Renee James Gilmore -ABC 7 Executive Producer, Host of Empowering Voices

RENÉE JAMES GILMORE is the executive producer and host of ABC7’s Empowering Voices. The public affairs television program explores issues of interest to communities of people who are underrepresented, marginalized, and whose concerns are nearly invisible to privileged Americans. Social justice and economic empowerment are frequent themes on her show and often the show’s guests risk reprisal for speaking truth to power. She is a fourth generation Sarasotan and the owner of a consulting firm.

Dr. Andrew Berish – Musicologist, Associate Professor at the University of South Florida

DR. ANDREW BERISH is an Associate Professor who holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles and B.A. in History from Columbia University. Dr. Berish’s current research focuses on the relationship between musical expression and the social experience of space and place. His current publications include his book, Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and articles on 1930s “sweet” jazz and guitarist Django Reinhardt in The Journal of the Society for American Music and Jazz Perspectives. Additionally, his essay on Duke Ellington in the 1930s appears in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, edited by Ed Green (Cambridge University Press, 2015). His research interests include topics in jazz and American popular music, theories of space and place, and ideologies of race. He teaches courses on American culture of the 1930s and ’40s, jazz and civil rights, the analysis of popular music, and the role of place and mobility in American historical experience.