Born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis is an American philosopher and writer, human rights activist and long-time professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Involved with the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s and the Communist Party until the late 1980s, she was sentenced to death in the United States in 1970 for political reasons. She was imprisoned until June 1972, when, thanks in part to a vast national and international support movement, she was released after conducting her own defence. Her struggles against racism, the prison industry and oppression and discrimination around the world have made her a major figure in the world’s intellectual, cultural and social history. She advocates an abolitionist feminism and stresses the importance of intersecting struggles for emancipation. She is the author of numerous books and essays. Her publications available including Autobiography, 1974, Women, Race & Class, 1981, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 1998, Are prison obsolete?, 2003, Abolition democracy beyond empire, prisons, and torture, 2005.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) is an American writer, poet and activist born in Harlem, New York. She is a major figure in contemporary literature and feminist struggles and defines herself as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. Her work is rooted in her own personal experience, making the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia a fundamental structure of her writing. She wrote her first poem at the age of 11, and the power of language was the guiding principle of her work throughout her life. She died of cancer in 1992, and the way in which she wrote and described the experience of illness was also constitutive of her intellectual commitment. Associated with the editorial boards of the feminist journals Chrysalis and Amazon Quarterly in the 1970s, she was one of the first writers to analyse racism in feminisms in her famous lecture “The master’s tools will never destroy his house”, delivered in New York in 1979. Her publications include Zami, a new spelling of my name, 1982, Sister Outsider, essays and speeches, 1994, The black unicorn: poems, 1978, Coal, 1976.

Toni Morrison (USA, 1931-2019) is a major figure in contemporary literature. Born in Lorain, Ohio, she studied at Howard University in Washington DC, one of the most prestigious black universities in the United States. In 1967, she became an editor at Random House in New York and worked to publish books by African-American authors. She initiated the autobiographies of major figures such as Mohamed Ali and Angela Davis, and supported the work of figures such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. In 1970, Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which she tells the painful story of a little girl in the 1930s. Sula, her second novel, was published in 1973. She stopped working in publishing in the early 1980s to devote herself exclusively to writing and, at the same time, returned to teaching literature at university (Cornell, then the State University of New York from 1985 to 1980, Princeton from 1989, until her retirement in 2006). In 1988, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved, and in 1993 received the Nobel Prize for Literature for her work. Toni Morrison has published eleven novels and three collections of essays. Among the latter, The Origin of Others (2017) and The Source of Self-Regard (2019) confirm the power of her language and thought.

Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s (France, 1977; lives and works in Sète) multi-faceted approach is characterized by artistic projects, research, exhibition curating, film programming, and explores areas neglected by colonial and post-colonial history. He collaborates with artists from a wide range of disciplines. Recent solo exhibitions include In the Womb of the Glass Ship at La Loge (Brussels, 2022), Gods Moving in Places. The Day Reader at IFA (Berlin, 2022), The Music of Living Landscapes at Kestner Gesellschaft (Hanover, 2022), Le palais du Paon at Musée départemental d’art contemporain (Rochechouart, 2018), Concerning Solitude at Fondation Jumex (Mexico, 2018), Maintenir la distance at Guyane Art Factory (Cayenne, 2017), Mefloquine Dreams at MMK (Frankfurt, 2016), Songs For a Mad King at Kunsthalle (Basel, 2013) and Préface à des fusils pour Banta at Gasworks (London, 2011). He is currently a doctoral student at EDESTA-Paris 8. He is director of the Culture collection at éditions B42 and co-founder of éditions Ròt-Bò-Krik. Crédac presented his solo exhibition Dans ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte from January to April 2023.

Anouchka de Andrade (Russia, 1962; lives and works in Paris) is the daughter of Guadeloupe filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020) and Angolan poet and politician Mário de Andrade (1928-1990). After being the artistic director of the Amiens International Film Festival, dedicated to auteur cinema and African and South American films, Annouchka de Andrade led numerous projects in international cultural cooperation. For the past twenty years, she has been Sarah Maldoror’s assistant. Alongside her sister Henda Ducados, she initiated a project to preserve and circulate the works of their parents, including film restoration and the archiving of documents, correspondence, manuscripts and unpublished scripts. A couple whose artistic and political commitment is rooted in the 20th century.

Often known as JEB, Joan E. Biren (USA, 1944) is a photographer, filmmaker, documentary filmmaker and activist. From 1971, she began documenting the lives of LGBTQIA+ people. Her photographs played a decisive role in the gay rights movement. Through her intimate and committed photographs, Biren captures authentic moments of solidarity and resistance within the lesbian community, seeking to counter stereotypes and give visibility to lives often marginalized or limited to an eroticised gaze often imposed by the male gaze.

The work of Krista Franklin (USA, 1970; lives and works in Chicago) is based on the tradition of negritude and Afro-surrealism to reappropriate African-American identities and narratives. She also broaches issues of gender and class through a variety of media. Although collage plays a key role in her work, it also includes installations, murals, performances, sound works and poetry. Her collages often center around photographs of black women or famous cultural figures such as Run DMC or Tupac Shakur, while playing with materials as varied as magazine cut-outs, craft ribbons and feathers, all on self-made paper. Influenced by the AfroSurrealist Manifesto (2009) written by poet D. Scot Miller, Franklin’s approaches are consistently mystical, metaphorical and metaphysical, including her spiritual learnings and ideas on the paranormal, gender and sexual identity, and the surreal nature of black experiences.

Writer, poet and playwright Jean Genet (France, 1910-1986) lived a tumultuous life as a ward of the public welfare system. As a teenager, he began a marginal, rebellious existence, spending time in the Métray penal colony, the Foreign Legion and prison on several occasions. His first novels were censored as pornographic. Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre brought him to light and defended him, one by saving him from life imprisonment, the other by writing Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952). Together with Michel Foucault, Genet set up an observatory of prisons, took sides with the Algerian independence movement, notably through his novels Le Captif amoureux (1986) and L’Ennemi déclaré (posth. 1991), was involved with the Palestinians and the Black Panthers, and supported and befriended Angela Davis. He is one of the most widely performed playwrights in the French repertoire, and was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1983.

French-Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) studied anthropology and comparative religion at McGill University in Montreal, then art at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris and Le Fresnoy. In recent years, she has established herself as a leading figure in international contemporary art. Kiwanga draws on her studies in anthropology and the social sciences to create meticulously documented artistic projects. Her installations stage new spatial environments, revealing how bodies interact with power structures. By deliberately blurring the line between truth and fiction, she challenges dominant narratives and opens up spaces where marginalized voices can express themselves. Her work explores the impact of power asymmetries by confronting historical narratives with contemporary realities, archives and future perspectives. Crédac presented her solo exhibition Cima Cima from April to July 2021. She represents Canada at the Venice Biennale 2024.

In the 1960s, Jill Krementz (USA, 1940; lives in New York) worked as a photographer for the New York Herald Tribune. In 1965, she spent a year taking a series of photographs of the Vietnam War, published in the New York Observer. Her photograph of the “March on the Pentagon”, a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War on October 21, 1967, made the cover of Time. In 1970, Jill Krementz decided to “fill the void of auteur photography” by specializing in portraits of writers. Working solely with the help of a secretary and a minimum of photographic equipment (two 35 mm cameras and three lenses), she built up and managed a vast photo library of over 800 portraits of male and female authors.

Through a variety of artistic forms, Paul Maheke (France, 1985; lives and works in Montpellier) explores how marginalized bodies, narratives and histories can be made visible or invisible. Maheke’s works, including performance, drawing and installation, seek to transform public perception and reconfigure traditional discourses on identity and representation. His aim is to shape our sensibilities and challenge dominant systems of discourse and understanding, which often rely on representation and visibility as ultimate forms of truth and power.

Sarah Maldoror (France, 1929-2020) is a French filmmaker of Guadeloupean origin. Her works, alternating fiction and documentary, short and feature-length, are marked by a desire to fight against the way others look at black people here and elsewhere. After co-creating the Compagnie des Griots in 1956, the first black theater company in Paris, she studied cinema in Moscow. Through her films, Sarah Maldoror is committed to accompanying the struggles for independence and their complex legacies, and to celebrating the artist’s commitment and art as an act of freedom. A pioneer behind the camera, she has helped shape a new African imaginary, nourished by a new representation of the black body, by the major place claimed by women in the battles to be waged, and by the survival of a humanist and sensitive way of thinking.

William Pope.L, known as Pope.L (USA, 1955-2023), is an artist whose work encompasses performance, sculpture, drawing and installation. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he studied at Montclair State University and Rutgers University. His work often explores issues of race, class, power and identity through a provocative, often humorous and incongruous lens. Pope.L is renowned for his performances, often featuring interventions in public space and acts of extreme physical endurance, to dramatize social inequalities.

Faith Ringgold (USA, 1930-2024) was a major figure in American feminist art, from the Black Arts Movement to the Black Lives Matter struggles. She produced her first political paintings, American People Series (1963-1967), which comment on the American way of life in the context of the civil rights movement. At the same time, the artist took action against the Whitney Museum in New York, which failed to show African-American artists in an exhibition in 1968, and against the under-representation of women in its collections. She spent several months working with women incarcerated in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island, where she created the mural For the Women’s House (1971), celebrating women in often male-dominated professions. Faith Ringgold is renowned for her narrative quilts, textile works that recount the African-American experience. Also the author of children’s books, she has received over a hundred awards for her visual and literary work.

Director Céline Sciamma (France, 1978) is renowned for her intimate films exploring themes of identity, gender and sexuality, including Tomboy (2011), awarded at the Berlin Film Festival. Bande de filles (2014) tells the story of four young girls on the outskirts of Paris who try to escape their fate and the male codes that rule the housing estate. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) tells the story of the love between Marianne, an 18th-century painter, and her model Héloïse, who has left the convent to get married. The film won the screenplay prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Paula Valero Comín (Spain, 1976) is a transdisciplinary artist who graduated from the College of Fine Arts in Valencia in 2001 and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2006. Her doctorate explores the links between performance and activism. She carries out travelling projects in several cities and focuses on how art can enrich the collective imagination and help to transform situations and realities. Her project Herbier Résistant Rosa Luxemburg establishes a genealogy of correspondences on the contribution of women to the protection of life and plants. Since 2020, the different layers of her polymorphous work (drawings, installations, lectures, urban interventions) have been interdependent and have been nourished by this research process.

Elvan Zabunyan is a contemporary art historian, professor at the Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University and an art critic. Since the mid-1990s, her work has examined historical, political, postcolonial and feminist issues in twentieth and twenty-first century art in the context of the United States and the Caribbean. She is the author of a pioneering work, Black is a color, (Dis Voir, 2005), as well as the first monograph on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - Berkeley - 1968 (Presses du réel, 2013). She has co-edited several books and written numerous articles for collective collections, exhibition catalogues and national and international periodicals. Her recent co-editions include Constellations subjectives, pour une histoire féministe de l’art (Ixe, 2020), Decolonizing Colonial Heritage (Routledge, 2022), L’art en France à la croisée des cultures (Heidelberg University, 2023). His new book Réunir les bouts du monde. Art, histoire, esclavage en mémoire (Éditions B42), whose ten years of research are rooted in the lecture series Une autre Histoire. Penser l’art contemporain à travers la mémoire de l’esclavage, given in 2013-2014 as part of the 7^th season of Mard! initiated by Crédac.

Claire Le Restif is an art historian, curator and director of the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry - le Crédac since 2003. In 2008, she created Royal Garden, an online curatorial project on the Crédac website. In 2011, she helped move Crédac to the Manufacture des Œillets in Ivry. Crédac added a dedicated video space in 2016 and a research residency in 2018. At Crédac, she organised the first solo exhibitions in France of Leonor Antunes, Liz Magor, Ana Jotta, Friedrich Kunath, Bojan Šarčević, Alexandra Bircken, and Caroline Bachmann. She curated the Altadis Prize in Madrid and Paris (2005), the Foundation Pernod Ricard’s Prize (2019), the 7^th edition of Paris internationale (2020) and the exhibition L’Âme primitive at the Musée Zadkine in Paris with Jeanne Brun (2021). Since 2002, she has organised several exhibitions abroad. From 2015 to 2020, she will be an associate professor in the Master’s programme in Contemporary art and its exhibition at Sorbonne University.