Visiting Program 2023 Participants

Read about the 2023 Visiting Program

Khari Bowman

Khari Bowman is a program coordinator at Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO) in Memphis. Her journey into remembrance and marginalized history started as a high school student in Memphis, where she took a Facing History elective course. While completing a course project, she and her classmates learned of the lynching of Ell Persons, which took place in front of thousands of people, and decided to make their community aware of it. They raised money for a historical marker and were a part of a ceremony that commemorated his life and brought awareness to their community. Khari believes that this history is extremely relevant to modern police killings that have taken place in Memphis. Khari received her degree in English Literature at Bryn Mawr College, where she worked to create more awareness of issues of race and social justice issues on campus.

Dr. Lisa Bratton

Dr. Lisa Bratton is an Associate Professor of History at Tuskegee University. As a historian for the Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project, she interviewed over 250 of the famed airmen. She has also led an oral history project at Historic Brattonsville, the South Carolina plantation on which her ancestors, Green and Malinda Bratton, were enslaved. Her upcoming book, "I am the Forever," repositions over 150 years of the plantation's records to describe how enslaved people resisted the brutality of enslavement and its terrorizing aftermath. In 2022, she learned through DNA evidence that she is blood-related to the white Brattons who enslaved her ancestors and meets monthly with their descendants to discuss the difficult questions that arise from their shared heritage. The two descendant groups are also working together on several remembrance projects. 

Stacy Burdett

Stacy Burdett has decades of experience as a Jewish community advocate on civil and human rights issues. She currently works with organizations, officials and thought leaders on topics including communications and strategies to fight antisemitism and bigotry. As vice president for government relations, advocacy and community engagement at the Anti-Defamation League, Stacy testified before Congress, directed national issue campaigns and designed coalition building training programs used in the U.S. and in Europe. She also served as the first government and external relations director at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. She has spent more than two decades working to ensure the inclusion of antisemitism issues on the human rights and social justice agenda. She worked closely with the advocates and thought leaders involved in efforts to define antisemitism through the IHRA Working Definition as well as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and the Nexus document.

Stephan Conrad

Stephan Conrad works with young people and conducts political and historical work with Treibhaus e.V., an Obermayer Award winning association in Döbeln. Treibhaus is based in an area of Saxony where there is strong support for the far right and seeks to provide a place for people who oppose its influence. Stephan was born Oschatz and has a degree in social work. For many years he has led educational trips to Kraków and Auschwitz for the Herbert Wehner Bildungswerk Dresden. He is also a founding member of the Saxon State Working Group on Dealing with National Socialism. His remembrance work with colleagues has included projects on the armaments industry and forced labor in Döbeln, on Jewish life in Döbeln, and on Nazi "euthanasia" and eugenics activities in the region. 

Melanie Roth Gorelick

Melanie Roth Gorelick was recently named the CEO of Elluminate, an organization with Jewish and feminist values that promotes social justice and equal opportunity for all women and girls. She previously served as Senior Vice President of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), a national organization in the United States that represents the diversity of the Jewish community. JCPA works to build a just and pluralistic America by working with a range of ethnically and racially diverse groups, faith leaders and legislators. She has dedicated her life’s work to women’s rights and social justice causes in roles at the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest, the UN Development Fund for Women (now renamed UN Women), and the American Association of University Women, among others. Melanie founded the NJ Coalition on Human Trafficking in 2012. In 2022, she launched The Joan Roth Legacy Project in which she wrote and produced a documentary film with the aim of bringing recognition to the key roles renowned photographer Joan Roth played in women’s history, raising awareness of current women’s issues, and making the world a better place. 

Dr. Matthias Hass

Dr. Matthias Hass is the head of the education and research department and deputy director of the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial Site and Education Center. He is the curator of the traveling exhibition “The Wannsee Conference and the persecution and murder of the European Jews.” Matthias was the director of the U.S. program of Action Reconciliation Service for Peace in Philadelphia from 2005 - 2009. As a political scientist, he has specialized in the field of Historical Foundations of politics and the Politics of Memory. Over the last years, Matthias has organized a number of international exchange seminars for Canadian, Polish, German and American students with different organizations and universities. He has taught at the Free University in Berlin, York University in Toronto and Touro College Berlin, and worked at several museums and memorial sites to the Nazi past, including the Topography of Terror Foundation.

Dr. Tanya Huelett

Dr. Tanya Huelett is Senior Director of Educator Content Development for Facing History and Ourselves (FHAO), and oversees all content creation for teachers and other educators there. Previously, she worked with a range of educators in New York to implement FHAO’s curriculum. She has more than 20 years of experience as a historian and educator in the field of moral and ethical education. Dr. Huelett taught history at New York University (NYU), the Double Discovery Center at Columbia University, and most recently, the Brearley School. Over the course of her career, Dr. Huelett has been awarded fellowships by the United Negro College Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University and the University of Florida.

Kevin King

Kevin King is the Founder and Executive Director of the King’s Canvas Gallery and Studio located in Montgomery, Alabama. Kevin and his family moved to the historic Washington Park neighborhood in 2007 to work with families, and to be a part of the fabric of a historically marginalized community for the purpose of neighborhood transformation. The King’s Canvas, which was founded due to a lack of equity in the arts locally, is located on the historic Selma To Montgomery Voter’s Rights Trail, and is a creative space that provides opportunity and access to an underdeveloped and underexposed art community in Montgomery. Kevin seeks to honor the community by preserving its history and using the arts as a means to physically and economically develop neighborhoods and develop people in the areas of entrepreneurship, financial literacy and life-skill development. Kevin is a visual artist who rediscovered his artistic talents after not participating in the arts for 17 years.

Rev. Tamara Lebak

Rev. Tamara Lebak is an educator, curriculum designer, facilitator, trauma-informed practitioner of restorative justice, minister, writer, singer-songwriter and backyard chicken farmer. Tamara’s remembrance work includes co-designing with Dr. Karlos Hill, the Tulsa Race Massacre Institute and the Clara Luper Institute. She has also used Internal-Family-Systems-informed (IFS) practices to heal biographical, cultural, and epigenetic trauma.Tamara is the founder of the Restorative Justice Institute of Oklahoma where she teaches leaders to work with resistance, adapt to circumstances without losing their identity, and lift up voices that might otherwise go unheard. Tamara creates open and affirming healing spaces for people to experience that they are not the worst thing they have ever done nor the worst thing that has ever happened to them. Tamara is currently working on her Doctorate at Phillips Theological Seminary.

Evan Milligan

Evan Milligan has spent more than two decades serving Black communities and pro-democracy efforts throughout Alabama and the Deep South. He currently serves as executive director of Alabama Forward. Officially launched in 2020, Alabama Forward is a 501-C-3 statewide civic engagement table advancing efforts of nonpartisan organizations throughout Alabama to greatly expand the voter base, protect voting rights, and make election systems as accessible as possible. Previously, Evan worked for the Equal Justice Initiative, designing and leading community engagement with partners throughout the country working with EJI to memorialize local racial history. Additionally, Evan is the named plaintiff in Milligan v. Merrill, a federal lawsuit challenging congressional district maps recently adopted by the State of Alabama as being in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments for the case in October 2022 and is expected to publish the opinion in Spring 2023. 

Steve Murray

Steve Murray is Director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH), the state agency that serves as the permanent repository for state government records, a special collections library, and the state’s history museum. At the ADAH and in public history networks, Steve has been an advocate for historical introspection as a basis for building organizational inclusiveness. Honest examination of the ADAH’s history of supporting racial discrimination is a key element of the agency’s 2020 Statement of Recommitment. In 2022, the agency announced that it would work to repatriate its collection of Native American ancestral remains and funerary objects. At the national level, Steve’s work includes terms on the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and the board of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). 

Viktoria Peter

Viktoria Peter began doing remembrance work when she joined the Anne Frank Zentrum’s youth network in 2015. Viktoria comes from a West German family but lived in Leipzig, Saxony, for four years during her bachelor’s degree studies in Translation and Interpretation (for Spanish and English) and Cultural Sciences. During her studies, she became active in human rights issues with local Amnesty International chapters and in doing additional remembrance work. She has been pursuing a master’s degree in Intercultural European Studies at the University of Regensburg and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. But with her broader interests in remembrance, she recently decided to add to her knowledge of contemporary history by starting a second master’s degree in Public History and Cultural Mediation. 

Amy Spitalnick

Amy Spitalnick is CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the national convener of Jewish coalitions working to build a just and inclusive democracy. She is also leading a project on antisemitism and democracy in partnership with the Aspen Institute and a number of major foundations. Amy previously served as Executive Director of Integrity First for America, which won its groundbreaking lawsuit against the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and hate groups responsible for the right-wing violence in Charlottesville in 2017. She serves as Senior Advisor on Extremism at Human Rights First, and on the Advisory Board of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. Amy has extensive experience in government, politics, and advocacy, including as Communications Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the New York Attorney General and as a spokesperson and advisor to the New York City Mayor. She has worked for a number of federal, state, and local officials, campaigns, and advocacy organizations, including as J Street’s first press secretary. Amy is also the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.

Nina Taubenreuther

Nina Taubenreuther is the managing director of Zweitzeugen (Secondary 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 and an emotional connection with the survivors, as well a stronger perspective on prejudice and hate in the world today. Previously, Nina worked with the Life Back Home project that combines policy work and anti-racist education in schools with the topics of immigration and refugees. Life Back Home trains young refugees in Germany to become educational advisors and to tell their life stories to students of similar ages in schools. Nina has a background in business economics and business psychology. Earlier in her career, Nina was a digital marketer for various technology companies. She also has long had an interest in research related to diversity and discrimination in work environments. Nina was raised in Düsseldorf and now lives in Berlin. 

Dr. Dave Tell

Dr. Dave Tell teaches at the University of Kansas and is Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities there. His research and work as a community engaged historian focuses on issues of race, memory, and the digital humanities. Since 2014, he has focused on the legacy of the murder of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, including partnering with the Emmett Till Interpretive Center (ETIC) and designing an exhibit for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Dave is the author of Remembering Emmett Till, which was an Economist 2019 book of the year, won the 2020 McLemore Prize, and won the 2021 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award. Dave’s scholarship is written for broad, public audiences and he has worked extensively with the ETIC to develop resources (mobile apps, roadside markers) which tell the story of Till’s murder for the next generation. 

Patrick Weems

Patrick Weems serves as the co-founder and executive director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, Mississippi. The Center was formed to confront the brutal truth about Emmett Till’s 1955 murder in the Mississippi Delta and to seek justice for community and the Till family. With a master’s degree from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, and prior roles as a Monument Lab fellow and W.K. Kellogg Fellow, Patrick has spent over a decade working in racial and restorative justice. Notably, Patrick has helped initiate the Summer Youth Institute, an experiential youth program for high school students and leads a national campaign to create the Mamie Till and Emmett Till National Historic Park in Mississippi and Chicago.