board of Directors at the San Francisco Art Institute.  He is the author of “African/American Garden Project.” which provided a physical and cultural exchange of disadvantaged urban single mothers in Pittsburgh, and farmers from Muguga, a small farming village in Kenya, to build a series of subsistence gardens.

He currently lives and works in Pennsylvania. 

Erika Diettes, Advisory Board

Erika Diettes Erika Diettes was born in Cali, Colombia, in 1978. She has a degree in social communication from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and an MA in Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. This dual focus on visual art and communication is reflected in her art and in her publications, which establish an intimate dialogue between the subject, the work and its audience through a synthesis of image, concept and process.

In Colombia, she has presented exhibitions in the principal museums of the country including Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Museo Nacional de Colombia, Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Museo de Antioquia, (Medellín). Internationally, she has exhibited in Argentina, Australia, Chile, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico, Poland, Spain and USA, in such prestigious institutions as the Fine Arts Museum (Houston), Centro Cultural Recoleta (Buenos Aires), and ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City). In 2017, Erika Diettes was awarded a fellowship by the World Press Photo Foundation and, in 2018, a fellowship by the Tim Hetherington Trust.

She currently lives and works in Bogota and Medellin Colombia.