The Institute Continues to Shape Board Leadership for Future Los Angeles - The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced the newly appointed and recent additions to the Institute's Board of Trustees. Kimberl Crenshaw, Ann Lewnes, Wonya Lucas join the board alongside Uzodinma Iweala, Amanda Kelso, William Plapinger, and Junaid Sarieddeen who joined over the last year. Together they add to the business, cultural, and philanthropic leaders who guide and steer the entire organization and also act in an advisory capacity. The distinguished new Trustees bring invaluable experience and will work closely with Board Chair Pat Mitchell and Executive Director Keri Putnam.
We are so grateful to welcome the expertise and unique perspectives of Kimberl , Uzodinma, Amanda, Ann, Bill, and Junaid to Sundance as we move forward in this challenging time, said Pat Mitchell. Our board possesses the right skills, a broad range of talents and a high level of commitment to our founding values and ethics to guide the organizations mission oriented work in supporting emerging artists around the world and connecting audiences to their stories.
They join current members on the Institute's Board: Robert Redford, President & Founder; Pat Mitchell, Chair; Jeanne Donovan Fisher, Vice Chair; Ebs Burnough, Vice Chair; Sean Bailey, Ritesh Batra, Jason Blum, Lisa-Michele Church, Kenneth Cole, Pascal Desroches, Fred Dust, Philipp Engelhorn, Caterina Fake, Robert J. Frankenberg, Donna Gruneich, Cindy Harrell Horn, Charles D. King, Lisa Kron, Lyn Davis Lear, Gigi Pritzker, Alejandro Ram rez Maga a, Amy Redford, Geoffrey K. Sands, Nadine Schiff-Rosen, and Lynette Wallworth.
Sundance Institute regularly evolves its Board, evaluating its composition to ensure it includes the skills and perspective necessary to help guide the organization as individual board member terms expire. The Institutes Board has typically included between 24-28 members, these latest additions represent a slight growth for the Board. With three board members terms concluding, and additions over the last year, the Institute is now composed of a 32-person Board, 10 of whose members self-identify as BIPOC and six of whom self-identify as Black. The Board is 50% men and 50% women.
The new members of Sundance Institute's Board of Trustees are:
Kimberl Crenshaw is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the African American Policy Forum, and the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia Law School. She is the Promise Institute Professor at UCLA Law School and the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor at Columbia Law School. She is popularly known for her development of intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the #SayHerName Campaign, and is the host of the podcast Intersectionality Matters!, a columnist for The New Republic, and the moderator of the widely impactful webinar series Under The Blacklight: The Intersectional Vulnerabilities that the Twin Pandemics Lay Bare. She is one of the most cited scholars in the history of the law, and was named Ms. magazine's No. 1 Most Inspiring Feminist, honored as one of the ten most important thinkers in the world by Prospect Magazine, and included in Ebony's Power 100 issue.
Her groundbreaking work on intersectionality has traveled globally and was influential in shaping the South African Equality Clause. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne and University of Paris; Centennial Professor at The London School of Economics; Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University; and taught at universities in South Africa, Brazil, and Italy. She received her J.D. from Harvard, L.L.M. from University of Wisconsin, and B.A. from Cornell University, and sits on the boards of Sundance, VDay, and the Algorithmic Justice League.
Uzodinma Iweala is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and medical doctor. As the CEO of The Africa Center, he is dedicated to promoting a new narrative about Africa and is Diaspora. Uzodinma was the CEO, Editor-In-Chief, and co-Founder of Ventures Africa magazine, a publication that covers the evolving business, policy, culture, and innovation spaces in Africa. His books include Beasts of No Nation, a novel released in 2005 to critical acclaim and adapted into a major motion picture; Our Kind of People, a non-fiction account of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria released in 2012; and Speak No Evil (2018), a novel about a queer first-generation Nigerian-American teen living in Washington, D.C. His short stories and essays have appeared in numerous publications like The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair andThe Paris Review among others. Uzodinma was also the founding CEO of the Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, an organization that promotes private sector investment in health services and health innovation in Nigeria. He sits on the boards of the Sundance Institute, The International Rescue Committee and the African Development Bank's Presidential Youth Advisory Group. A graduate of Harvard University and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and a Fellow of The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Amanda Kelso is passionate about technology and storytelling, and how together they can shape communities. She has spent the last 25 years serving as a creative communications and brand leader for global tech companies as well as lending her skills to non-profit organizations and startups. Amanda's tenure includes helping to foster and oversee the stewardship of Instagram's community of more than one billion people, serving as the Managing Director of Google Creative Lab, and providing creative digital leadership at Goodby Silverstein & Partners and West Ventures. While th
