Speaker

A graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, Ebony is an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky. “Beauty, gender, body and the grotesque are on going discussion in my work. I am enthralled by the repulsive, the bizarre and the objectness of bodies and the contradictions that both have to art historically and culturally. I seek to reference beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed.

Ebony's most recent exhibition is Gangstas, Disciplez and Doiley Boyz a show dominated by portraits of young Jamaican men who bleach their skin, pluck their eyebrows and wear 'bling' jewellery in defiance of racial and sexual stereotypes. Ebony finds beauty in their psychic violence glamourizing them with glittered halos and luscious lipstick. She questions why young black men, especially those related to Jamaica's dance hall culture, are regularly viewed in terms of aggression. She re-balances this male macho personna with feminine touches and homo-erotica.

Jacqueline Sutherland is the Founder & CEO of Global Gateway Solutions, Inc., named by the Montego Bay Freezone as Jamaica’s “2010 Employer of the Year” , and lauded by leading industry publication “Nearshore Americas” as “Jamaica’s fastest growing contact center.”

Sutherland was a technology executive at Verizon and Bankrate Inc. and was the key decision-maker in the selection and implementation of multi-million dollar information technology systems solutions for Fortune 500 companies such as Hughes Information Technology Systems, NOAA, NASA, Central Newspaper, Inc, Baan, and John Deere.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in Math/Computer Science from Howard University, Wash, DC; Master of Science Telecommunications and Information Systems Management from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. Sutherland says she returned to her native Jamaica to be an influential contributor and employer in her country’s ICT sector.

Chairman, Global Gateway Solutions, Inc.
(Montego Bay, Jamaica)

In the past 17 years Mark Jones has built and run three outsourcing businesses serving Fortune 1000 clients at the top of the value chain – finance, accounting and complex customer services, financial regulatory activities and debt collection. In 1998, he founded RSM/FPO, a finance/accounting outsource company that was an early-stage player in the migration of professional services to offshore delivery centers. By 2005, this business employed 600 accountants and financial professionals in five US locations and Mumbai, India with clients like American Express, Napa Auto Parts, GE Capital, YUM Brands, Fleming Foods, and Burger King. Today, through Global Gateway Solutions, Today, Jones is focused on capturing near-shore opportunities for Jamaica. He is a co-founder and director of Teens for Technology and is on the Board of the American Friends of Jamaica, the American International School of Kingston Foundation, and is a member of the Rotary Club of Kingston. Jones holds an undergraduate degree from University of Virginia, and a Masters of Science: Finance and Accounting from Georgetown University.

Wayne Marshall is an ethnomusicologist focusing on the popular music of the Caribbean and the Americas, and their circulation in the wider world, with particular attention to digital technologies. Currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, he's writing a book on music industry, networked media, and transnational youth culture. He recently co-edited and contributed to Reggaeton (Duke University Press 2009), the first book length study of the Spanish-language genre that mixes hip-hop and dancehall, and he has published in academic journals such as Popular Music and Callaloo while writing for popular outlets like The Wire and the Boston Phoenix. He holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote a dissertation on the longstanding interplay between hip-hop and reggae, and he has taught at Brandeis, Brown, University of Chicago, and Harvard Extension School. He is also an active DJ and maintains and runs the blog and website, www.wayneandwax.com.

Professor Carolyn Cooper is a Jamaican author and literary scholar who has written extensively on cultural politics in Caribbean literature and popular culture - particularly reggae and dancehall music. She is the author of two books - Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, 1993; and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large, 2004. Professor Cooper currently writes a weekly column for the Jamaica Gleaner which she translates into the Jamaican language for her blog: http://carolynjoycooper.wordpress.com/ Professor Cooper is also an innovative administrator. She is a former head of the Department of Literatures in English (2000-2003) and director of the Institute of Caribbean Studies (2005-2008) at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She initiated the establishment of the University's International Reggae Studies Centre which she directed for a decade and a half. In January 2000 she launched her own Global Reggae Studies Centre as a private sector initiative.

Kaiton Williams is a Ph.D. student in Cornell's Information Science program and a senior engineer at Microsoft. He’s also an occasional photographer, sporadic tweeter, forever failed blogger, and frequent flyer. He has been an instructor, a web designer, and a software developer for Goldman Sachs and sees his graduate study as a confluence of all these threads and more. Kaiton wants your computer to help you to be happy and engaged. He believes that culturally sensitive design is the key to making that happen and key to leveraging all the ways in which we think about and experience the world. Kaiton is interested in how these ideas evolve in the developing world; areas that shouldn't be viewed in terms of charity but instead as rich in a tradition of entrepreneurship and creativity where indigenous knowledge, remix and improvisation will inform and nourish our shared understanding of the meaning and possibilities of computing.