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Notes on Contributors
- State University of New York Press
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Notes on Contributors Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is assistant professor of African and African Diaspora religions at the Harvard Divinity School. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús is a cultural and social anthropologist who has conducted multi-site ethnographic field research with Santeria practitioners in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and Miami, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. She studies religious travel, tourism, media, and issues of race, gender, sexuality, and power. Dr. Beliso-De Jesús was a 2011 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University’s Department of Anthropology where she worked on her upcoming book manuscript on transnational Santeria between the United States and Cuba. In fall 2012 she returned to her regular position at Harvard Divinity School. Erin Dean Colcord, a lighting consultant, writer and artist, lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two kids. She grew up in Ohio and has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography from the Ohio State University. Erin lived for many years in the San Francisco Bay Area, working as an art teacher, photographer and in the lighting industry, before moving to LA. Her art covers various media, including painting, drawing and photography, and is usually made as an act of reverence, as adoration for a goddess or for a beloved friend. She is a high priestess of Come As You Are (CAYA) Coven, where she is known as “Ladybug.” Erin’s artwork expresses her worldview that all people and creatures are divine beings. Now she is working on a fiction novel featuring a witch and a tribe of mermaids living at Venice Beach. Jamie N. Davidson is an ethnographer, dancer, and mother. A PhD candidate in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at University of California, Los Angeles, Davidson is currently a Fulbright-Hays Fellow living in Brazil. Her primary area of research regards ritual dances in Afro-Brazilian religions. 279 280 Notes on Contributors Micaela Díaz-Sánchez is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish, Latina/o Studies, and Latin American studies at Mount Holyoke College where she teaches Latina/o Cultural Studies. She received her PhD from Stanford University’s Department of Drama in 2009; her dissertation is entitled (In)Between Nation and Diaspora: Performing Indigenous and African Legacies in Contemporary Chicana/o and Mexican Cultural Production. While at Stanford, she focused on directing and performing in original work by queer writers of color while working in community-based performance projects throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. After Stanford, Díaz-Sánchez was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Latina/o studies with an affiliation in African American studies at Northwestern University. At Northwestern, she was selected as Faculty Member of the Year by the Multicultural Student Affairs Office for bridging student affairs with her work in the classroom as well as for serving as a mentor to students of color on campus. While in Chicago, she immersed herself in local performance communities as a practitioner of two diasporic musical traditions, Afro-Mexican Son Jarocho and Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba, which she performed professionally as part of a Humboldt Park-based ensemble. Her article “Impossible Patriots: The Exiled Queer Citizen in Cherríe Moraga’s ‘The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea” was published in Signatures of the Past: Cultural Memory in Contemporary North American Drama. Her article on performance artists Jesusa Rodriguez and Celia Herrera-Rodriguez, entitled “Body as Codex-ized Word/Cuerpo Como Palabra (en-)Códice-ado: Chicana and Mexican Transnational Performative Indigeneities,” will be published in the forthcoming book Performing the Latina/o Borderlands. Her article about Chicago-based playwright Tanya Saracho, “Race-ing Class and Gender on the Border,” is part of a forthcoming anthology about Latina/o theater in Chicago. She is currently working on an article focusing on gender and sexuality in the contemporary practices of Bomba as well as an article about Chicana/o cultural practitioners’ part of the African Diaspora through what she conceptualizes as “Afro-Chicana/o Diasporic Aesthetics.” Nelson Eubanks, a graduate of Columbia University’s Masters of Fine Arts program in writing, is a fiction writer, sound engineer, and creator of bluethroatproductions. After publishing his first book, The First Thing Smoking, a collection of connected short stories (Ballantine 2003), Nelson took to chasing sound. Nelson has recorded parades, processions, and sounds from the oceans, rivers, jungles, juke joints, clubs, and streets of the black Diaspora, including New Orleans, Cuba, Venezuela, Peru, and Brazil. He has done sound...