Panel: Memory, Reparations, and Transitional Justice

traci kato-kiriyama

Author and artist

Panelist

traci kato-kiriyama (they/she), author of Navigating With(out) Instruments—based on unceded Tongva land in the south bay of Los Angeles—is an award-winning multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary artist, recognized for their work as a writer/performer, theatre deviser, cultural producer, and community organizer. tkk is grounded in collaborative process, collective self-determination, and art+community as intrinsically tied and a critical means toward connection and healing. They are a principal writer and performer in PULLproject Ensemble, which created TALES OF CLAMOR, a powerful theatrical case-study. TALES OF CLAMOR examines the sound of silence and the echoes of a little-known yet major moment of American history, the public hearings of the Commission of Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which contended with the legacy of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. tkk is a core artist of Vigilant Love and an organizer with the Nikkei Progressives & Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress joint Reparations Committee, and Director/Co-Founder of Tuesday Night Project.

Sarah Case

International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, Deputy Program Director for the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation

Panelist

Sarah Case (she/her) is the Deputy Program Director for the Global Initiative for Justice, Truth and Reconciliation (GIJTR), a multi-disciplinary consortium of nine organizations, led by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, that together serves as a new mechanism to respond to the transitional justice needs of societies emerging from conflict or periods of authoritarian rule. Through the GIJTR, Sarah has managed a range of projects, including a Transitional Justice Academy for activists in the MENA region; a multi-year collaboration with Guinean civil society organizations to advance community memorialization, psychosocial support, and violence prevention; the development of a manual and resource center on digital archiving for civil society organizations; and a research and exchange project aimed at highlighting the unique needs of survivors conflict-related sexual violence and their children within transitional justice processes. Sarah is an Associate Producer on the award-winning documentary A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake and a Producer on the forthcoming documentary, The Journey Back to Now. Sarah received her master’s degree in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University, where her research focused on the arts and storytelling as tools for truth-telling and social change. She also holds a BA in Art History from Columbia University.

Amina Krvavac

War Childhood Museum, Executive Director

Panelist

Amina Krvavac (she/her) is the Executive Director of the War Childhood Museum. Amina believes in museums as spaces for social action and drivers of change, and she is particularly interested in unlocking the potential of museums in transitional justice processes. She is committed to creating exhibitions and workshops that support open and conscious dialogue, and promoting the idea of museums as platforms for societal healing and reconciliation. When it comes to formal education, Amina holds a BA in International Relations from the International University of Sarajevo and an MA in Children's Rights from the University of Geneva. Since 2020, Amina has been a member of the Board of Directors of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience Europe--a network of museums, historic sites, and memory initiatives connecting past struggles to today's movement for human rights. In 2021, Amina joined the European Museum of the Year (EMYA) Jury, where she currently serves as the Jury Chair. The EMYA scheme, founded in 1977 by the European Museum Forum, aims to support, showcase, and award excellence and innovation in the museum field.

C├®cile Fromont

Yale University, Department of Art History, Professor

Panelist

Cécile Fromont (she/her) is a professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800), on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World, and on the slave trade. Her current research investigates areas of intersection between visual and material culture, religion, and knowledge creation in cross-cultural environments of early modern Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Her first book, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo was published in 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History. Her second book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State University Press, 2022) presents and analyzes for the first time a set of unpublished and unparalleled images from seventeenth and eighteenth century Kongo and Angola created within the Capuchin Franciscan mission to the region. She is the editor as well as a contributor to the 2019 volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (Penn State University Press).

Kayla Vinson

Law and Racial Justice Center, Executive Director

Moderator

Kayla Vinson is the inaugural Executive Director of the Law and Racial Justice Center, and she co-teaches the Access to Law School courses at Yale Law School. Kayla’s work investigates how the afterlife of chattel slavery mediates life, opportunity, development, and underdevelopment in the United States so that we might build an otherwise world. Before joining the YLS community, she worked as an attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, where her docket included appellate and post-conviction legal representation, reentry support, memory work on the legacy of racial injustice in the United States, curriculum development for middle and high schools, and research and writing about the function of white supremacy in the criminal legal system. She has also worked to create and support antiracist, liberatory educational settings. 

Debbie Rabinovich

Yale Law School, JD Candidate, 2024

Moderator

Debbie Rabinovich is pursuing a JD at Yale Law School. She is interested in narrative building through public humanities and  strategic connections between the movements for racial justice and immigrant rights. She is particularly interested in issues that concern the rule of law, due process, excessive use of force by law enforcement, and redress for historic injustice. She is involved with the Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic (WIRAC), the Clinical Student Board, and the LLSA, WoCC, and Outlaws affinity groups. During the summer of 2022, Debbie served as a Collections Intern with the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. Previously, she earned her Master’s in Socio-Legal Research at the University of Oxford, where her dissertation focused on the construction of redress and reparations within survivor testimonies of Japanese internment.