Meet the TEAm

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  • (TEA Lab Director, Project lead of The Criadas Project and The Lugares Históricos Project) 

    Dr. Sarah Bruno is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Caribbean Performance and Culture in the Departments of English and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University, and former Diaspora Solidarity Lab Postdoctoral Fellow (2023-2024). Her research and art lie at the intersections of ethnography, performance, diaspora, and digitality. She is currently working on my first book manuscript, Black Rican Refusal: Decolonial Postures, Emotional Dexterity, and Bomba Puertorriqueña, tentatively out of Duke University Press.

    As a Black Puerto Rican from the south side of Chicago, Bruno was trained in Hip Hop pedagogy and collaborative performance, and performed across the country as a poet and as a part of the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts scholarship program based out of University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a cultural anthropologist invested in Afro-Latinx studies, performance studies, and decolonial methodologies, she is attentive to the ways music and dance are rich sites for ethnographic-based analyses regarding Blackness, colonialism, diaspora, and affect.

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  • (The Registro Project Lead) 

    Essah Cozett Díaz, Ph.D. is a Liberian-American poet, digital humanist, and community organizer. Her research is rooted in African diaspora literature, oral traditions, and spiritual practices. Díaz, who leads TEA's Registro Project, is currently the Project Manager of the Mellon-funded Rooted + Relational program at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) at CUNY Hunter College. She also serves as the editor of the Archive Liberia Anthology. In 2016, she founded Hermanas del Agua, the Puerto Rican chapter of the SisterCARE Alliance, to create a safe space for women and non-binary people to practice strategic self-care. Díaz is a co-editor of the collections Mothering, Community, and Friendship (Demeter Press, 2022) and Distancing as Infinite Entanglement: Healing, Intersectionality and Interstices in the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Greater Caribbean and Beyond (University of Curaçao, 2021). She is also an alumna of the Obsidian Foundation and the Young Scholars of Liberia. Her writing has appeared in several international print and online publications.

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  • (The Libertos Project Lead)

    Dr. Daniel Morales-Armstrong is a Black DiaspoRican historian and educator from The Bronx whose work focuses on slavery and emancipation in Puerto Rico. Morales-Armstrong, who leads TEA's Libertos Project, is the Miriam Jiménez Román Fellow in AfroLatinx Studies at NYU, prior to which he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (Centro) and a Ford Dissertation Fellow. His scholarship examines how formerly enslaved Puerto Ricans (“libertos”) challenged the three-year forced labor mandate that followed emancipation in the colony, as well as the silences surrounding these acts of refusal. He is currently editing a two-volume anthology about the legacies of slavery and abolition in Puerto Rico. His work has been published in Slavery & Abolition, the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, the Centro Journal, as well as chapters in bilingual anthologies. His research has been generously funded by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Diaspora Solidarities Lab, Centro, and The Latinx Project. 

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  • (Taller Entre Aguas Predoctoral Fellow)

    Elyse Veloria (she/her/ella) is a PhD candidate of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University pursuing graduate certificates in African American Studies and College Teaching. Her ethnographic dissertation research focuses on labor, livable futures, and land in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Given Elyse’s ethnographic commitment to Black Puerto Rican cultural memory, the study of embodied ecological knowledge, and her training in Black feminist studies, she is thrilled to be the inaugural Predoctoral Fellow for Taller Entre Aguas. As a member of the TEAm she is excited to be in a collaborative and creative space dedicated to foregrounding Black Boricua aesthetics and stories. Previously, she graduated from Bowdoin College cum laude and completed a Fulbright fellowship in Colombia. 

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  • (Graduate Assistant)

    Melanie Rodríguez Vázquez (ella/she) is a doctoral student in English at Michigan State University, specializing in Caribbean Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research explores narratives of migration and displacement through the lens of feminist theory, focusing on how concepts such as citizenship, diasporic Blackness, and belonging are articulated in Caribbean cultural production. Her work engages deeply with the colonial legacies that continue to inform bordering practices and notions of citizenship in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.

    Joining Taller Entre Aguas as a Graduate Assistant represents an opportunity for her to engage in intellectual and community-based collaborations with other Afro-Boricua scholars and community organizers. Through this role, she aims to support the recollection and dissemination of Black Puerto Rican data, enriching the fields of Puerto Rican and Caribbean Studies.

    Melanie holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, where she first cultivated her curiosity for Caribbean literature and feminist praxis.