Leslie Askew is an award-recognized television producer and documentary director with over twenty years of experience working across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. Her work has been commissioned by major broadcasters including CNN, ITV (UK), SBS (Australia), Al Jazeera, CBS, BET, and PBS. She is the founder of Askew Pictures, an independent documentary studio focused on history, culture, and social impact storytelling. Her recent projects include Pignorant, currently streaming on Amazon Prime, and Harvesting Justice, a documentary series examining food justice and grassroots activism, set to air on PBS in 2026.

David Waldstreicher is a faculty member at The City University of New York and a historian of the early and nineteenth-century U.S., with particular interests in political history, cultural history, slavery and antislavery. His latest book, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence, is a deeply researched biography of the poet. The New York Times, in a feature on the book and Waldstreicher, described his willingness to put Wheatley “smack in the middle of the raging debate over the relationship between the American Revolution and slavery,” and praised his achievement in not only “tracing her life” but “also recreat[ing] the 18th-century intellectual world Wheatley actually lived in.” The book was awarded The Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize honoring literary merit in the writing of history. Before joining the CUNY faculty, Professor Waldstreicher taught at Temple University, the University of Notre Dame, Yale University, and Bennington College. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University.

Jeneé Osterheldt, the Boston Globe’s Deputy Managing Editor for Culture, Talent, and Development, is an acclaimed journalist covering identity and social justice through the lens of culture and the arts. She centers Black lives and the lives of people of color. Sometimes this means writing about Beyoncé and Black womanhood or unpacking the importance of public art and representation. Sometimes this means taking systemic racism, sexism, and oppression to task. It always means Black lives matter. She joined the Globe in 2018. A native of Alexandria, Virginia, and a graduate of Norfolk State University, Osterheldt was a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, where her studies focused on the intersection of art and justice. She previously worked as a Kansas City Star culture columnist.