LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. After completing her undergraduate education at Duke University, she received a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and a PhD in Religion from Emory’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she navigates the academy as a scholar-artist, where she merges her life as a musician and filmmaker with her interdisciplinary specializations in Religious Studies, Africana Studies, and Gender Studies, all with a focus on ethnographic methods.

Rhon is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Duke University Press, 2014), and co-author of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) with Tamura A. Lomax and Carol B. Duncan, and she has authored and co-authored numerous essays for academic and general audiences. As a recent recipient of the New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Rhon is becoming a more technically adroit filmmaker, and has embarked upon a formal education in filmmaking at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Occasionally, you can find her adding colorful, critical, commentary to the Twitter universe via @DoctorRMB.