Melina Gooray
Melina is an arts educator and youth advocate who is invested in working in Black feminist spaces with her own community of womxn and girls of the African Diaspora. She has over ten years experience working in various capacities at the interface of museum and community for a number of cultural institutions across the country including the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, GA, The Art, Design, and Architecture Museum UCSB, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is the former Director of Education at the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia where she developed and led youth programs. In addition, she is a PhD candidate in Art History at Northwestern. Her dissertation My Body-Home interrogates West Indian diasporic ways of looking and how first generation Americans visualize, interpret and engage with the ordinary built environments they inhabit. As a researcher, Melina is committed to the vital importance of uncovering and (co)authoring the history of the communities she inhabits. She endeavors to make her scholarship relevant to her communities. In this light, she wrote her master's thesis, "Concrete Under the Guyanese Sun", on shifts in material practices in domestic vernacular architecture in her parents' hometown, Essequibo, Guyana.