Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called The Jazz Singers, he was nominated for a Grammy Award.

O’Meally has co-curated exhibitions for The Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center and The High Museum of Art (Atlanta). He has held Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships, and was a recent fellow at Columbia's new Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Global Center/Paris. His new books are The Romare Bearden Reader (edited for Duke University Press, 2019) and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020).

For more information, please visit O'Meally's personal website here

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Aidan Levy is the author of Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (Hachette Books, 2022), which won a 2023 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, the 2023 Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Award for Biography/Autobiography of the Year, and was longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. He began work on the book as a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellow. He is the author of Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed and editor of Patti Smith on Patti Smith: Interviews and Encounters. He is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Saint Joseph, and holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He is also a professional saxophonist. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, JazzTimes, and The Village Voice.

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Hinton is a marketing professional and graphic designer with a passion for experimental design and creative strategy. She is Communications Director for both JGI New Orleans and JGI New York.

Originally from Detroit, Jocelyne fell in love with New Orleans in the late 1990s and moved here in 2005. She brings more than 15 years of experience across music, arts, and cultural programming, including event production, venue operations, and artist relations.⁠⁠With a background in Anthropology and Urban Studies & Planning from Wayne State University, Jocelyne’s work centers on people-focused cultural spaces and the role music plays in shaping community life. She has worked with many of the city’s major festivals, including Jazz Fest, Essence Festival, French Quarter Fest, Satchmo SummerFest, and the New Orleans Film Festival.⁠

Jazz Studies Group Coordinator for the Jazz Generations Initiative and the Program Coordinator for the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. Passionate about supporting artistic and scholarly work in jazz, she plays a key role in developing programs, connecting communities, and fostering opportunities for musicians, researchers, and students. In her positions, she supports innovative programs, facilitates research and artistic collaboration, and helps advance the study and preservation of jazz culture. Yulanda brings commitment to community engagement and program development, contributing to the growth of both emerging scholars and seasoned practitioners within the jazz community.

Writer, editor, organizer and educator working at the intersection of music, politics and community history. The first person to have served as both politics columnist and music critic for the New York Times, Gio is currently writing a book about Gil Scott-Heron and Washington, D.C., under contract to Metropolitan Books/Macmillan and Faber & Faber. Since 2010, Gio has served as co-founder and editor-in-chief of capitalbop.com, a web magazine covering D.C.’s jazz scene. He was a 2024 DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities fellow and a 2021 Logan Nonfiction Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

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Composer and pianist Courtney Bryan is the New Orleans Co-P.I. of the Jazz Generations Initiative. Dr. Bryan is the Albert and Linda Mintz Professor of Music at Newcomb College in the School of Liberal Arts at Tulane University. Her music is published by Boosey & Hawkes, and she is a Steinway Artist and 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Recent accolades include the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts (2018), Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition (2019–2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2020), and the Camargo Foundation Fellowship (2025). She currently serves as composer-in-residence with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.

Yulanda C. McKenzie is the Jazz Studies Group Coordinator for the Jazz Generations Initiative and the Program Coordinator for the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. Passionate about supporting artistic and scholarly work in jazz, she plays a key role in developing programs, connecting communities, and fostering opportunities for musicians, researchers, and students. In her positions, she supports innovative programs, facilitates research and artistic collaboration, and helps advance the study and preservation of jazz culture. Yulanda brings commitment to community engagement and program development, contributing to the growth of both emerging scholars and seasoned practitioners within the jazz community.

Giovanni Russonello is a writer, editor, organizer and educator working at the intersection of music, politics and community history. The first person to have served as both politics columnist and music critic for the New York Times, Gio is currently writing a book about Gil Scott-Heron and Washington, D.C., under contract to Metropolitan Books/Macmillan and Faber & Faber. Since 2010, Gio has served as co-founder and editor-in-chief of capitalbop.com, a web magazine covering D.C.’s jazz scene. He was a 2024 DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities fellow and a 2021 Logan Nonfiction Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Educator, musician, and interdisciplinary artist from Houston, who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 2002. She is the Creative Director for Bamboula: Jazz Studies in Motion, the New Orleans arm of the Jazz Generations Initiative Project. Frazier recently curated programming for Prospect NOLA and was a 2023-2024 MLK Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests currently include the Gulf South and the Anthropocene, sound studies and the natural, and built environments of the Gulf South and Circum-Caribbean. She is the co-founder of Les Cenelles, a string and technological interfacing ensemble that performs African Diasporic music through a prismatic lens that honors African and Indigenous ancestors and chronicles ecological realities. As a company member of Goat in the Road Productions, Frazier has used her skills as an actor and as a musical composer in immersive performances and collaborations that tell lesser known stories. She is the proud parent of one son.