Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is president of Marlboro College. She began her career with the Vermont Arts Council and was a co-founder of the Governor's Institutes of Vermont, which bring high-school students to college campuses for experiential learning and community involvement.

McCulloch-Lovell served for 10 years as chief of staff for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). Her focus on education, culture and public policy was further expanded in her next position as director of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. There she worked with entertainment industry and government leaders, scholars and artists to strengthen the role of arts and humanities in American life. As head of the White House Millennium Council, McCulloch-Lovell worked with President and Mrs. Clinton to create, among other national programs, Save America's Treasures.

Richard Dubin is a visiting professor of television, radio and film at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. He has written, produced or directed prime-time programs for ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and UPN. His studio affiliations include Disney, Warner Bros., Viacom, TriStar, HBO Productions, Fox TV, MGM, United Artists and Columbia Pictures.

For his work on the landmark CBS program "Frank's Place," Dubin received an Emmy nomination and both The Humanitas and Mentor Awards. He has also been honored with a Bínai Brith Humanitarian Award. Dubin is an elected member of The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Marcyliena Morgan is executive director of the Hip Hop Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. Her research has focused on youth, gender, language, culture and identity, sociolinguistics, discourse and interaction. She is the author of "Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture" and editor of "Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations."

Morgan's other publications include articles and chapters on gender and women's speech, language ideology, discourse and interaction among Caribbean women in London and Jamaica, urban youth language and interaction, hip hop culture, and language education planning and policy.

R. Gustav Niebuhr is an associate professor in religion and the media at Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences and S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Over his 20-year career in journalism, Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion. Niebuhr has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has also been published in books and magazines and on the Internet. He does occasional commentaries on religion for National Public Radio. Niebuhr is writing a book on religious pluralism and interfaith relations in America.

Melvin L. Oliver is dean of the Division of Social Sciences and professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Oliver has more than 25 years of experience in both philanthropy and higher education. Prior to coming to UC-Santa Barbara, he was vice president of the Asset Building and Community Development (Assets) Program at the Ford Foundation, which helped poor and disadvantaged individuals and communities throughout the world.

An expert on racial and urban inequality and poverty, Oliver is the co-author of "Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality." The book has received widespread recognition, including an award for the outstanding book on the subject of human rights from the Gustavus Myers Center.

Mark Robbins is the dean of the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. His work bridges the fields of art and architecture, exploring the complex social and political forces that contribute to the built environment, and has been exhibited in numerous venues in the United States and abroad, including the Adelaide Festival in Australia, the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan, the Clocktower Gallery in New York, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Before coming to SU, Robbins was the director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts where he developed an aggressive program to strengthen the presence of innovative design in the public realm. Robbins was a Fellow in the visual arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome.

Roger Shimomura is a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Kansas. His paintings, prints and theater pieces address socio-political issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by 56 years of diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother.

Shimomura has had more than 100 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints, as well as presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace (New York City) and The Smithsonian Institution. He has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at almost 200 universities and art museums across the country. Shimomura is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in painting and performance art, a Civil Liberties Public Education Fund Fellowship and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Aaron Sorkin created the television series "The West Wing" and wrote the show for its first four seasons. "The West Wing" has won more than 20 Emmys, a Golden Globe Award for Best Television Drama Series, two consecutive Peabody Awards for Broadcast and Cable Excellence, two Humanitas Prizes, and Television Critics Awards. In 2001, Sorkin won the Writer of the Year Award from the Caucus for TV Producers, Writers, and Directors.

Sorkin received the Outer Critics Circle award as Outstanding American Playwright for "A Few Good Men," and his screen adaptation of the play was nominated for four Academy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards. He has also received awards for the films "The American President," "Malice" and the television series "Sports Night."

Dorothy M. Steele is associate director of Stanford University's Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, part of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research includes teaching practices for diverse classrooms, alternative assessment processes that inform teaching and learning, and strategies that build inclusive communities of learners in schools.

Steele is co-author of the article "Colorblindness as a Barrier to Inclusion: Assimilation and Nonimmigrant Minorities" in the Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. She began her work in 1968 in Columbus, Ohio, as a director/teacher of one of the city's first Head Start Programs.

Rennard Strickland holds the Philip H. Knight Professorship at the University of Oregon School of Law where he served as dean from 1997-2002. A Cherokee/Osage Indian, Strickland has worked for more than 30 years in the complex area of law and culture, and is well known as a scholar and teacher of federal Indian law, tribal law and American Indian culture.

Strickland is also an expert in American Indian culture and art. He is the author and editor of more than 35 books, ranging from "Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law" to "Tonto's Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Policy and Culture."

Silvio Torres-Saillant is an associate professor in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences and director of the College's Latino-Latin American Studies Program. His expertise includes Caribbean literature, comparative poetics, ethnic American literature, Latino texts, Diaspora and migration studies.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Torres-Saillant is author of "Caribbean Poetics." His latest work, "El retorno de las yolas: Intellectual History of the Caribbean," is forthcoming. He is co-author of "The Dominican-Americans" and co-editor of "The Challenges of Public Higher Education in the Hispanic Caribbean."

Carrie Mae Weems produces art that addresses formal and political issues encircling African-American culture. She focuses on the ways in which images shape our perception of color, gender and class by exploring and manipulating existing genres of photography.

Using narrative as a counterpoint to imagery, Weems recounts stories and myths and invents texts. Working from her Syracuse base, Weems has exhibited across the United States and internationally, including residencies in Berlin and Paris. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and a Bunting Institute Fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe College. Weems' work has been commissioned by institutions and museums across the United States.