Dr. Tyron Cooper is a five-time Emmy award winner and the director of Indiana University's (IU) Archives of African American Music and Culture. He is also an associate professor in IU's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. He holds a BA in music education from Bethune-Cookman University, an MA in jazz studies, and a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, both from IU. Cooper's research broadly focuses on popular black and religious music, specifically live gospel music recording productions as mediated products.

Dr. Alisha Lola Jones is an associate professor in the music faculty at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. She is a board member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), a member of the strategic planning task force for the American Musicological Society (AMS), and a co-chair of the Music and Religion Section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Additionally, as a performer-scholar, she consults museums, conservatories, seminaries, and arts organizations on curriculum, live and virtual event programming, and content development. Dr. Jones' book Flaming?: The Peculiar Theopolitics of Fire and Desire in Black Male Gospel Performance (Oxford University and Press) breaks ground by analyzing the role of gospel music-making in constructing and renegotiating gender identity among black men.

Dr. Mellonee Burnim is professor emerita in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and retired Director of the Archives of African American Music and Culture at Indiana University-Bloomington. She is a past Director of the Ethnomusicology Institute at IU and has served as chairperson in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies. As an ethnomusicologist with a specialization in African American religious music, Burnim has done fieldwork and led choral music workshops on African American religious music across the United States, as well as in Cuba and Malawi. She is co-editor of African American Music: An Introduction (Routledge 2006), now in its second edition (2015). This text has been widely adopted in universities across the US, and in 2020 it was named to the Zora Canon: The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written by African American Women.

Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America (winner of the James Beard Media Award for Food Issues and Advocacy, 2023), co-editor of Taking Food Public: Redefining Food in a Changing World (2013), and, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (winner of the Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize, American Folklore Society). She is known nationally and internationally for her work in building the scholarly subfield of Black food studies, and she has published numerous articles on topics such as Black women, food, and power; food and literature; food and sustainability; race, food, and design thinking; eating and workplace cultures; as well as the historical legacies of race and gender (mis)representation, with (and without) food.