Speakers & Artists

Brandon V. Lewis is a Baton Rouge–based visual artist, arts administrator, and museum educator whose richly layered paintings explore memory, faith, family, and Black life in the American South. Inspired by family stories, Southern folk traditions, gospel music, and the legacy of Clementine Hunter, he transforms everyday experiences into powerful visual narratives of remembrance and reverence.

Lewis earned a B.A. in History with a minor in Fine Arts from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He currently serves as Director of The Helis Foundation John Scott Center at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. His acclaimed exhibitions include Say Amen, Somebody, When All God’s Children Get Together, and Uninterrupted Black.

Dr. Hayes is Professor and Dean emerita at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Following retirement, she founded the nonprofit Iberia African American Historical Society (IAAHS) in 2017, where she serves as its President. Her public history work focuses on researching, teaching, preserving, and commemorating the histories of African Americans of Iberia Parish and surrounding communities.

She is the biographer of the African American Wakefield family of New Iberia whose lives spanned slavery to the post-Reconstruction era. Her research led to the recent publication of Were You There? A Biography of Emma Wakefield-Paillet (University of Louisiana Press, 2026) which chronicles the life of Wakefield family member, Emma Wakefield-Paillet, Louisiana’s first Black woman physician and the first woman of any race to graduate from a Louisiana medical school.

Dr. Abigail Cooper is an assistant professor of history at Brandeis University whose scholarship explores slavery and emancipation, the Civil War and Reconstruction, religion, migration, and the cultural worlds created by African Americans during the transition from slavery to freedom. She teaches courses in U.S. history, slavery and emancipation, Civil War and Reconstruction, migration and refugees, and innovative methods of researching and writing history.

Dr. Cooper earned her B.A. from Columbia University, her M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship has received support and recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Athenæum, and the Virginia Historical Society.

Her forthcoming book, Pierced Dimes and Placenta Fires, examines the powerful cultures that formerly enslaved people created in refugee camps during and after the Civil War. Through faith, healing traditions, family and community networks, and other forms of shared knowledge, Black refugees forged new lives and helped give meaning to emancipation. Dr. Cooper’s research offers an especially important perspective on the experiences, resilience, and community-building work of Black women during one of the most transformative periods in American history.

Dr. Candice Harrison received her PhD from Emory University and is an Associate Professor of African American History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her current research explores the ascent of six generations of her ancestors from enslaved chattel property to free property holders in early-nineteenth-century Louisiana, as well as their descent to landless tenant farmers and migrants by the mid-twentieth century.

Rev. Mary Louise Bashay was raised in New Iberia, Louisiana, where she grew up as the daughter of Rev. James Simmons and Mrs. Wanda Armstrong Simmons.

She later attended Louisiana State University–Baton Rouge (LSU-BR), where she earned her baccalaureate degree.

Following her academic preparation and inspired by her father’s ministry—Rev. James Simmons, who served as assistant pastor at Star Pilgrim Baptist Church—Bashay entered the ministry. She was ordained as a Baptist minister and made history as the first woman to be ordained as a Black Baptist minister in Iberia Parish. She subsequently served at Star Pilgrim Baptist Church as Associate Pastor. Rev. Bashay is now the associate pastor at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church, New Iberia.

For Daphne Thomas, creativity has never belonged in just one lane. A Franklin native and New Iberia resident, Daphne brings her artistic eye to the stage, the canvas, hair design, floristry, and event décor. Whether she’s performing for an audience, providing personalized at-home hair services, arranging flowers, or transforming a space for a celebration, her work is rooted in imagination, beauty, and joy. Daphne joins HistoryFEST 2026 as a featured performer, sharing musical selections throughout the celebration.

Bring Daphne’s creativity to your next event, project, or personal style:
daphnethomascreative@gmail.com · (337) 280-8629

John Warner Smith was the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2019 to 2021 and is the only African American male to serve in the office in its 84-year history. Smith has published five collections of poetry, most recently Our Shut Eyes, published by MadHat Press in 2021. His sixth collection, From the Flinty Rock: New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming from Legacy Book Press in 2027.

Smith’s novella, For All Those Men: When the KKK Threatened to Take Control of Louisiana, was published by UL Press in November 2022. Sisters of Gavinville, his first full-length novel, was published in December 2024 by Between the Lines Publishing. Smith’s memoir, I, Too Am Tar Baby, was published by Legacy Book Press in April 2025. His second novella, Murders at Mer Rouge, was published by Between the Lines Publishing in 2026.

A Cave Canem Fellow, Smith is a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets and is winner of the 2019 Linda Hodge Bromberg Literary Award. He earned his MFA at the University of New Orleans.

Smith is now retired from full-time work and is an Adjunct Instructor of English at Southern University in Baton Rouge.

Karen C. Dugas, M.Ed., is an educator, entrepreneur, and advocate committed to preparing young people for successful futures. With more than 20 years of experience in public and private education, she is the founder of Above the Limit, LLC, and the Beyond the Bus Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps teenagers transition into adulthood.

Through Beyond the Bus, Dugas provides free college and career workshops, ACT preparation classes, and financial literacy programs for students who might otherwise lack access to these opportunities. She earned degrees from Southern University and A&M College and Louisiana State University Shreveport. Her work reflects her passion for education, economic empowerment, and helping young people pursue their goals with confidence.

Ifa Bayeza is an award-winning playwright, novelist, and educator whose work explores defining moments in African American history. Her acclaimed works include The Till Trilogy, centered on the life and legacy of Emmett Till, and Some Sing, Some Cry, a novel co-authored with her sister, Ntozake Shange, chronicling 200 years of African American music through seven generations of women.

A Harvard University graduate with an M.F.A. in Theatre from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bayeza was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ inaugural Humanist-in-Residence. She has collaborated with twelve New Iberia writers to reconstruct the historical narrative of life in a Southern Jim Crow community.