Meet the Dream-Shaping Advisory Team
Who do/would you turn to for guidance in your work?
For the three-year Mellon Foundation-funded grant we call Dream-Shaping Our Community, it was important for us to have a team of folks outside of our project teams to help keep us accountable and highlight potential unseen gaps.
We’re so excited to introduce the Dream-Shaping Advisory Team:
Zakiya Collier
Zakiya Collier (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based, Black, queer archivist and memory worker. She is a member of Shift Collective where she supports communities in collectively developing cultural memory practices and designing sustainable programs to preserve and share their own stories. Their recent work includes serving as the first Digital Archivist at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Archivist for the visual artist, Marilyn Nance; and Co-Editor of a special double issue of The Black Scholar on Black Archival Practice. She is a recipient of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar’s Diverse Voices Fellowship; the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York’s Educational Use of Archives Award for her work on #SchomburgSyllabus; an Archival Achievement Award for “Linking Lost Jazz Shrines;” and an Equity-in-Action Grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council. She holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, an MLIS from Long Island University, and a BA in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina.
Twanna Hodge
Twanna Hodge is a second-year Ph.D. student in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research is focused on the mental health information behavior of BIPOC Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museum (GLAM) employees, LIS students, and Afro-Caribbean immigrants, cultural humility, and the retention of BIPOC workers in GLAM. She is a 2013 Spectrum Scholar She was an academic librarian for over seven years.
Gabriel Solís
Prior to returning to Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) as its executive director in 2016, Gabriel worked as a capital post-conviction investigator for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs, researcher at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and coordinator of the Guantánamo Bay Oral History Project at the Columbia Center for Oral History Research. Gabriel also advises and consults on a range of projects and initiatives, including the Ford Foundation’s Reclaiming the Border Narrative initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project, the UCLA Archiving the Age of Mass Incarceration project, Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity, a project documenting the experiences of parents separated from their children at the U.S./Mexico border, Shift Collective’s Historypin Research Faculty, and the Advisory Board for the Community-Centered Archives Practice: Transforming Education, Archives, and Community History (C-CAP TEACH) project at UC Irvine. Gabriel is the recipient of the 2018 Pushcart Prize for nonfiction. His writings have appeared in Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, Oxford American, Scalawag, Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power, and Kula: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies. In 2023, Gabriel was honored as the University of California Regents Fellow in Information Studies.
Laura Tadena
Laura Tadena (she/her/ella) is the Community Engagement Librarian at Austin Public Library, where she leads system-wide community engagement efforts, helps cultivate partnerships, and manages system impact projects designed to uplift the Austin area community. Laura has over 15 years of experience working in public service and has a background in architecture and urban design, education, and organizational development. Laura specializes in addressing inequities in the built environment, creating inclusive and welcoming library spaces and services, and fostering community development through meaningful engagement. Her research interests include social impact in public services, community development, and advancing equity in the workplace.