Meadow Dibble
Founding Executive Director
Meadow Dibble, Ph.D. is a writer, organizer, and public memory advocate who has been facilitating complex, searching conversations about modes of historical recovery while developing sustained local engagement processes aimed at surfacing truth, fostering healing, and achieving justice. Originally from Cape Cod, Meadow lived for six years on Senegal’s Cape Verde peninsula, where she published a cultural magazine from 1996–2000 and coordinated foreign study programs. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University’s Department of French Studies and taught at Colby College from 2005–08. From 2019–2023, Meadow served as Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. In 2022-2023, she served as Co-Lead on the Place Justice initiative, carried out in partnership with the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations.
Adilah Muhammad
Board Member & WHERE Advisory Council Member
Adilah Muhammad is the Founder and Executive Director of The Third Place—a cross-sector network that connects Black professionals, students, and entrepreneurs to social, career, and economic opportunities. Prior to founding The Third Place, Muhammad worked as an independent strategic planning and research consultant for over fifteen years. In this capacity, she specialized in organizational development for ethnic and community-based organizations, municipalities, and network-driven nonprofit. Adilah currently serves as board chairperson for the Maine Community Foundation, board director for the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, member of the Lewiston Economic Development Council, Good Shepherd Food Equity Collaborative, and as a Corporator of Androscoggin Bank. She was selected as a 2021 Mainebiz Woman to Watch and chosen as a 2022 Mainer of the Year by Maine Magazine. She received her B.A. from DePauw University and M.A. from the USM -Muskie School of Public Service.
Kate McMahon
Co-Founder & Scholarly Advisor
Kate McMahon, Ph.D. is a Historian at the National Museum of African American History & Culture and leads research efforts at the Center for the Study of Global Slavery. She received her B.A. in Art History and M.A. in American and New England Studies from the University of Southern Maine. She completed her Ph.D. in History at Howard University in 2017. Her dissertation was entitled The Transnational Dimensions of Africans and African Americans in Northern New England, 1776-1865. Her current research explores New England’s connections to and complicity in the illegal slave trade and colonialism, 1809-1900. She is committed to exploring the living legacies of slavery and the slave trade in the present day and interpreting this history for a broad public through frequent public speaking engagements and scholarly production.
Daniel Minter
Board Member
Daniel Minter is an American artist known for his work in the mediums of painting and assemblage. His overall body of work often deals with themes of displacement and diaspora, ordinary/extraordinary blackness; spirituality in the Afro-Atlantic world; and the (re)creation of meanings of home. Minter’s work has been featured in numerous institutions and galleries including the Smithsonian, the Portland Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Bates College, University of Southern Maine, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The David C. Driskell Center and the Northwest African American Art Museum. For the past 15 years Minter has raised awareness of the forced removal in 1912 of an interracial community on Maine’s Malaga Island. As founding director of Maine Freedom Trails, he has helped highlight the history of the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement in New England. In 2019, Daniel co-founded Indigo Arts Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to cultivating the artistic development of people of African descent. In this same year, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Arts by The Maine College of Art.
Mihku Paul
WHERE Advisory Council Member
Mihku Paul is a Wolastoqey elder with a background in Human Development and Communication. A writer and visual artist, Mihku has spent decades presenting curriculum enrichment to Portland Public School students and engaging in activism related to the waters and natural ecologies. Her poetry has been published internationally and translated to French and Spanish. She lives and works in Portland.
James Eric Francis, Sr.
WHERE Advisory Council Member
James Eric Francis, Sr. is Penobscot Nation’s Director of Cultural and Historic Preservation, Tribal Historian, and Chair of Penobscot Tribal Rights and Resource Protection Board. As a historian James studies the relationship between Maine Native Americans and the landscape. Prior to working at the Penobscot Nation, James worked for the Wabanaki Studies Commission helping implement the new Maine Native American Studies Law into Maine schools. James co-produced a film, Invisible, which examines racism experienced by Native Americans in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. James is the on the Co-Chair of the Abbe Museum’s Board of Trustees, and Co-Director of Local Contexts, an initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property and cultural heritage. James also serves on the UMaine’s Hudson Museum Advisory Board. James is a historical researcher, photographer, filmmaker, painter, and graphics artist.
Erika Arthur
Program & Development Associate & WHERE Advisory Council Member
Erika Arthur is Program and Development Associate at Atlantic Black Box. Erika most recently worked at the Catherine Cutler Institute at the University of Southern Maine in the Justice Policy and Child Welfare program areas after spending the years before that as a cook, a bookseller, and a farmworker. She holds an MA in U.S. History and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her graduate research was located at the intersection of race, gender, rural political economy, and mass incarceration. For more than two decades, Erika has engaged in community organizing and education on social and racial justice issues. Her current focus is embodied practice as a capacity-building tool for anti-racism, decolonization, and collective healing. She is pursuing a Master of Divinity degree with a focus on chaplaincy in the Buddhism & Interreligious Engagement Program at Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York.
Lilah Akin
Board Member
Lilah Akin is a Penobscot Nation Tribal Member and an interdisciplinary artist. Born and raised on Oahu, Hawaii, Lilah is also of Jewish, Cherokee, and settler-colonial descent. She earned her second BA at the University of Southern Maine’s Geography-Anthropology program with a focus in Cultural and Natural Heritage Management. Lilah is a member of In Kinship Collective and the Spinning Wampum initiative. She has worked with Nibezun and Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness.
Lisa Simpson Lutts
Administrator
Lisa Simpson Lutts is Administrator at Atlantic Black Box. She recently retired from a 40 year career leading history museums in the Northeast, most recently the Castine Historical Society in Castine, ME. In 2020, Lisa became involved with ABB as a citizen historian researching, writing, and speaking about Castine’s hidden African American history and complicity with slavery through the maritime cotton and cod trades that brought great wealth to the town. Through her leadership at the Castine Historical Society, she brought this history to the public through a year-long lecture series, historic walking tours, and the creation of a five-week learning unit on Castine’s African American history for the local school. Lisa received her undergraduate degree in Art History from the University of Tennessee and a masters degree in Art History and Museum Studies from George Washington University.
Shana Cook Mueller
Board Member
Shana Cook Mueller is an attorney who was in private practice for 18 years mostly representing municipalities in the areas of economic development and public finance. More recently she serves as a program leader for the Groundwater Institute, an organization that offers historical and data-driven training programs about race across the United States. Shana served as the leader of diversity initiatives at her former law firm in Portland, Maine and has served on the equity leadership steering committee of her local school district. She also served as the Chair of the Maine State Bar Association Diversity Committee and the Chair of the Maine State Bar Association Task Force on Bar Admission for Internationally Trained Attorneys. She lives in North Yarmouth with her husband and two children. She and her family are currently traveling abroad for ten months in Tanzania and Switzerland, among other countries. Shana has been inspired by the work of Atlantic Black Box for years now and is thrilled to join the board.
Christy Clark-Pujara
Scholarly Advisor
Christy Clark-Pujara, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of History in the Department Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the experiences of Black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. She is particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined—small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. Dr. Clark-Pujara contends that the full dimensions of the African American and American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how black people managed their lives in places where they were few. Her first book Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island examines how the business of slavery shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War.
Bob Greene
Board Member
A native of Portland, Bob Greene is the eighth generation of his family to be born in Cumberland County. His roots in Maine stretch back into the 1700s. After graduating from Portland High, Bob went off to college and a career as a journalist, covering among other things airplane crashes, Mississippi River floods, and the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He has met three presidents: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. And, as The Associated Press Tennis Writer, Greene traveled the world covering the sport. After retiring, he returned home to Maine where his genealogical research has led to his deep knowledge about Maine’s Black history. He currently teaches a Black History of Maine course at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) at the University of Southern Maine. Greene also is the 2021 recipient of the Maine Historical Society’s Neal Allen Award, which is presented each year for exceptional contributions to Maine History.
Elizabeth Bradley
Board Member
Elizabeth L. Bradley, Ph.D. is Vice President of Programs and Engagement at Historic Hudson Valley (HHV), where she directs digital and onsite programs, curatorial affairs, research and archives for five historic sites. Dr. Bradley’s work on Northern slavery with HHV has garnered numerous awards, and she regularly writes and lectures on the subjects of Northern slavery, the cultural history of Washington Irving, and New York City history in general. She previously directed adult program strategy for the New York Public Library’s flagship research library and 88 branches. She is the author of Knickerbocker: The Myth Behind New York and New York: Cityscopes, as well as the editor of the Penguin Classic Editions of A History of New York and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories, both by Washington Irving. She is a Fellow of the New York Academy of History. Dr. Bradley serves on the board of the Mamaroneck Larchmont Student Aid Fund, The Mamaroneck District Equity Task Force, and the Larchmont Mamaroneck Human Rights Committee.
Nicole Maskiell
Scholarly Advisor
Nicole Maskiell is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College, where she specializes in the colonial history of the Northeast, with a focus on overlapping networks of slavery in the Dutch and British Atlantic worlds. Her book Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry (Cornell University Press, 2022) compares the ways that slavery shaped the development of elite Northern culture by examining the social and kinship networks that intertwined enslavers with those they enslaved. It won the 2023 Hendricks Award from the New Netherland Institute. Professor Maskiell is series editor for Black New England, a University of Massachusetts Press book series that highlights original and innovative research on the history of African-descended people in New England from the colonial period through the present day.
Eisha Khan
Board Member
Eisha Khan is a Kashmiri Muslim American with a diverse background in health equity and community engagement. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and international relations and a Master’s degree from Harvard University, where she specialized in global health. Eisha has developed impactful programs addressing health disparities and racial inequities, including creating trauma-informed curricula for refugees with the UNHCR. Currently, she serves as the co-chair of the BIPOC Care Team Member Network and program manager for Social Drivers of Health at MaineHealth. Shifting from the mental model of a melting pot to that of a mosaic, Eisha strives to uphold the beauty of each unique tradition, story, and belief, cultivating an environment where every piece of the mosaic contributes to the whole, and all voices are seen, heard, and valued. Through her work, she continues to foster community, promote equity, and lead initiatives that inspire systemic change.
Devon Kelley-Yurdin
Lead & Creative Coordinator for WHERE
Devon Kelley-Yurdin (they/them) serves as Lead & Creative Coordinator on ABB’s Walk for Historical and Ecological Recovery (WHERE) initiative. They are an an interdisciplinary artist, friend, and instigator of collective experiences living rurally in what is colonially known as Midcoast Maine. Devon’s introduction to ABB/WHERE was through their work with the In Kinship Collective, who was invited to co-produce a walk as part of the inaugural season in 2024. There was enough energy and alignment in the project and its unfolding that Devon also joined the WHERE team as a coordinator for the series. Their creative practice is devoted to expanding interpersonal and collective creative capacity, which is necessary for liberatory world-building. This devotion is expressed through traditional media such as printmaking, cut-paper, installation; design, illustration, and art direction; event production and facilitation; performance; education; and cultural organizing. They orient towards collaboration and interdependence, curiosity, deep care, queerness in all its forms, Jewish time, casual mysticism, connection to more-than-human neighbors, and beauty as a tool for accessibility.