Esteban Acuña Cabanzo is a Colombian cultural anthropologist who is a visiting assistant professor for Bard College’s Prison Initiative and a scholar in residence for State University of New York at Plattsburgh’s Northern Border Project. His research focuses on the intersections between studies of ethnicity, representation and human mobilities. He obtained his MA in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University and his PhD in European Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg. His most recent research projects include engaged work with Romani families in Colombia, as well as ethnographic projects about migration along the US borders with Mexico and Canada.

Rafael Buhigas Jiménez holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the Complutense University of Madrid. His thesis explored Romani lives during Franco’s regime in Spain. He is currently coordinating the project “DocRoma: The Image of the Roma in the Documentary” at the Autonomous University of Madrid that addresses the construction and representation of the Roma in the media and contemporary visual arts. His research also focuses on Roma political belonging, transatlantic Romani migrations and the methodological development of Critical Romani Studies within Spanish historiography. He has held research positions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Loughborough University in London, the National University of General San Martín in Buenos Aires and the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City.

Michael Ciuraru is an American Romani of Romanian descent who has dedicated his life to advocating for Romani rights, cultural pride and community empowerment. For over fifteen years Ciuraru has worked as an entrepreneur, financial advisor and mortgage banker. In that time, Ciuraru has assisted numerous Romani families in achieving home ownership and financial stability. Ciuraru is one of only a few Romani language translators in the United States who speaks several Romani dialects, allowing him to assist with financial guidance, doctors’ visits, asylum hearings and youth mentorship. Throughout this work he remains a passionate advocate for justice, education and self-determination. Ciuraru has also worked with several Romani rights organizations and continues to be a trusted ally and advocate for Romani rights across the world. In 2022, Ciuraru founded Rom Sam Yehk with Dalen Wakeley-Smith and serves as its executive director.

James I. Deutsch is senior content coordinator for the Smithsonian Institution’s America at 250 project, which will mark the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. He was formerly curator and editor at the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, where he helped plan and develop public programs on California, China, Hungary, Baltic nations, Ukraine, Peace Corps, Circus Arts, Native Americans, NASA, Mekong River, US Forest Service, Silk Road and White House workers. He is also an adjunct professor – teaching courses on American film history – in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. Deutsch has also taught American Studies classes at universities in Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Poland and Turkey. He has academic degrees from Williams College (BA), University of Minnesota (MA), Emory University (MLn) and George Washington University (PhD), and has published widely on topics related to film, folklore and minority groups.

Martin Fotta is the Head of the Department of Mobility and Migration at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His scholarship spans economic anthropology, kinship, gender, ethnicity and the anthropology of violence, with a primary focus on Romani communities in Brazil. He is the author of From Itinerant Trade to Moneylending in the Era of Financial Inclusion: Households, Debts and Masculinity among Calon Gypsies of Northeast Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and coeditor, among other volumes, of Ethnographic Methods in Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Research: Lessons from a Time of Crisis (Bristol University Press, 2024). He is currently working on a manuscript that, within comparative, transnational and intercultural frameworks, examines transformations of Romani identity in the Lusophone Atlantic.

David Lagunas is a Mexican-Catalan anthropologist who is Head of the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Seville, having previously taught at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Buenos Aires and the Sapienza University of Rome. He is the author of Los tres cromosomas: modernidad, identidad y parentesco entre los Gitanos catalanes (Comares, 2005), on Catalan Gitanos, and Segregar, producir, contestar: Una etnografía con Gitanos de La Mina (Entimema, 2010), on Andalusian Gitanos. He has also published a monograph about the Tepehuas, Hablar de otros. Miradas y voces del mundo Tepehua (Plaza y Valdés, 2004), as well as on other Indigenous peoples of Mexico. He is a coeditor of Gitanos rumanos en España. Trayectorias de vida, estrategias y políticas públicas (Tirant, 2021). His latest work, American Gitanos in Mexico City: Transnationalism, Cultural Identity and Economic Environment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), explores the life of a community of Spanish Gitanos in Mexico City. Lagunas is a regular member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences.

Susana Macías Pascua is a doctoral researcher at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies. Her 2026 dissertation, “Reminiscencia gitana. Un estudio institucional de la historia de la minoría en la Edad Moderna (Siglos XVI–XVIII),” examines how public policy evolved in Spain between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in connection with Romani people. Understanding how religion, the law and social and economic institutions affected their lives – whether positively or negatively – is her main area of interest. Her work examines the legal justifications and arguments made about Romani people throughout the Ancien Régime.

Ann Ostendorf is Professor of History at Gonzaga University. Her research interests include early American and Atlantic histories of racialization, Indigeneity, migration and culture. Since her first monograph, Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860 (University of Georgia Press, 2011), she has published extensively on early American Romani history. Her works have appeared in Romani Studies, Romano Džaniben, Frühneuzeit-Info, Critical Romani Studies, American Music, Maryland Magazine of History and Journal of Gypsy Studies. Her 2021 article, “Louisiana Bohemians: Community, Race, and Empire,” published in Early American Studies, was awarded the Louisiana Historical Association’s prize for best article in Louisiana history. She is currently completing a monograph on early American Romani people.

Mariana Sabino-Salazar is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, where she investigates ethnic shifting in Brazil. She earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin, where she acted as head archivist at the Romani Archives and Documentation Center. Her publications focus on early transatlantic Romani history and the representation of diasporic populations in Iberian and Latin American popular culture. She coedited the Latin America-focused double issue of Romano Džaniben in 2021 and was a Fulbright grantee researching Romani self-representation and the “Gypsy” stereotype in Brazil. Sabino-Salazar has collaborated with the United Nations on the Romani Memory Map for the Americas, and curated exhibits in Brazil and the United States utilizing art-based methodologies. In her current book project, she analyzes the recurring female “Gypsy” trope in Mexican horror films and Brazilian Westerns.

Carol Silverman has been involved with Romani culture for over forty years as a researcher, teacher, performer and activist. An award-winning Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon, she focuses on Balkan music, migration and human rights issues among Roma. Based on fieldwork in Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo, New York and Western Europe, her numerous articles analyze the relationship among music, politics, ritual and gender, via issues of representation and appropriation. Her book Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2012) won the book prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, and her book Balkanology (Bloomsbury, 2021) traces the politics and artistry of Bulgarian wedding music. She works with the US NGO Voice of Roma, is curator for Balkan music for RomArchive.eu, is a vocalist and teacher of Balkan music, and was recently elected to the Barvalipe Academy of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

Adèle Sutre is a historian and geographer and currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Collaborative Institute on Migration, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris. Her research focuses on migratory trajectories and the dynamics of mobility and territorial anchoring among Romani societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries across the world. Her work also explores the spatial legacies of Romani migration memories in the Paris region in contrast with the places and territories of assignment for populations categorized as “Gens du Voyage” (Travellers) in France since 1945. She also pays close attention to the role of images in shaping representations. In 2018, she was associate curator of the exhibition “Mondes tsiganes. La fabrique des images” (“Romani Worlds: The Making of Images”), held at the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris. She has published Géopolitique des Tsiganes: Des façons d’être au monde, entre circulation et ancrages (Cavalier Bleu, 2021).

Louis Takács took undergraduate degrees in anthropology and philosophy and received an MA in Information Science & Learning Technologies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He works as Communications Manager for the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions in The Hague, the Netherlands and as a research assistant in the Department of History at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is currently working on a documentary film and several projects with museums concerning migration and transnationalism – all coming out of his long-form digital publication, LET ME GET THERE: Visualizing Immigrants, Transnational Migrants & U.S. Citizens Abroad, 1904–1925 hosted by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. He lives in Amsterdam.

Dalen Wakeley-Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in Saint Louis. Wakeley-Smith is an expert in the study of race, ethnicity and migration with a particular focus on the history of American Roma in urban centers. Wakeley-Smith’s forthcoming book Gypsy Madness examines the long history of American Romani presence in New York City and their resistance to extra-legal efforts by immigration officials, police and local government officials to push them out of the city. Wakeley-Smith has published in the Journal of American Ethnic History along with Critical Romani Studies and is currently serving as an editor on The Handbook of Romani History for Oxford University Press. Wakeley-Smith is involved with several Romani rights organizations, along with cofounding Rom Sam Yehk with Michael Ciuraru in 2022.