Meet the speakers and performers for the 18th Annual Liberation Based Healing Conference, to be held November 3 and 4, 2023, at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.
We will be adding new speakers and performers, and announcing the full program, in the coming weeks. Please check this page for up-to-date information.
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Rhea V. Almeida, M.S., Ph.D., LCSW, founder of The Institute for Family Services, is a family therapist with more than 30 years of experience as a trainer, therapist, activist and author. A graduate of Columbia University, Dr. Almeida is the creator of the Cultural Context Model. She has published numerous articles and is the author of her fourth book on Liberation-Based Healing Practices. She has served on the editorial boards of several distinguished journals in the field, including The Journal of Cultural Diversity and Mental Health, The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and The Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, as the consulting editor for the White Privilege online journal, and on the Council for Racial and Economic Diversity at the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE).
Dr. Almeida is a member of the American Family Therapy Academy and a clinical member of the American Association of Marital and Family Therapists. She has served on numerous boards, including the Council for Contemporary Families, the American Family Therapy Academy, the National Association for Social Workers and Orthopsychiatry. She is also an Approved Supervisor for the Association of Marital and Family Therapists. She has been featured in the Los Angeles Times and USA Today and on CNBC, National Public Radio and Pure Oxygen.
She is the founder of the Liberation Based Healing Conference, currently in its 18th year.
Dr. Mayida Zaal is an associate professor of teaching and learning at Montclair State University. She serves as co-director for the Red Hawks Rising Teacher Academy, a grow-your-own partnership with the Newark Board of Education and the American Federation of Teachers. Informed by her extensive experience as a math and science middle school teacher and curriculum developer in the U.S. and internationally, Dr. Zaal’s research is grounded in community and centers on youth, teachers and families.
Dr. Zaal engages decolonizing pedagogies and research methods including critical participatory action research. Her current research aims to identify factors that help recruit and retain racially and ethnically diverse teachers in the profession, especially those from marginalized communities. She is the founder of a critical participatory action research collective, Reclaiming ME: Muslim Educators. The collective is conducting the first national study of Muslim American teachers in K-12 schools. Dr. Zaal has been awarded $500,000 from the Spencer Foundation to fund this study.
Dr. Zaal is the recipient of many honors, including awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Ford Foundation and the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She serves on the editorial board of the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series. Dr. Zaal earned her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in biological sciences and Spanish, her master’s degree in educational leadership from Bank Street College of Education, and her Ph.D. in urban education from the City University of New York.
Deja Amos is the operations manager at Tri County Care Management Organization, where she helps to move toward the structural changes necessary to become an antiracist organization. She has 10+ years of experience working with youth, families and system partners such as DCP&P, schools and the juvenile justice system and is also a field instructor/field liaison for various schools of social work within New Jersey. Amos became a certified Nurtured Heart Approach® Advanced Trainer in June of 2018 and has a great deal of experience providing training and workshops to the community in the approach as well as other goal-directed workshops.
Juan Carlos Areán, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized activist, public speaker, trainer and facilitator, and published author. He works as a program director for Futures Without Violence. Since 1991, he has walked along with men across different cultures in a collective healing journey to become better fathers, intimate partners, and allies to end gendered violence and achieve gender equity. He was previously the director of the National Latin@ Network at Casa de Esperanza and the first sexual assault prevention specialist at Harvard University. Dr. Areán is an active trainer who has led hundreds of workshops and presentations throughout the United States, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe, Asia, the US Congress, and the United Nations in New York and Geneva.
James Christy Jr. is an award-winning playwright, filmmaker and father of a 20-year-old boy with autism. Christy wrote the play “Love and Communication,” based in part on his family’s experience after their son Jimmy was diagnosed. The play was produced by Passage Theatre in Trenton, N.J., and won the prestigious Brown Martin Barrymore Award. Christy has now made the play into a feature film, which premiered in 2023. He is working with noted autism expert Dr. Kate Fiske on using the film as a learning tool for parents and autism professionals to better understand how to support families going through an autism diagnosis.
Other recent plays include “The Forever Question,” which won the B Street Comedy Festival in 2018, and a solo show titled “Not Right Now” about his experiences with (and failures in) mindfulness meditation. In a previous life, Christy was an actor with a featured part in the film “Dead Poets Society.”
Mark Harris is an award-winning artist, activist and educator. His artwork examines critical issues facing America today. He has established a strong independent voice and is one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most controversial artists. The Metro Silicon Valley News called his work “brilliantly subversive.”
Harris has exhibited at the de Young Museum, the Exploratorium, the USF Thacher Gallery, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Ohio Wesleyan University and Linn Benton College, among others.
Mark has mentored at-risk youth through art education programs, as well as teaching art in schools. In 2017 he received the Teacher 4 Social Justice award. He currently teaches painting at University High School in San Francisco. A native of Durham, N.C., Harris grew up in Atlanta, Georgia; he now lives in San Francisco, California. You can follow his work on Instagram @markharrisart or visit his website, artofmarkharris.com.
Clory Jackson is a creative artist-activist blending live performance, social discourse and grassroots organizing to help communities disrupt patterns of hate and systemic oppression. She founded The Brownsville Project in 2018, inspired by her journey to trace her father’s family history as Black Americans in Appalachia and her maternal grandmother’s legacy as a civil rights activist in Chicago.
Jackson is a lifelong learner who often dives deep into various subjects of interest. She is currently learning about spiritual healing and liberation practices. Past Liberation Based Healing Conferences have served as an illuminator to Jackson in accessing liberatory and healing practices.
Incredibly introverted and reticent as a child, Jackson found boldness and joy in telling stories through theatre and music. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in drama from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, and then a Master of Fine Arts in acting from Penn State University in State College, PA. She also spent two years at Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, VA, studying musical theatre. During and after college, Jackson performed in several regional professional theatres around the country. In 2010, she moved to New York City, where she began working in the tech startup industry. Jackson now combines the lessons she is learning in business operations, the healing art of storytelling and her family’s legacy of civil rights activism to fuel her work through The Brownsville Project. Using a transformative justice model, The Brownsville Project abolishes systemic oppression by helping communities confront and heal from suppressed history. This work is done through facilitated discussions, live performances and community organizing.
James Parauda is the chief executive officer of Tri County Care Management Organization. He has been in that role for over 10 years and part of New Jersey’s Children’s System of Care for over 20 years in various roles across three care management organizations. Parauda received his Master of Social Work degree from Hunter College and is a Licensed Social Worker in New Jersey. He has more than 25 years of experience in social services, including work with homeless families, mentally ill adults, youth in out-of-home settings, and families facing mental health, developmental disabilities and substance use challenges.
Reginald Rosarion is currently the director of training for Tri-County CMO headquartered in Branchburg, NJ. In this role, Reginald Rosarion is tasked with identifying, assessing, and implementing training processes and projects that promote high quality outcomes and lead to the growth and development of Tri-County CMO staff and improves the profile of the entire organization as a great place to work.
Reginald has more than 16 years of educational leadership experience. He has worked with the University of West Virginia and Carnegie- Mellon University on an interactive teen-pregnancy prevention research project piloted by the University of West Virginia. And has been a collaborator on sexuality education materials like “Teaching Safer Sex” (abridged edition-2020). He has planned more than 50 educational conferences and retreats.
Minnijean Brown Trickey has lifelong experience and commitment to peacemaking, environmental issues, developing youth leadership, diversity education and training, cross-cultural communication, and gender and social justice advocacy. Brown Trickey is one of the nine African American students who collectively resisted opposition to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, with protection from federal troops.
Brown Trickey’s teaching experience in social work includes Carleton University and community colleges in Canada. She served in the Clinton Administration as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity at the Department of the Interior. She was the Shipley Visiting Writer for Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University. For the past 22 years she has been a nonviolence and anti-racism facilitator for Sojourn to the Past, a 10-day interactive history experience for high school students. She continues as a teacher, writer and motivational speaker. She is the mother of three sons and three daughters.
Brown Trickey is the recipient of numerous awards for her community work for social justice, including the Lifetime Achievement Tribute by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the International Wolf Award for contributions to racial harmony. With the Little Rock Nine, she received the NAACP Spingarn Medal and the Congressional Gold Medal. She is a member of the Little Rock Nine Foundation that awards nine scholarships biannually.
She is also the subject of a documentary, “Journey to Little Rock: The Untold Story of Minnijean Brown Trickey,” which has received critical acclaim in international film festivals in Africa, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, the U.S., South America and Canada. She was featured in People Magazine, Newsweek, Ottawa Citizen, “Donahue,” the History Channel’s “Turning Points in History,” and the HBO documentary “Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later,” among other television, radio and print media, including the BBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and CNN. She appeared with the Little Rock Nine on “Oprah,” “Today” and numerous other media.
Dr. J. Corey Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital. He is a child and adolescent psychiatrist with the Wellness in School Environments (WISE) program, where he helps deliver school-based mental health services for children and families. He is the director of mental health services innovation for the Early Childhood Innovation Network (ECIN), where he conducts community-based participatory research focused on early childhood development. He is also the co-director of diversity, equity and inclusion for Medstar Georgetown’s Department of Psychiatry.
Spirit Tawfiq is a creative changemaker, anti-racism educator and founder of Roots of the Spirit, an organization created to uproot racism through storytelling, education and the arts.
She is the creator and host of the “Roots of the Spirit” podcast, a space to galvanize change through honest conversations about identity, race, racism and intersecting social justice issues.
As a professional speaker and playwright, Tawfiq speaks and hosts workshops in K-12 classrooms, colleges, universities, organizations and corporations about her legacy as the daughter of Minnijean Brown Trickey, who is one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Tawfiq’s vision is to inspire people from all walks of life to discover their own roots, our interconnected history, and how to achieve a more harmonious future.
Born in Canada and now living in New York City, Tawfiq is an alumna of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (B.A.) and the Clinton School of Public Service (MPS). Her professional experience includes social justice education and advocacy, community relations, and public speaking within the National Park Service; working with the Smithsonian Institution; and being a speaker agent for civil rights icons Minnijean Brown Trickey and Ruby Bridges.
She is the proud mother of her two-year-old vivacious boy, Nizami.
Ryan Stark Lilienthal, a mixed media artist, creates artwork ranging from earlier expressive portrait and landscape paintings to conceptual collages that explore social justice themes. In this recent work, Lilienthal seeks to harness the opaque and transparent nature of oil pigments as a metaphor in combination with other media to tease out opacity and transparency in the experience of daily life. Given the challenges of our times, Lilienthal often reaches to his career as an attorney for the visual vocabulary in his work. His recent mixed media series on “The Mueller Report” and “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)” integrate representational oil painting with legal documents in two- and three-dimensional pieces.
Dr. Stovall is a professor in the Department of Black Studies and in the Department of Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His scholarship investigates three areas: Critical Race Theory, the relationship between housing and education, and the intersection of race, place and school. He works with community organizations and schools to address issues of equity, justice and abolishing the school/prison nexus, and is a member of the design team for the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice.
He is involved with the People’s Education Movement, a collection of classroom teachers, community members, students and university professors in Chicago, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area who engage in collaborative community projects centered in creating relevant curriculum. He has also served as a volunteer social studies teacher at the Greater Lawndale/Little Village School for Social Justice from 2005-2018.
Denise Pflaumer-Capici has been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist since 2014. After completing her master’s degree in marriage and family therapy at Capella University, she completed two years of postgraduate training in family systems at the Institute for Family Services. As the parent of a special needs child herself, Denise has also done extensive work in helping advocate for, educate and support parents of children with disabilities in navigating the barriers to access to services.
Virgie Tovar is an author and lecturer focused on weight-based discrimination and body positivity. She holds a master’s degree in sexuality studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. Tovar is the author of “You Have the Right to Remain Fat,” “The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color” and “The Body Positive Journal.” She has received the Inspire Award from Project HEAL as well as Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.
Maggie Whittum is a filmmaker, theatre artist, actor, disability advocate, public speaker and stroke survivor at age 33. She just finished acting in the world-premiere immersive experience “Theater of the Mind,” created by David Byrne and Mala Gaonkar. She often performs with the “disability affirmative” Phamaly Theatre Company in Denver, CO, which exclusively casts actors with disabilities. She speaks at conferences, universities, hospitals and medical schools about her story of stroke, disability and identity. She has spoken at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Georgetown Hospital, Craig Hospital, and the ACCAC “One World One Family” Conference and Cultural Exchange Festival, among others. Maggie is creating a feature-length documentary film, “The Great Now What,” about her story of resilience in the aftermath of a major health crisis, and the healing power of art (https://www.thegreatnowwhat.com). She is a graduate of Colorado College.
Carla Shalaby is the coordinator of Social Justice Initiatives and Community Internships at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her professional and personal commitment is to education as the practice of freedom, and her research centers on cultivating and documenting daily classroom work that protects the dignity of every child and honors young people’s rights to expression, to self-determination, and to full human being. Specifically, she is interested in practices of critical pedagogy and critical literacy at the elementary level; classroom community and “management” as the practice of democracy; and the relationships between the daily work of teachers and the ongoing struggle for justice. She is the author of “Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School” (New Press, 2017).
She earned her doctoral degree in Culture, Communities and Education at Harvard Graduate School of Education; her Master of Education in Early Childhood/Elementary Education at Rutgers Graduate School of Education; and her Bachelor of Arts with a specialization in Black Literature at Rutgers University.
Avi Wisnia is an award-winning singer/songwriter, finding inspiration in 1950’s west-coast jazz, acoustic American folk, Brazilian bossa nova, and contemporary piano pop. Avi tours in support of his studio album, Catching Leaves, performing in prestigious venues around the world – from the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC to The Kennedy Center in DC to concert tours in Japan, Poland, and Brazil. In addition to being a performing songwriter, he has given a TED Talk and performed with The Moth storytellers and organizes the Philly Songwriters Circle.
Avi Wisnia is also featured in the documentary How Saba Kept Singing (2023). Singer David “Saba” Wisnia believed that he survived the horrors of Auschwitz by entertaining the Nazi guards with his beautiful voice. On their way to a Holocaust Commemoration Concert, David and his grandson Avi embark on a journey exploring the mystery of Saba’s past and the revelation of who else might have had a hand in saving his life. Directed by Sara Taksler, and produced by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton, this powerful award-winning film had its premiere on PBS and is now available to view anytime on YouTube.
Scarlett is a recent Saint Peter’s University graduate (’23). She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a minor in sociology, as an undocumented student. During her time at Saint Peter’s, she was involved in many campus organizations, including being president of L.A.S.O. (Latin American Service Organization), e-board member of RAIIS (Reaching After Immigration Intellect and Success) and a member of other organizations that focus on social justice advocacy and organizing. She is currently on her gap year before starting her PhD program in neuroscience to pursue her research career.
Jennifer Ayala, Ph.D., is a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, director of the Center for Undocumented Students, and director of Latin American and Latino Studies at Saint Peter’s University in Jersey City, New Jersey. Her work focuses on immigrant justice issues, Latine communities, education and well-being using participatory action research EntreMundos approaches.
Britton Williams is a Black woman. Drama Therapist. Artist. Activist. Storyteller. She is a multitude of hyphens, contradictions, and ands. She is an educator and student. A thinker and dreamer. She is deeply and urgently concerned with the possibilities that live with/in radical (re)imagining and the inextricable connectedness of healing and liberation. As a Ph.D. candidate in the Social Welfare Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, Britton is a BRES (Black, Race and Ethnic Studies) fellow and a member of the inaugural Mellon Humanities Public Fellows cohort. Her dissertation research project, The Black MAP Project: A Black People’s Epistemology of Healing, lifts the history and trajectory of Black creative healing and seeks to historicize and (re)imagine mental health care for Black people(s) through a liberatory lens.
Desiree “Des” Armas is a graduate of Saint Peter’s University. She has her B.A. in environmental studies and anthropology, with a minor in social justice. She is currently involved in a number of social justice-related projects and is a dedicated social researcher. She is based in New Jersey and loves her cat Zoey.
Patricia Krueger-Henney is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston in the Urban Education, Leadership, and Policy Studies doctoral program. Before entering academia, Patricia taught social sciences in high schools, directed various afterschool youth leadership programs, and organized with youth communities around issues of injustice in schools and education. Her research interests respond to the power and wisdom of young people.
Andrea Nikté Juárez Mendoza (she/her/ella) is an NYC based Guatemalan scholar, artist, organizer, and research consultant from San Francisco California, and Ph.D candidate in the Urban Education program at the City University of New York, Graduate Center. Her work centers community-driven change through an orientation she calls organizer/activist praxis grounded in participatory theory, collectives, justice, and healing, guided by ethical commitments to uplift the unique experiences of immigrant people, in particular Central Americans. Through the lenses of decolonial and community feminisms, Andrea’s current research looks at immigration, family separation, dehumanization, social movements and mutual aid, and immigrant worldmaking, utilizing arts-based healing methods for the collective retrieval of historical memory through oral histories and testimonios. She has worked as a translator in detention centers with the Feerick Center for Social Justice and as an organizer and researcher with the APA, Vera Center for Justice, Aspen Institute, CUNY and the Public Science Project on local, state-wide, and national projects documenting and archiving immigration experiences.
ajuarezmendoza@gradcenter.cuny.edu
Ph.D Candidate, Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY
I am Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), and of agapi, a digital company that seeks to build relational intelligence; and the PI on the Listening Project. I was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence, received my B.A. from U.C. Berkeley, my doctorate from Harvard, and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the psychology department.
My work focuses on social and emotional development, how cultural ideologies shape families and child development in the U.S. and China, and on how to build a more just and humane world. The Listening Project (LP) is a school-based curriculum that was created to address the global crisis of connection (i.e., loneliness, depression, anxiety, suicide, hate crimes, mass violence) by fostering the practice of listening with curiosity in schools, workplaces, and homes. As a professor, I teach the “The Science of Human Connection,” “Transformative Interviewing,” and “Culture, Context, and Psychology.” My work integrates my theoretical, empirical, and applied work developed over three decades on the intersections of culture, context, human development, and wellbeing.
My latest co-edited book is The Crisis of Connection: Its Roots, Consequences, and Solution (NYU Press). I authored or co-authored nearly a hundred journal articles and books, including Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard University Press), which was the inspiration for “Close” a movie that won the Grand Prix Award at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film. My newest book is for Dutton press (a division of Penguin/Random House) is Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture; Another book is in progress for Harvard University Press, is titled: The Culture/Nature Clash and Its Violence Consequences
I am regularly featured in the media.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/11/opinion/feminism-gender-empathy-psychology.html
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/769538697
https://www.tedmed.com/talks/show?id=730069
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/opinion/boys-gender-books-culture.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-yvSyVHXM8 (Daily Show podcast)
I am also a Principal Investigator of a 17-year longitudinal research study of Chinese families, and of The Human Connection Lab at NYU. http://niobewaylab.squarespace.com/new-page, and was on the Aspen Digital group focusing on humanizing AI. I am also a member of the New Pluralist group.
An Oakland native, Antoine Hunter, aka Purple Fire Crow, is an award-winning internationally known African American, Indigenous, Deaf, Disabled choreographer, dancer, actor, instructor, speaker, producer and Deaf advocate. He creates opportunities for Disabled, Deaf and hearing artists, produces Deaf-friendly events, and founded the Urban Jazz Dance Company in 2007 and Bay Area International Deaf Dance Festival in 2013. Awards include the 2022 Disability Futures Fellowship, 2021 Dance Teacher Award, 2019 National Dance/USA fellowship recognized by the Mayor of Oakland, 2018 inaugural Jeanette Lomujo Bremond Humanity Arts Award and 2017 Isadora Duncan (Izzie) for BAIDDF.
Hunter’s work has been performed globally, and he has lectured across the U.S., including at the Kennedy Center’s VSA, Harvard and Duke Universities, and the National Assembly of State Arts as an ambassador for social change. Hunter utilizes his company’s artistic talents to engage with audiences, empower Deaf and disabled communities, and advocate for human rights and access, working to end discrimination and prejudice.
Along with CEO Susan Paley, his shoe company, DropLabs, released an innovative haptic product to help people feel music. Hunter curated the 2021 Bay Area Deaf Arts at SOMArts, is a 2021 YBCA 100 honoree, is on the production team of Signing Animation actively working on inclusive films, and serves on the boards of Dance/USA, BABDA, Museum of Dance and councils for CalArts Alumnx and Intrinsic Arts.
In response to COVID-19 in July 2020, Hunter founded #DeafWoke, an online talk show that amplifies BIPOC Deaf and Disabled stories as a force for cultural change. www.realurbanjazzdance.com
The Meta Theatre Company believes theater is a pathway to justice. This New Jersey-based social justice theater company began in 2013 and is composed of women inside/outside the prison walls, with part of their cast incarcerated at halfway houses and a women’s prison in New Jersey. Using transformative justice theater, they write and perform their lived experiences, inviting audiences to interact with them on stage, looking at how systemic, institutional power impacts our relationships and community. MTC utilizes theater in support of a mutual-aid based re-entry program for women coming back to their communities. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @MetaTheatreCo #GettaMeta
