The Keeper Project is a public art and education initiative that seeks to revise the popular imagery around hip hop music and culture, which almost exclusively elevates male voices and attitudes while overlapping and erasing those of women and girls. The Keeper Project offers two primary interventions for the problem of gender inequity within hip hop practice, study, and documentation: a) a digital archival project that quantitatively and qualitatively maps women and girls’ contributions to hip hop (an ongoing, not yet released project) and b) oral histories with women and girls in hip hop to amplify their voices and create a pipeline between our work and the next generation of hip hop practitioners, scholars, and fans.
theKEEPER Leadership Team
Dr. Tricia Rose (she/her) | Principal Investigator
Director, Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity
Akua Naru (she/her) | Founder & Artistic Director
MC, Producer, Scholar
Dr. Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (she/her) | Director of Outreach & Artist Ambassador
Rapper, Producer, Professor
Center for Digital Scholarship & John Hay Library Staff
Dr. Ashley Champagne (she/her), Project Manager
Heather Cole (she/her), Curator
Andrew Majcher (he/him), Digital Archivist
Karen Eberhart (she/her), Metadata Specialist
Dr. Laura Stokes (she/her), Performing Arts Librarian
Cody Carvel (he/him), Researcher and Web Developer
Elizabeth Yalkut (she/her), Front-end Developer
Since June 2021, we have worked with a number of student researchers each semester through CSREA, CDS, and the UTRA research program who have helped us to complete vital tasks including collecting and entering demographic and record release data for the 400+ artists in the primary spreadsheet, contacting artists for interviews, transcribing interviews, and writing reflections on the materials they have collected.
Students
- Spring 2021 (Bethany Fernandez, Fordham)
- Summer 2021 (Afia Akosah-Bempah, Ania Briscoe, Kaela Hines, Lauren Wilson)
- Fall 2021 (Afia Akosah-Bempah, Kaela Hines, Salma Mohamed)
- Spring 2022 (Sheri Zhang)
- Summer 2022 (Imani Stewart)
- Fall 2022 (Ayana Boyd)
- Spring 2023 (Teniayo-Ola Macaulay, Zoe Donovan, June Dike)
- Summer 2023 (Kaniy’a Davis)
- Fall 2023 (Makayla McPhereson, Jemima Alabi, Jada Hardwick)
