Associate Minister, Director of Christian Education, and Director of the Worship Arts Ministry at the historic New Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, Rev. Dr. Jean Derricotte-Murphy is a 2020 recipient of the Ph.D. in Theology, Ethics, and Arts from Chicago Theological Seminary. Also, holding a Doctor of Ministry and a Master of Theological Studies well qualifies her to teach various seminary courses.

Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “A View From the Balcony: Opera Through Womanist Eyes,” traces United States history through the development of opera as a racist genre of cultural entertainment. Examining how African Americans and other marginalized minorities have been forcibly consigned to the balconies of American society, culture, and institutions while peering over symbolic balconies to locate and excavate truth, corrects the historical underpinnings of Western religious thought that fuels racist ideologies that disparage indigenous, black, and brown people in the name of God and Christianity.

Rev. Dr. Nikia Smith Robert earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Religion at Claremont School of Theology with a focus on ethics and public policy. Her transdisciplinary scholarship asks questions at the intersection of race, gender and class to interrogate social inequities that disproportionately target Black women in the U.S. Carceral State. Her primary research examines the criminalization of impoverished Black motherhood using womanist religious and abolitionist ideals.

Dr. Robert’s published works include a peer-review article in the Harvard Graduate Journal titled, “Penitence, Plantation and the Penitentiary: A Liberation Theology for Lockdown America.” She serves as a steering committee member for the Liberation Theologies group at the American Academy of Religion. Dr. Robert has participated as speaker, organizer and protestor at peaceful demonstrations for Black Live Matter, the Movement for Black Lives, Clergy for Black Lives and the NAACP. Dr. Robert is an ordained Itinerant Elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Dr. Teresa L. Smallwood, a native of North Carolina, earned a B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she majored in Speech Communications and Afro-American Studies, followed by a Juris Doctor degree from North Carolina Central University School of Law in 1985. Answering the call to ministry, she earned a Master of Divinity degree at Howard University School of Divinity in 2010, followed by a PhD degree from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2017. Her PhD concentration in Theology, Ethics, and Human Sciences informs her multivalent methodological approach to racial justice. She is the Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate Director of the Public Theology and Racial Justice Collaborative at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Dr. Smallwood is licensed and ordained to public ministry in the Baptist tradition and is presently an active member at New Covenant Christian Church in Nashville where she serves as Social Justice Minister.

Rev. Dr. Michele E. Watkins serves under appointment as the Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego, teaching courses in the early church tradition Black and Womanist theologies, and Religion and Hip-Hop.

A native of Chicago and daughter of The United Methodist Church, Dr. Watkins is a scholar-pastor-activist shaped by the Black freedom movement tradition. Prior to teaching at the University of San Diego, Dr. Watkins served as the Gerald L. Schlessman Assistant Professor in Methodist Studies and Assistant Professor of Theology at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado.