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Gabrielle M. Hamilton is a folklorist with extensive expertise in the Indigenous and Hispanic traditions of the Americas. She is Director of Education and Public Programs at the Flushing Council on Culture & the Arts. She previously served as a program director and archivist at the Center for Traditional Music and Dance. At the Center, Ms. Hamilton conducted research and founded the program FolkColombia Música y Danza in collaboration with master artists in New York’s Colombian community. She founded and directed the initiative Pachamama Peruvian Arts (based in Queens) which develops the Peruvian traditional performing arts in partnerships with local community organizations through weekly educational classes, workshops, and presentations. This program is a vital part of the New York Latino landscape, and is now an independent non-profit organization. Hamilton has served as Acting Director and Senior Researcher of the Repatriation Office at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian; conducted extensive research on the Native collections at Utah State University (where she received her Master’s Degree in Folklore) and currently serves as a consultant for Blood Tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy, where she is an honorary member. She also has lived and taught on the Navajo Reservation and in American Samoa; and has conducted folklore residencies for schools, museums, arts councils and prisons.

Delcy Ziac Fox develops marketing communications plans and oversees the execution of strategies and tactics for non-profit businesses and corporate clients. Fox has worked in higher education in New York state and Hawaii and at marketing services agencies in Albany, New Jersey, and New York City. Fox is VP Collegiate Relations for the American Marketing Association, former VP Communications for the Gift Planning Group of Northeastern New York, Class Agent for her alma mater, Wesleyan University, and Former Chair of the Wesleyan Annual Fund. Fox volunteers for Van Antwerp Middle School and Hilllside Elementary School and serves as Secretary to the Parent-Teacher Organization Council for the Niskayuna Central School District. Fox holds a Master of Science in management from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Master of Arts in biological anthropology from the University at Albany, and a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and biology from Wesleyan University.

Jessica Schein was born and bred in New York City. She has a B.A. in Accounting from Brooklyn College and an M.B.A. in Finance and Accounting from Columbia Business School. She now works as a part-time accountant/controller for several small non-profit organizations in NYC, having been in financial positions for non-profits and large corporations. She has had a life-long interest in folklore, well before she even knew that such a field existed.

Polly Adema holds an M.A. in Folklore (Indiana University) and a Ph.D. in American Studies (University of Texas at Austin). She joined the Dutchess County Arts Council as the staff folklorist in August, 2007. Prior to taking the Poughkeepsie position, the Buffalo (NY) native worked with arts and culture organizations in Nevada, Wyoming, South Carolina, Washington DC, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Texas. Her particular areas of interest include community celebrations and foodways. In addition to her work as a folklorist, Polly writes and cooks in her role as a culinary anthropologist, and when time permits, she teaches at area colleges. Among her recent projects are an ethnography of Gilroy, California and its food-themed place branding as Garlic Capital of the World. This study of how food comes to be associated with place is the subject of her book Garlic Capital of the World: The Making of a Festive Foodscape (University Press of Mississippi). She actively participates in and presents at professional and academic organizations, including the American Folklore Society, the American Studies Association, and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Polly also offers culinary and food history classes at epicurean and specialty events.

Libby Tucker, Professor of English at Binghamton University, discovered the field of folklore while working on an M.A. with Lydia Fish at Buffalo State College. After receiving her M.A., she joined the Peace Corps and did field research on women’s initiation rituals in the Ivory Coast, West Africa. Libby received her Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University. She edited New York Folklore for several years and is currently on the editorial board of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore; she also edits Children’s Folklore Review, Children’s Folklore eNewsletter, and FOAFtale News. She serves as president of the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society and has enjoyed chairing CFS’s Newell Committee, Opie Committee, and Aesop Prize Committee. Tucker’s main areas of interest include children’s and adolescents’ folklore, women’s rituals, folklore of the supernatural, and the folklore of folklorists. Her book Campus Legends was published in 2005; Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses was published in 2007, and Children’s Folklore: A Handbook was published in 2008. She loves to travel, swim, and plan family get-togethers.

Kay Turner, Director of Folk Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council and Adjunct Professor, Performance Studies Department, New York University. Kay Turner has directed the Brooklyn Arts Council’s (BAC) folk arts program since 2000. Turner works with Brooklyn traditional artists practicing in a range of disciplines—music, dance, material arts, narrative, and other verbal arts. Since coming to BAC, Turner has initiated a number of field research-based projects resulting in public programs such as Praise in the Park: Musical Expressions of Faith, Local Eyes: Folk Photographers in Brooklyn, Williamsburg Bridge 100th Anniversary Celebration, Folk Feet: Celebrating Traditional Dance in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Maqam: Arab Music Festival; Days of the Dead in Brooklyn: Diverse Traditions of Death, Mourning and Remembrance, Black Brooklyn Renaissance, 1960-2010, Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn: Traditional Storytellers and Their Tales, and upcoming in spring 2012, Half the Sky: Brooklyn Women in Traditional Performance. Turner recently completed a seven-year long, annual September 11th Memorial series, which included the 2006 exhibition of over 300 photographs in Here Was New York: Twin Towers in Memorial Images and culminating in 2011 with a reconsideration of the importance of ephemeral memorials in the legacy of September 11th. In October 2011, she held the first annual Brooklyn Folk Arts Day, a gathering of over 125 artists, local organizations, funders, elected officials, and professional folklorists interested in preserving and presenting Brooklyn’s traditional culture. Turner began her public folklore adventure in the mid-1980s in Texas, where she served as Interim Director of the Folk Arts Collections at the San Antonio Museum of Art and Co-Founder (with Pat Jasper and Betsy Peterson) of Texas Folklife Resources (TFR), one of the first stand-alone, non-profit arts organizations in the nation dedicated exclusively to regional folk arts and folk life. During her tenure at TFR, Turner co-curated Art Among Us/ Arte Entre Nosotros: Mexican American Folk Art of San Antonio; Hecho Tejano: Six Mexican-American Sculptors; and Handmade and Heartfelt: Folk Art of Texas; which toured Texas arts institutions, bringing the work of 80 Texas traditional artists to public attention. Turner also teaches courses on gender, theory of time and performance, ghosts and their ontology, ephemerality, and oral narrative theory in the Performance Studies Graduate Program at New York University. She holds the Ph.D. in Folklore and Anthropology from the University of Texas, Austin. Among her publications are Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (Thames and Hudson), an extended treatment of her dissertation on Texas-Mexican women’s home altars in south Texas and Baby Precious Always Shines: The Love Notes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (St. Martin’s Press). Turner’s essay “September 11 and the Burden of the Ephemeral” was published in Western Folklore in 2009 and her new book (with Pauline Greenhill) is Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms (forthcoming Fall 2012, Wayne State University Press). Kay remains dedicated to her own artistic pursuits in singing, songwriting, collaborative performance works, and alternative curatorial initiatives.

Tom van Buren is the Director of Folk Arts and of Performance Programs for ArtsWestchester, the Arts Council of Westchester County, New York. An arts presenter with extensive public sector folk arts experience in field research, performance programs, and media productions, he earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland (2001), writing on the practice of music and dance in the francophone West African immigrant community of New York City. His areas of cultural expertise include also expressive cultures of the Caribbean, and the Middle East, as well as the wider topic of cultural migration and transnational communities. From 1994 to 2003, he worked on cultural programs related to immigrant communities of the New York metropolitan area for the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, including concert and festival productions and audio-visual documentation projects. From 1996 to 2000, he was project director of the Dominican Community Cultural Initiative which founded the Quisqueya en el Hudson Festival in Washington Heights, New York. In this capacity, he worked in collaborative community cultural organizing, field research, and artistic programming within the Dominican community of New York. He was co-editor/compiler of the Global Beat of the Boroughs CD series for Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, for which he also produced two other albums: Badenya: Manden Music in New York City (2002) and Quisqueya en el Hudson: Dominican Music in New York (2004). Since 2003, he has produced public programs for ArtsWestchester (formerly the Westchester Arts Council), including concerts, festivals, and material arts exhibitions featuring primarily immigrant community-based artists of the lower Hudson Valley. In 2006 and 2007 and currently, he has written and administered grants from the National Endowment for the Arts for a multicultural concert series called Worlds Of Westchester, and a two-part program of Asian Indian culture and the current Latino Cultural Initiative.

Paul Mercer studied Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and received his Masters in Information Science from the University at Albany. He has worked at the New York State Library since 1979, and has been a Senior Librarian in Manuscripts and Special Collections since 1986. In addition to acquiring collections and documents for the library, he is responsible for map collections, and for the library’s extensive music holdings. As a researcher he studies the complex interplay between song writing, broadside ballads and songsters, and vernacular music traditions. By avocation he is a folk musician and singer-songwiter who tours New York and neighboring states, (as well as making occasional forays into Canada and the UK) as part of the performing duo, “Alien Folklife.”

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