(Photo credit: Justin Shiels)

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an activist, cultural organizer, and Director of Programs at Antenna, New Orleans. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of citizens, artists, architects, and activists daring to design a new model for development that creates art and action to impact issues of blight, gentrification, and housing affordability. She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture. In 2014, Imani returned to New Orleans, her hometown as Curatorial Associate and Manager of Publications for Prospect.3, New Orleans under the Artistic Direction of Franklin Sirmans. That same year, her paper “Performing Bare Life: Occupying the Liminality between Civilizations” was named best in stream at the 5th Annual Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies in Havana, Cuba. She received her BA in Visual Arts and Anthropology from Columbia University in the City of New York in 2010. In her (currently non-existent) “free” time, Imani experiments with the ritual potential of film photography, transposing the principle of photographic soul capture to effect resistance to and transformation of hostile urban spaces.­­