Information About Contributors

Zahra Abedinezhad is a doctoral candidate in comparative studies with an interdisciplinary specialization in folklore at The Ohio State University. With a background in both law (Tarbiat Modares University, Iran) and folk studies (Western Kentucky University), she is interested in using ethnographic methods to explore the intersections between religious practices and social regulations in Iran. Her work includes the publication “Layered Meanings of Resistance Through Dress and Bodily Practices: A Case Study of Iranian Women” in Western Folklore (2023).Junious Lee Brickhouse, an Executive Board member of the American Folklore Society, is a public folklorist dedicated to exploring the impact of African American music and dance traditions on contemporary culture. As the Director of Next Level, a cultural diplomacy initiative of the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs at the US State Department, he advances global conflict transformation through hip-hop culture. As Founder and Executive Director of Urban Artistry (UA) Inc., he leads efforts in cultural preservation with projects like The Preservatory and the UA Digital Archives, which capture and celebrate the contributions of tradition bearers to urban dance and music cultures. His project Follow the Music: Exploring the Multi-Linear Legacies of House Culture, supported by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, underscores his commitment to highlighting the interconnected legacies of African American artistic traditions.Nikketa Burges, a medical anthropology graduate student at the University of Colorado Denver, has extensive professional experience in health care, homelessness, and harm reduction. A former medic in the United States Army, she advocates for culturally compassionate care for people who use drugs and their communities, with a focus on ending the War on Drugs.Tulika Chandra has a PhD in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University and is Professor of English at Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR, India. With 25 years of research experience, she specializes in folk narrative, folk belief, language development, and translation studies. She is a folklore collector and is currently working on two empirical research folklore projects that employ oral folk expressions. She is also exploring learner-centered instruction and the role of instructors in the classroom.Betsy Craft is an abolitionist and staunch advocate of health equity for sex workers, people who use criminalized drugs, and the unhoused community. She elevates living and lived expertise leadership in community-engaged research and policy advocacy through grassroots organizing and coalition-building with the Underdog Alliance, Colorado Drug Policy Coalition, and Right Response Colorado. She is a seasoned peer educator on building team resilience, compassionate overdose care, and liberatory harm reduction, and she champions anti-carceral drug policies like overdose prevention centers, peer-led respites, and safe supply.John Fenn is the Head of Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, where he leads a team involved in public programming, publications, researcher support, and collections discovery. Previously, he was Associate Professor in the Arts and Administration Program at the University of Oregon. Throughout his career, he has merged training in folklore and ethnomusicology with a commitment to documentation, public presentation, stewardship, and interpretation of cultural forms and expressions. He holds a PhD in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University.Sarah M. Gordon is Associate Professor of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She has done collaborative research in the Sahtu region of Denendeh (Northwest Territories, Canada) that remains in community possession and therefore unpublished. Additional work, which engages various dimensions of the relationship between folklore and power in online and offline spaces, has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Western Folklore, and several edited volumes.Andrés Guerrero is Director of the Overdose Prevention Unit in the Prevention Services Division at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). He has a BS in Human Physiology from Michigan State University and a Master of Public Health degree from the Colorado School of Public Health. He has been at the state health department for 15 years. His areas of interest include drug user health, population-level health of homeless and re-entry populations, and harm reduction. He currently serves as the principal investigator on the Overdose Data to Action Grant for States for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.Ashley Minner Jones is a community-based visual artist and folklorist from Baltimore, Maryland. She earned an MFA in Community Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. She has exhibited her artwork widely and is represented in several prominent collections. Her research is being archived as “The Ashley Minner Collection” in the Albin O. Kuhn Library of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is an enrolled citizen of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.Mathilde Frances Lind is an environmental folklorist and craft researcher. Her work examines how traditional textile crafts and folk ecology intertwine through wool production and processing. Her research is informed by her textile art practice, and she teaches hands-on fiber arts workshops at the Adirondack Folk School (Lake Luzerne, New York) and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (Gatlinburg, Tennessee). She is currently the Kenneth R. Trapp Craft assistant/curatorial fellow at Arrowmont and Affiliated Research Faculty at Virginia Tech.Deeksha Nagar is an ethnographer and folklorist with extensive experience in community education. In the early 1990s, Deeksha began working in creative education in India, co-authoring teaching and learning materials with the help of community members who had been deprived of formal literacy. Since earning her PhD in Folklore from Indiana University in 2002, she has served as the Curator of Education at Indiana University's Mathers Museum of World Cultures and has taught anthropology and folklore courses at the University of Northern Colorado. As a passionate and skilled writer in Hindi and English, she has published articles and book chapters and has curated exhibits on folklore, foodways, and US life.Marty Otañez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. He is a senior fellow at the Centre for Public Health Research, Manbhum Ananda Ashram Nityananda Trust (MANT) West Bengal, India. He published a co-edited series of four volumes called Breaking Stigmas: Art and Cannabis in North America (Intellect Books, 2024). He produces the community television program Getting High on Anthropology (www.FSandGreen.org/shows).Michelle Stefano is Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She is the author of Practical Considerations for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor, with Peter Davis, of The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2017), Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities (Boydell and Brewer, 2017), and Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage (Boydell and Brewer, 2012). She has served as a public folklorist in the United States for over a decade.Naomi Sturm-Wijesinghe is a public folklorist and ethnomusicologist with more than 15 years of experience working at every level of small- to mid-sized nonprofit arts organizations. Her specialties range from immigrant and urban place-based folklife to grassroots fundraising and nonprofit management. She is the founding Executive Director of Los Herederos, a media arts nonprofit dedicated to inheriting culture in the digital age. She is also the Creative Traditions Program Director for City Lore and an adjunct professor at the New School. Naomi holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University and a BA from Bowdoin College. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Mencius Society for the Arts and currently serves as the co-chair of the Cultural Diversity Committee and on the Nominating Committee of the American Folklore Society.Ven Talley is an undergraduate illustration and sociology student at the University of Colorado Denver invested in topics of restorative justice, liberatory harm reduction, and arts-based methodologies. He believes that research should be accessible and should cycle back into the community. He studies interpretive reproduction, qualitative methods, and other strands within both fine arts and the social sciences to lead his research with community and faculty members.Kalrav Vashishtha holds an MA in English from Shiv Nadar University, Delhi-NCR, India, where he also worked as a teaching and research assistant. He completed his undergraduate studies in English at Hindu College, University of Delhi. Kalrav is interested in a wide range of literary and cultural material, including women's folk music in north India, anglophone historical fiction, televisual media, and plants in literature.Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth is Director and Curator of the Gordon Art Galleries at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He has held research, teaching, and administrative positions in anthropology and folklore studies through his work with the Smithsonian Institution's Asian Cultural History Program, the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology and Appalachian Center, and The Ohio State University Department of Comparative Studies and Center for Folklore Studies. From these positions, he has led community-engaged ethnographic research, archiving initiatives, and peer-to-peer organization efforts.