Maria Garcia is the senior editor of The ARTery, WBUR's Arts and Culture Team. She oversees WBUR's arts coverage for the radio and the web. Maria started her career as a 19-year-old intern at ABC-7 in El Paso, and worked her way to lead investigative reporter and the youngest anchor of a 35-minute discussion program. She broke and investigated several big stories, including the mysterious loss of nearly $30 million at city hall and lack of financial reporting by public officials. Her stories often led to community action, including a city ethics investigation, reform of bidding rules and performance improvement plans for high level city officials. After a decade of political reporting, Maria decided to pursue another long-standing passion: arts journalism. She is interested in arts reporting in New England’s underrepresented areas, as well as investigative stories about Boston’s legacy arts institutions.

Amanda Figueroa is the Co-founder and Managing Curator of Brown Art Ink. She is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation focuses on the role of exhibition design in audience engagements with art by Latina artists. She believes that public art education is the future of civic education, and the fastest path for community development. Image: Linkedin

Barbara Lewis is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Liberal Arts and the Director of the William Monroe Trotter Institute for the Study of Black History and Culture. She has expertise in theater, politics and performance, francophone literature, and cultural history. Image: [University of Massachusetts Boston](https://www.umb.edu/academics/cla/faculty/barbara\_lewis "University of Massachusetts Boston")

Dell Marie Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and independent curator whose artist talks, solo performances and collaborative projects have been presented to a wide variety of audiences in New York at Five Myles Gallery, Panoply Performance Lab, and MOCADA, as well as in the New England area at Hubweek, MIT, Boston University, Massachusetts College of Art & Design, the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, the ICA/Boston, and the RISD Art Museum. She has also frequently performed with her teacher and mentor, Maria Magadalena Campos-Pons at venues such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.) and the Peabody Essex Museum (Massachusetts). Working across a variety of mediums including performance, video, painting and photography, Dell uses the body to investigate the social and geopolitical constructions of memory, gender, history and citizenship. With roots in Belize, Honduras and the Caribbean she frequently draws upon the personal experiences of her family as well as the history and folkloric traditions of the region. Dell has a B.A. in journalism from Northeastern University (Massachusetts) and completed her MFA from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Massachusetts). Her curatorial project “Nine Moments for Now” was ranked by Hyperallergic.com as one of 2018’s top 20 exhibitions in the U.S. and in 2019, she presented her first solo show “All Languages Welcomed HERE” at Salem State University in Massachusetts. Image: [Hutchins Center for African & African American Research](https://hutchinscenter.fas.harvard.edu/people/dell-m-hamilton "Hutchins Center for African &African American Research")