From cultural criticism, liner notes, music journalism, DJ scholarship and more—this symposium explores the art of music writing and the work and impact of the late, great Greg Tate.

Special Guest Panelists Include — DJ Lynnée Denise, Daniel Gray-Kontar, dream hampton, Mark Anthony Neal, Shelley Nicole and Dawn-Elissa Fischer.

Learn more about our guests:

dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. She has been a public advocate for racial and gender justice since she was a teenage editor at a hip hop magazine in the 90s, she is an expert in how narrative affects policy and cultural change.

Her most recent works include the Frameline feature documentary Treasure (2015) the HBO feature documentary, It's A Hard Truth Ain't It, (2019), the BET docu-series Finding Justice (2019) and Lifetime's Emmy nominated Surviving R. Kelly (2019), which broke ratings records and had wide and far-reaching impact. hampton is the 2019 recipient of Ms. Foundation's "Gloria" award and was named one of 2019 TIME 100's most influential people in the world.

Shelley Nicole is a transformational healer using the power of love and the energetic magic of music to shift the world. Shelley Nicole is also a featured vocalist with Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber co-founded by writer/musician Greg Tate and bassist Jared Michael Nickerson. She has traveled the globe performing in venues from New York to Paris and graced a multitude of stages including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Apollo Theater, Afropunk and the Hammer Museum.

Mark Anthony Neal is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of African & African-American Studies, Professor of English, and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Neal is the author of six books including the just published Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture, the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (2013), and co-editor, with Murray Forman, of That’s The Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (now in its 2nd edition). Neal directs the Center for Arts, Digital Culture and Entrepreneurship (CADCE) which produces original digital content, including the weekly video podcast Left of Black, (now in its 12th season).

Dawn-Elissa Fischer, also known as the “DEF Professor,” is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses on black popular culture, information technology and virtual ethnography. A founding staff member of Dr. Marcyliena Morgan’s Hiphop Archive and Research Institute at Harvard University in 2001, Fischer continues to consult in an advisory role. The Hiphop Archive houses Fischer’s Japanese Hiphop collection, including Nihon Style, a film about an annual Hiphop festival in Japan that she co-produced with filmmaker Bianca White.