The STP team is made up of artists, scholars, and cultural workers.

Michaela Leslie-Rule

Michaela Leslie-Rule is an artist and social scientist. She uses photography and film to explore, document and sometimes build participatory traditions. Over the past decade she has been fortunate to collaborate with communities on four continents, exploring a broad array of social issues and practices including: sexual and reproductive health rights in Tanzania; agricultural and culinary knowledge held by elders in the Mississippi Delta; and the lives of market women in Gisenyi, Rwanda. Michaela holds Masters of Public Health and Public Administration from the University of Washington with a focus on advocacy and multimedia storytelling in global health. She also earned a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Learn more about Michaela’s work on her website.

Ron Ragin

Ron Ragin writes, sings, composes, and makes interdisciplinary performance work that integrates sound, text, and movement. His creative interests include music of the African Diaspora, embodied ancestral memory, improvisational creative processes, liberation aesthetics, and the development and maintenance of spiritual technologies. Ron grew up in Perry, Georgia and received his musical training at the Saint James Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. He's had the honor of performing with brilliant souls like Amara Tabor-Smith and Laurel Butler, studying his crafts with luminaries such as Joy Harjo and Brenda Wong Aoki, and being a soloist on Christopher Tin’s Grammy Award-winning album Calling All Dawns. He also makes a mean red velvet cake and can throw down on some biscuits.

T. Carlis Roberts

T. Carlis Roberts is a scholar and artist based in Oakland. They are Associate Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley, where they teach courses on popular and folk music in the Americas. T has published work on music, race, and politics including Resounding Afro Asia: Interracial Music and the Politics of Collaboration, Yellow Power Yellow Soul: The Radical Art of Fred Ho, and articles in multiple journals, anthologies, and blogs. T is also a composer, songwriter, performer, and sound designer who has worked nationally and internationally in theater, dance, and film. Learn more about T's artistic and scholarly work on their website.