The CEDAR Gallery: People
Principal Curator and Director
Jayson Maurice Porter is an environmental writer and historian who researches environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice and injustice. His book manuscript is in review with Duke University Press and focuses on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconuts. You can find his narrative non-fiction works on black environmental history in Distillations Magazine.
Jayson teaches “Environmental Justice Histories of Agrochemicals in the Americas,” “Black and Indigenous Environmental Histories of the Americas through Seven Plants," and an “Environmental and Historical Writing Seminar” for graduate students. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He also serves as a Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the Indigenous Futures Lab of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, where he is opening the CEDAR Gallery to support students' climate anxiety with celebrations of Black and Indigenous environmental art. Outside of academia, he is a board member of Rutgers University’s Black Ecologies Lab; the board chair of One Square World, an environmental justice non-profit; and is a co-designer of the Chicago Teachers Union’s Environmental Justice Freedom School.