Speakers

A’Keitha Carey is a Bahamian artist, educator, scholar, mother, and activist. She developed the dance technique CaribFunk, a fusion of Afro‐Caribbean, ballet, modern, and fitness principles and rooted in Africanist and Euro-American aesthetics. She holds a B.A. and M.F.A. in Dance, an M.A. in African and African Diaspora Studies, a Graduate Certificate in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Global Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University (anthropology track). Her dissertation is titled Hip-Mancipation: Erotic Performance and Black Female Subjectivity in Jamaican Dancehall, which examines the meaning of women’s performance in Jamaican Dancehall and more broadly, how women interpret and understand agency, liberation, and erotic subjectivity in performance. Some of her publications include: “Junkanoo/Junka(new): The History and Aesthetic Contributions of a Bahamian Cultural Performance”; “Junkanoo and Carnival as Theoretical Frameworks: A Pedagogical Narrative”; “CaribFunk: A Dance Technology, Praxis, and Educational System”; “Visualizing Caribbean Performance (Jamaican Dancehall and Trinidadian Carnival) as Praxis: An Autohistoria of KiKi’s Journey”; “Black Motherhood and Activism: A Radical Movement In the Academy and Beyond”; “CaribFunk Technique: A New Feminist/Womanist Futuristic Technology in Black Dance Studies”; “Roots and Culture: Exploring Afro Caribbean Music and Dance in the Classroom” and “Escape Routes and Roots to Freedom: Rewriting the Narrative of The Vulgar Body. A’Keitha is also a Global Dance Writer, Archivist (she created Bahamian Dance History on IG and FB), Blogger, and Curriculum Consultant. She is a cofounder of The Florida Black Dance Artist Organization, a member of Olujimi Dance Theatre, and a personal fitness coach.

Shelly Justement serves as an archivist for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. In her role as a project archivist for the Community Collections Grant (CCG), she manages born-digital, community-generated ethnographic archival assets across all stages of their information lifecycle. Shelly holds Master’s degrees in History and Information and Library Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has served as an archivist at the Archives of American Art, the Feminist Majority Foundation, and the Center for Global Migration Studies. Throughout her career, Shelly has remained dedicated to expanding public access to collections that amplify historically underrepresented community voices.

Allina Migoni is a reference librarian for the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Allina holds graduate degrees in Latin American studies and Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining the reference team, she worked as a cataloger and acquisitions librarian for the South America Section of the Library’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate. Working with researchers and the general public, she provides research assistance and access to the American Folklife Center’s Archive of Folk Culture and the greater Library’s collections, with an expertise in Latine, Latin American, and Spanish language materials.

Lea Nickless is a multimedia artist, researcher, and curator based in Coconut Grove, Florida, and Saluda, North Carolina. Her current work explores the connections among place, memory, and history, with particular attention to the Bahamian communities that helped shape South Florida. She is the creator of Beloved, an ongoing art and research project dedicated to recovering and sharing the histories of those buried in Coconut Grove’s historic Black cemeteries. Through archival research and artistic interpretation, the project brings individual lives into a broader conversation about migration, community, and remembrance. Her recent exhibition, The Magic of Miami Beach (2026), examines the city’s development through the often-overlooked labor of Bahamian immigrants and the transformation of South Florida’s natural environment. In 2024, Nickless retired from The Wolfsonian–FIU after nearly forty years working closely with its founder, Mitchell “Micky” Wolfson Jr. She helped build and research its collection and develop educational programming. Her curatorial projects include Aerial Vision (2021), Plotting Power: Maps and the Modern Age(2022), Harry Clarke and the Geneva Window (2023), and Smoke Signals: Cigar Cutters and Masculine Values (2024). 

Dr. Valerie Lyles Patterson is a Professor in the Public Policy & Administration program at Florida International University (FIU) and served as the director of FIU’s African & African Diaspora Studies program from 2020 to 2026. Her research examines post racial performance of race, gender and policing in majority-minority communities, and the history and lasting impact of Bahamian immigrants in the founding and building of the City of Miami. Her most recent art exhibit, Women of Washington Avenue: Fiber Art as Commemoration was presented at Vizcaya Museum & Garden as a part of its series, The Rich & Forgotten History of Black Coconut Grove in February 2025. Through collage, assemblage, ephemera, photography, textile work, storytelling, and mixed-media experimentation, Valerie's studio work and art practice foregrounds the material traces of Black life as carriers of history and cultural knowledge. Grounded in archival material, she incorporates historical fragments, family photographs, found objects, and layered visual narratives as tools for examining how communities remember, endure, migrate, resist, and reimagine themselves across generations and geographies. Her art and teaching pay particular attention to the African Atlantic diaspora and the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural flows connecting African American, Bahamian, and broader diasporic experiences.

A native of The Bahamas, Sasha C. Wells is an Assistant Professor of History at University of The Bahamas and a fourth-year PhD Candidate in Atlantic History at Florida International University. Wells has Wells’ dissertation is tentatively titled, “‘The Looks of a Complete Villain’: Black Networks in the Colonial Bahamas, 1760s-1834” and focuses on Black networks in the 18th and 19th century Bahamas. By examining movement, the project demonstrates how Bahamian networks form part of a larger story of mobility and interconnection in the Atlantic world. For her work, Wells has received a Houghton Visting Fellowship, a SHEAR DEI Fellowship, and Library Travel Grants from University of Florida’s Latin American Center. Wells has published public-facing pieces in Time Magazine’s Made by History, Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, and FIU’s The Millennium. Additionally, she has co-authored a book review in the American Historical Review. Outside of academia, Wells does history and literature content creation on TikTok and Instagram under @bahareads.