Meet Our Dedicated Team
Welcome to the Amistad Research Center! Our dedicated staff is crucial to our mission of preserving and sharing Black history. Their expertise and passion drive our efforts to maintain and expand our invaluable collections.
Our Experts At Your Service
Kathe Hambrick is the Founder and former Executive Director of the River Road African American Museum (RRAAM), established in 1994 as Louisiana’s first African American Museum. She is a past President of the national Association of African American Museums (AAAM). She served as the Chief Curator and Director of Interpretation for the West Baton Rouge Museum for four years. Hambrick was born in New Orleans and spent half her life in California where she received an undergraduate degree in English and a minor in African American Studies from California State University Long Beach.
Kathe Hambrick is the founder and former Executive Director of the River Road African American Museum, established in 1994 as Louisiana’s first African American museum. She is a past President of the National Association of African American Museums. She served as the Chief Curator and Director of Interpretation for the West Baton Rouge Museum for four years. Hambrick was born in New Orleans and spent half her life in California where she received an undergraduate degree in English and minor in African American Studies from California State University Long Beach.
Hambrick is a Public Historian with a passion for collecting, preserving, and interpreting history for diverse audiences. Her career as a museum professional includes expertise in program development, interpretative planning, curation, grant writing, fundraising, and board governance. She led the effort to preserve three slave cemeteries and six historic buildings in Ascension Parish.
She is considered an expert on the history and culture of African Americans in communities along the Mississippi River. Kathe Hambrick’s interviews include local, national, and international media, the BBC Learning Channel, CBS Morning News, National Public Radio, and the New York Times. The consulting firm, 2PRESERVE was established by Hambrick in 2021 to provide cultural resources and guidance to corporations, museums, cultural centers, government agencies, and faith-based organizations.
Throughout her career, Kathe has curated over 100 exhibits, including The Rural Roots of Jazz, African Influences on Louisiana Cuisine, Creole Du Monde, and The Square Collection that featured original art by Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, and Tina Allen. Her most recent exhibit is the GU272 of Ascension: The Jesuit and Episcopal Connection to Slavery.
Kathe is the author and co-author of several books: Juke Joint Men, Oh Say Can You See: Flag Paintings of Malaika Favorite, Our Roots Run Deep: The History of the River Road African American Museum, and a curriculum guide entitled Freedoms’ Journey: Understanding the Underground Railroad in South Louisiana. Hambrick was an adjunct professor at Southern University in New Orleans (SUNO) where she received a master’s degree in Museums Studies.
Paula Allen received her Master of Fine Arts from Southern Illinois University. Prior to coming to Amistad, she served for twelve years as a program director for a nationally acclaimed education program called The Breakthrough Collaborative and taught at several local institutions including Xavier University of Louisiana, Southern University at New Orleans, and Delgado Community College. She is a past recipient of the Smithsonian's Awards for Museum Leadership and was recognized, along with Independent School program directors, by the Klingenstein Foundation for her work with middle-school-to college preparatory programs. Paula Allen's most recent research was published in the International Review of African American Art (co-authored with Rebecca Hankins) and in The African American National Biography, a joint project of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and Oxford University Press. As Curator of Fine Art and African Collections at the Amistad Research Center, Paula Allen is responsible for the management, development, and of ARC's fine arts and African art collection as well as the development of public programs, including curatorial research, advocacy, fundraising, and reference assistance.
Prior to working at Amistad, Rainey formerly served as the operations manager at Ashé Cultural Arts.
She attended Mount Carmel Academy High School and matriculated at Southern University in Baton Rouge. She pursued a career as a premier flight attendant for American Airlines and relished global travel for fifteen years. Exposure to other global cultures allowed her to recognize the deficiencies in her hometown of New Orleans. Valenetta resumed her education to obtain a paralegal certification at Tulane University Extended Learning.
Ms. Rainey is a cultural advocate, emulating her grandfather's legacy of safeguarding New Orleans' heritage. Ms. Rainey asserts that understanding one's origins is essential for comprehending one's future direction. She joined the inaugural African American female Carnival Krewe and undertook several leadership roles inside the group.
Ms. Rainey is currently pursuing a degree in project management at Colorado Tech University.
Anna LeBlanc-Mulder was born and raised in New Orleans. She graduated from Smith College in Northampton, MA, with majors in History and French Studies. She recently completed her Master’s in Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University. Anna has worked in library services most of her career, including the New Orleans Public Library and most recently as an intern for the Library of Congress. She also received a graduate certificate in Archival Studies.
Jennifer is passionate about the digital preservation of archival collections and making them accessible for the general public to see and interpret. Jennifer holds a degree in Fine Art from the University of Kansas, a BA in Art History from Portland State University, and studied Museum Studies at the University of Bologna, Italy. Jennifer has worked as an Archival Assistant at the Bartlesville Area History Museum in Oklahoma, which primarily focuses on local and Indigenous history. She then served as Digital Assets Manager for the Louisiana State Museum’s Colonial Document Project, which is comprised of nearly 20,000 French and Spanish New Orleans judicial records dating from 1714-1804. She also served as Digital Assets Manager at The New Orleans Jazz Museum, home of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of jazz-related artifacts.
Lisa C. Moore, a New Orleans native, received her MLIS from the Catholic University of America in 2019. She is also a graduate of Louisiana State University (B.S., business administration), Georgia State University (B.A., print journalism) and the University of Texas at Austin (MA, anthropology/African diaspora studies). Prior to arriving at the Amistad Research Center, Moore was board president of Fire & Ink, a national advocacy organization for LGBTQ writers of African descent. In addition to her work as an archivist, Moore is editor/publisher of RedBone Press.
Felicia Denice Render received her Master of Science in Library and Information Science degree from the University of North Texas with a concentration in Digital Content Management. Prior to joining the Amistad Research Center, she was the Visual Culture Archivist for the Atlanta History Center, where she managed visual collections by processing over 100 photograph collections, cataloging thousands of images, and completing a grant project to digitize vintage color film footage of Atlanta. Felicia has worked as Project Archivist (Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, LA); Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Fellow (The HistoryMakers, Chicago, IL); Digital Initiatives Resident Librarian (Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta, GA); and Library Associate (Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta, GA). As her work experience indicates, Felicia is passionate about preserving different aspects of culture and the ways technology is used to manage cultural heritage resources.
Laura J. Thomson has been an archivist for 20 years, specializing in the arrangement, description, and preservation of archives and manuscripts collections, and managed the Manuscripts Processing Department at Amistad for over ten years. She has a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from the University of South Carolina, a Master’s in Fine Arts in the Book Arts from the University of Alabama, and a certificate in Preservation Management from Rutgers University. She is a bookbinder and fine press printer in her spare time, teaching and working out of an artist studio in Florida.
Brenda Flora focuses on Amistad Research Center’s audiovisual collections. She holds a Master’s degree in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. She has completed several grant-funded projects for the Center, including projects funded by the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, the National Park Service, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. Prior to joining the team at Amistad in 2010, she worked at the University of New Orleans Earl K. Long Library, the Tulane Libraries Recovery Project, and the British University Film and Video Council’s Newsfilm Online project at ITN.
Jakilah Mason has a Bachelor of Arts in English/Music from New College of Florida, and a Master of Arts in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. They have previously worked at the Theodore M. Finney Music Library at the University of Pittsburgh, as a public services and training associate at Gwinnett County Public Library, and as the African American Resource Collection Librarian at New Orleans Public Library. They have helped start a lending library for the Big Idea Bookstore in Pittsburgh, PA, and currently serve on a team implementing an audio gear lending library in New Orleans.
In addition to their library and archival work, they also work as a horticulturalist and independent researcher. They were the 2020-2021 Gardener in Residence at Longue Vue House and Gardens, where they presented the Afro Garden project, a horticultural and public programming project highlighting Black cultural and medicinal traditions. They currently work as the Groundskeeper for Press. St. Gardens, and serve on the Greater New Orleans Growers Alliance Leadership Committee. They recently received a grant from the National Young Farmers Association for their (tentatively named) Okra Flowers farm and cultural preservation project, where they grow and prepare Black food and medicine, save seed, and conduct genealogy research, in practice of the African principle of “sankofa.”
Courtney Tutt received her BA in Anthropology from the University of Houston and later her MSLS in library science with a specialization in archives and digital imaging from the University of North Texas. She has interned at the University of Houston, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, and the Rothko Chapel. She has also worked at organizations such as the American Institute of Architects, Holocaust Museum Houston, and the University of Houston.