our kind of people
The Workshop
The assumptions we make based on appearance are often the basis for the discriminatory policies and practices that uphold systemic inequity. Expand a team’s cultural competency by examining unconscious bias and common misconceptions about identity in connection to our daily lives, business practices, legal system, and human rights. Utilizing elements of the Our Kind Of People photo series, these workshops combine a creative approach to implicit bias testing, break-out sessions, and group discussions to help participants become more aware of their unconscious biases and more capable of discussing and questioning their pre-existing beliefs. This awareness and analysis becomes tools for challenging bias, facilitating education, and promoting social justice. These workshops will influence your team’s ability to make future decisions, and leave them with lasting assets as they move forward professionally and personally. As seen in: The New York Times, TED, + Creative Capital.
Available on site or virtually
90 minutes for up to 70 participants
4 hours for up to 100 participants
Bayeté Ross Smith
Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, and new media.
He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, an Art For Justice Fund Fellow, a BPMPlus Grantee, a CatchLight Fellow, and a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with Paris Photo (France), the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), with the U.S. Department of state in South Africa, and America House in (Ukraine), among others. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center, the Sheffield Doc Fest, the March on Washington Film Festival and the L.A. Film Festival. His collaborative projects "Along The Way" and "Question Bridge: Black Males" have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively.
He has created public art projects with organizations such as the Lincoln Center, Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the Jerome Foundation, Paris Photo, Dysturb, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the Hartford YMCA, The California Judicial Council and Columbia Law School. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté helped launch and continues to work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI), a hospital and school based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY that partners with Kings County Hospital. He is also a faculty member at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and board member of Project Implicit at Harvard.