Ph.D., History, University of Wisconsin

Cisco Bradley is associate professor of history at the Pratt Institute where he directs the Music and Migration Lab. He is the author of three books, including, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (2021), both on Duke University Press. He has also published in the Cambridge History of Global Migration among other journals and collections. He founded the Free Jazz Oral History Project in 2016 which has recorded nearly 500 oral histories with musicians in the U.S., Ethiopia, Mexico, South Africa, Korea, Germany, and other countries. He is the founder and editor of Jazz Right Now. His current research examines the roots of jazz in the Great Migration. He has received grants from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Fulbright program, the Social Science Research Council, the New York State Council of the Arts, and other organizations.

Ph.D., Geography, Clark University

John Lauermann is the Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative (SAVI) faculty director and associate professor in the School of Information at Pratt. He leads all GIS-related projects at the lab. SAVI has received grants from FEMA, Mellon Foundation, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, New York City Council, NYC Mayor's Office of Data Analytics, New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Sloan Foundation, and the US Forest Service.

He is a DJ, cultural archivist, music historian, and professional listener based in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from West Baltimore, Maryland, his passion for music began in the mid-1980s, leading him on a journey through various professions and intellectual settings. Currently, he is pursuing pathways to link together music, archives, and media with group therapy settings for Black and Brown men living with depression, anxiety, and deep trauma.

M.F.A., Music Composition, Vermont College of Fine Arts

He is the director of the Black Cosmic Music Library. Burnett is a Brooklyn-born saxophonist, composer, educator, and musicologist. His father and grandfather played saxophones and he studied with them while performing in public school bands through high school. He began playing with reggae and free jazz groups in 1987. He lectures on free jazz and social movements and also worked as a music therapist. He has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, New Music USA, the Yip Harburg Foundation, and the Sanctuary for Independent Media.

M.A., English Literature, University of Geneva

His research has focused on the aesthetics of Black revolutionary poetry through jazz, particularly Coltrane poetry. His current academic project explores jazz and migration through digital humanities, examining the presence of Free Jazz musicians in Europe. From 2020 to 2024, he served as a research assistant on Professor Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel's "Visual Contagions" project, which investigated global image circulation through the press. In 2020, he founded Sconsolato, a jazz label dedicated to reviving forgotten works by artists such as Noah Howard and Ken Rhodes. More recently, his involvement in the "PHAROAH" project revitalized a masterpiece by Pharoah Sanders.

Ph.D. Candidate, English, Rutgers University

His scholarly interests lie in the intersection between communities of Black poetics and Black music, specifically the coinciding rise of the free jazz tradition and the rise of the Black Arts Movement.

Ph.D, Candidate, Music, City University of New York

Her dissertation focuses on Cecil Taylor's improvisations in relation to politics and aesthetics. She was the organizer of Unit Structures: The Art of Cecil Taylor Conference (2019) and is currently the managing editor of American Music Review.

M.A., Art History; M.S., Information Science

He is an archivist and journalist who has written and documented the history of creative music since the late 1990s. He has published reviews and interviews with the New York City Jazz Record, All About Jazz, JazzRightNow.com, and many other publications.

M.S., Media Archive Studies

He is an archivist and an instructor in the MLIS program at Queens College. He is the recipient of the MLIS Award for Advancement of the Profession, Sony Pictures Scholarship, and the Rutgers University Jazz Archives Fellowship. He consults for WITNESS Human Rights Video and the Oral History Projects department of the Academy Foundation. He is a core member of XFR Collective, which works with communities and artists to digitize at-risk media.

Ph.D. Candidate, Art History, New York University