2023 Southeast Benefit

Jon Adam Ross has spent more than 25 years making art with communities as an actor, playwright, and teaching artist and the last 8 years as a co-founding artist and Executive Director of the In[HEIR]itance Project, a national arts non-profit that works with communities to build relationships across divides through collaborative theater projects inspired by shared cultural touchstones. The In[HEIR]itance Project, which was recently featured in an Emmy Award winning PBS documentary, has employed over 200 artists to engage over 11,000 people to devise original plays in 15 cities around the world. Jon has served as an artist in residence at Union Theological Seminary, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and many other religious and educational institutions. Jon has been a Covenant Foundation Fellow, a LABA Fellow, a Pedagogies Research Fellow with M², a Cogenerate Innovation Fellow, and a Spielberg Fellow in Theater Education with the Foundation for Jewish Camp. Jon holds a BFA in Acting from NYU/Tisch. As an actor, Jon has performed in over 90 cities around the globe. His stage credits include: a dog, a 2,000-year-old bird, an elderly orthodox Jew, a spurned housewife, a horse, a British naval officer in 1700s Jamaica, a goat, Jesus Christ, a lawyer, a wrestler, a hapless police chief, and a cyclops. Jon holds a BFA in Acting from NYU/Tisch. As a parent to a 2 year old, Jon has recently provided silly voices to such inanimate objects as a winter hat, a rubber ducky, and a syringe of children's tylenol. www.inheiritance.org

Elizabeth Jemison (PhD, Harvard) is a historian of American religion at Clemson University. Her research centers on questions of race, gender, and politics in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christianity. Her first book, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020. Her next book project, tentatively titled Christian Motherhood: Race and Southern Churchwomen’s Organizing during Segregation, will examine how women’s religious groups across racial lines mobilized to defend Christian motherhood with conflicting results from the 1890s through 1940s. Other publications include “Gendering the History of Race and Religion” in the Oxford Handbook on Race and Religion edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her research has earned support at Clemson from the Humanities Hub, Lightsey Fellowship, and Faculty Development Research and outside of Clemson from the Whiting Foundation and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center. She was a member of the 2015-2017 cohort of the Young Scholars in American Religion Program at IUPUI. She is an affiliated faculty member for the Global Black Studies and Women’s Leadership majors. A dedicated teacher, Jemison received the Provost’s Outstanding Junior Teacher Award in 2022. The College of Architecture, Arts & Humanities awarded her the Advisor of the Year award in 2019 and the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2020.

Desmond K. Blackburn, PhD began serving as President and CEO of Facing History & Ourselves in April 2023 and is based in Florida. A former teacher, principal, and superintendent, he most recently served as the Deputy Chancellor of School Leadership for the New York City Department of Education, the largest school system in the nation.