Berlin Fellowship 2024
Sixteen fellows are participating in Widen the Circle’s year-long Berlin Fellowship, beginning with an immersive learning program in Berlin, May 29 - June 6, 2024.
Dina Bailey leads U.S.-based programmatic efforts for the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities. She also runs a consulting business that works on systemic change at museums and cultural organizations to increase their community impact.
Lisa Denneler is a historical and political educator who runs a youth project “So that no grass grows over it” (Damit kein Gras drüber wächst) at a Nazi memorial site in Saarland, Germany. Her focus is on educating young people as a means to creating a more open and tolerant society
Robert Louis Brandon Edwards is an artist, historian, and preservationist whose practice focuses on the power physical spaces and objects have to evoke the past. He is a PhD student in historic preservation at Columbia University and a Scholar-in-Residence at Voices Underground.
Raimund Grafe is chairman of the Erich Zeigner House (EZH) in Leipzig, Germany, a center for civic awareness and remembrance culture that counters the rise of the far right. EZH empowers students to conduct community projects that remember individuals who resisted the Nazis or were persecuted by them.
Kira Khazatsky CEO and President of JVS Boston, an organization that is based on Jewish values and works to empower individuals from diverse communities (who are typically non-Jews and often immigrants) to find employment and build careers, while partnering with employers to develop productive workforces.
Idit Klein is the founding CEO of Keshet, the national organization for LGBTQ equality in Jewish life. Under her leadership, Keshet has mobilized tens of thousands of Jewish leaders to make LGBTQ equality a core communal value and priority for action.
Kiyomi Kowalski is an Afro-Latin, queer, Jewish, social justice advocate who uses non-violent communication to coach people in productive dialogue to eradicate racism and antisemitism. She is Vice President of Partnerships at Project Shema, which trains the Jewish community and allies to address contemporary antisemitism.
Justin Merrick is the executive director of the Center for Transforming Communities in Memphis, which does cultural and civic engagement by lifting up the culture of individual neighborhoods, especially through the arts. He is also a Grammy-nominated, multi-genre musician, artist, storyteller, and educator.
Angelika Rieber is a historian, teacher, and activist who co-founded Projekt Jüdisches Leben in Frankfurt (Jewish Life Project in Frankfurt) to foster a more personal approach to Frankfurt’s reckoning with its Nazi past. The project has brought thousands of high school students in contact with the city’s former Jewish residents and their descendants,
Ashley Rogers is the founding director of Whitney Plantation, a site of memory in southern Louisiana with a mission to educate the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States. She is also an advocate for social justice and equity in the museum field.
Renee Romano is a scholar of U.S. racial history and historical memory, and a public historian who works with museums to craft historical narratives that connect the past and present as a way to work towards a more equitable future. She is an author and professor of history at Oberlin College.
Reuben D. Rotman is the founding President and CEO of the Network of Jewish Human Service Agencies. The network was established in 2017 as an international membership association, with the mission of strengthening and advancing the Jewish human service sector.
Gaila Sims is the curator of African American history at the Fredericksburg Area Museum in Fredericksburg, Va. She leads a broad based initiative looking at local African American history and communities that began with a question about what to do with a slave era auction block that had been openly displayed in the city.
Nina Taubenreuther is the managing director of Zweitzeugen (Second Witnesses), an organization that turns young people into “witnesses” by teaching them the life stories of Holocaust survivors. Zweitzeugen helps students as young as 10 develop empathy andl a stronger perspective on prejudice and hate in the world today.
Gregory Thompson is the co-Founder and Creative Director of Voices Underground, a team of scholars, artists, and activists specializing in African American history and committed to racial healing through storytelling. There he working on the National Memorial to the Underground Railroad in Chester County, Pa.
Kristi Williams is a descendant of a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and a Creek Freedman descendant. She founded Black History Saturdays, a pioneering institution in North Tulsa that teaches African American history to community members, ages 5 to 85. She has also created a library of banned books.