Affiliate Scholars, Activists, and Artists

Dr. Aminah Pilgrim has taught in the Dept. of Africana Studies at UMass Boston for the past 17 years. She is an affiliated faculty member of the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies at Bridgewater State University. Her areas of research include late 19th and 20th century African-American history, African-American women’s history, African Diaspora studies, Cabo Verdean studies, education research and critical hip hop studies. She is the founder of the HIPHOP Initiative, and MEMORIA Oral History Project. She is the Co-founder (with Anita Monteiro) of SABURA Youth Program in Brockton, MA, and the Co-founder (with Dr. Terza Lima-Neves) of PODEROZA: International Conference on Cabo Verdean Women. In addition to community organizing, Pilgrim has experience as a visual artist, writer, and public speaker.

mYia X is a proud Jamaican born and Boston based poet, intellectual, activist, healer, and abolitionist. She has over two decades of experience organizing to free political prisoners.

Dr. Kristen J. Maye Focuses her research on engagements with political theory and questions at the intersection of slavery, neoliberalism and gender. She is interested in exploring the position of anti-Blackness in progressive civil society and thinking through how anti-Blackness impacts Western conceptions of what it means to be human. Kristen spent the time between her undergraduate studies and her return to school working in criminal justice and drug policy reform in New York City. In her spare time she enjoys biking and beer.

Master printmaker, Jacques Bidon, formerly a commercial printer who left the world of cutthroat deadlines to work with artists and designers alike. Sharing his love of offset and letterpress printing is a blessing. He believes in the power of printing to change just about anything. With three decades of a career in commercial printing to draw upon for your printing solutions, he founded the Bidon Community Print and Design Studio. "What makes us unique is that you have the option to be part of the print process from start to finish if you choose to. We also offer 1 on 1 classes where you can learn how to print your project on the offset and letterpress." In his spare time when he's not working on someone else's project he makes his own art using traditional and non-traditional print mediums like the letterpress, etching presses and offset. He also mentore some of the kids from the youth program and some that aren’t from the youth program when they come to the print shop.