Join us Monday, March 4, at 6:00 PM for an Accelerator Series panel discussion on food justice, sustainability, and well-being. This conversation, moderated by Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier, will include artist and urban farmer Kate Daughdrill; Wesleyan University professor and author of Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America Anthony Hatch; and farmer, activist, and author of Farming while Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land Leah Penniman.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the Panelists

Kate Daughdrill is an artist, urban farmer, writer, and speaker based in Detroit. She earned a BA in Studio Art and Political & Social Thought from the University of Virginia and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Recent projects include Detroit SOUP, a monthly dinner that funds micro-grants for creative projects in Detroit, and the Edible Hut, a community space with a living, edible roof in a public park in Detroit’s Osborn neighborhood. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Kunstverein Wolfsburg. Daughdrill lives and works on Burnside Farm on Detroit’s east side. She is currently cultivating gatherings and dinners that explore the connections between plants, ceremony, and artistic energy. She is also focusing on her writing, offering talks, and immersing herself in learning experiences to deepen her integration of meditation, wildness, yoga, and artistic practice.

Anthony Ryan Hatch is Associate Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan University. An expert in health care, medicine, science, technology, culture, power, and social inequality, Hatch’s areas of interest are science and technology studies, medical humanities, critical race theory, radical ecology, and sociology of knowledge. He earned an AB in philosophy from Dartmouth College and both his MA and PhD in sociology from the University of Maryland at College Park. He held a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral training fellowship at Morehouse School of Medicine focused on substance use, mental health, and HIV/AIDS in prison systems. He is the author of Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), which critiques how biomedical scientists, government researchers, and drug companies use concepts of race and ethnicity to study and treat metabolic syndrome, and Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America (Minnesota, 2019), an investigation into the use of psychotropic drugs to pacify and control inmates and other captives in the U.S. prison, military, and welfare systems.   

Leah Penniman is an educator, farmer, writer, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. She co-founded Soul Fire Farm in 2011 with the mission to end racism in the food system and reclaim our ancestral connection to land. She is part of a team that facilitates powerful food sovereignty programs, including farmer trainings for black and brown people, a subsidized farm food distribution program for people living under food apartheid, and domestic and international organizing toward equity in the food system. She holds an MA in Science Education and BA in Environmental Science and International Development from Clark University. She has been farming since 1996 and teaching since 2002. Penniman’s work and the work of Soul Fire Farm have been recognized by the Soros Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Presidential Award for Science Teaching, NYS Health Emerging Innovator Awards, and Andrew Goodman Foundation, among others.

About the Accelerator Series

The Accelerator Series is the Tang Teaching Museum’s dynamic conversation series on big ideas and big issues that seeks to find new entry points into discussions that veer from traditional paths. As an open and inclusive public forum for dialogue, exchange and questioning, the Accelerator Series ignites a collective sense of intellectual curiosity and fosters thoughtful engagement with a deeper understanding of compelling issues that have the potential to spark radical transformations.

The series features key cultural influencers from the arts and culture sector as well as academia, entertainment, government, journalism, media, politics and beyond, who present new perspectives and disrupt the status quo by encouraging a “getting comfortable with discomfort” attitude in order to think and work through big ideas to drive change.

The Accelerator Series is supported by Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum, a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.