Our People

  • Nomi Dave is a music / sound researcher and former lawyer whose research explores the relationship between voice, sound, politics, violence, and the law. As a lawyer, she represented clients in asylum proceedings in the U.S, delivered oral arguments before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, worked for the United Nations for five years, and interviewed, counseled, and represented refugees and survivors of sexual violence in Guinea. Her current work uses text and film to explore what justice sounds and feels like for people in legal processes and everyday life.

  • Anne M. Coughlin is the Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. She taught at Vanderbilt Law School from 1991-95, and joined the University of Virginia faculty in 1996 after visiting during the 1995-96 academic year. Her primary research and teaching interests are in the areas of criminal law, criminal procedure, feminist jurisprudence, and law and humanities. She is co-author of a casebook on criminal law, and she has written a number of articles exploring the intersections among criminal law, criminal procedure and feminist theory, as well as essays concerning the connections between law and literature.

  • A music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices Bonnie Gordon is fascinated by the idea of sound as fundamental to the ways we move through the world and deeply committed to the idea that learning about sound is not for musicians only. She is a founding faculty member of the Equity Center and founded the Arts Mentors a program designed to increase access to the arts in Charlottesville. Her research centers on sound and gender in the early Modern world. In addition to her scholarly work, she has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Slate and the Cville weekly. She plays jazz, rock, and classical viola.

  • Bremen Donovan is an American/Irish filmmaker, photographer, and researcher whose work explores experiences of law and representations of justice, most recently in France and West Africa. She is currently directing the feature documentary film Big Mouth, co-produced by Nomi Dave and Paraíso Production, about creative testimony, independent journalism, and sexual justice in Guinea. Her doctoral dissertation was an ethnography of policing, racialized violence, and the production of visual evidence in France. Bremen is a 2025 Wenner-Gren Foundation Fejos Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnographic Film. She lives in Marseille.

  • Larycia Hawkins, PhD., is a scholar, a political science professor, and an activist. Professor Hawkins teaches and researches at the University of Virginia, where she is jointly appointed in the departments of Politics and Religious Studies. She also serves as a Faculty Fellow at the University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, is a contributor to the Project on Lived Theology; and co-convenes the Henry Luce Foundation project, Religion and Its Publics.

  • A.D. Carson is a rapper, performance artist, and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received a Ph.D. from Clemson University in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. His most recent album is iv: talking to ghosts. His previous album, i used to love to dream, published by University of Michigan Press in 2020, was a winner of the 2021 Research Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities from the University of Virginia. It was also a Category Winner (Best eProduct) of a Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in 2021.

    Dr. Carson is currently assistant professor of Hip Hop & the Global South in the Department of Music at the University of Virginia.

  • Jane Kulow is labs coordinator for the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA, where she provides support for rotating Democracy Labs, Working Groups, and more. Previously, she served as director of the Virginia Center for the Book and the Virginia Festival of the Book, programs at Virginia Humanities, which she joined in 2012. She has supported the work of numerous community organizations and served on the boards of libraries and school parent councils in Boston, Saskatoon, and Charlottesville, where she developed the Build Crozet Library grass-roots organization, providing a channel for community support to build a new Crozet Library.

  • Mary Garner McGehee (she/her) is a multimedia producer, specializing in audio and podcasting. She has worked on more than 10 podcasts on topics ranging from classical music, Aboriginal art, anti-racist pedagogy, and local news. Deeply interested in labor rights, gender justice and material culture, her 2019 thesis, Nothing to Hide Here: Transparency as Diversion in the Clothing Industry, found that clothing corporations distracted from poor labor conditions in their supply chains by claiming “transparency” at the expense of considering what constitutes an ethical or an abusive job. At the Sound Justice Lab, she works to develop and communicate creative strategies for responding to legal failures.

  • Spencer Haydary is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law. There, he served as president of the Lambda Law Alliance at UVA and was a Co-Director for the Peer Advisor Program. He will be working for the Law Center for Better Housing in Chicago starting in the Fall.

    Spencer's project primarily involves writing a law review article exploring legal avenues to challenge the proposed or adopted drag bans in Tennessee and thirteen other states. He will also compile a Toolkit and create social media on debunking anti-trans and anti-queer rhetoric.

  • Aayusha Khanal is an undergraduate Batten student double majoring in Global Studies and Public Policy. She has worked as an Asylum Case Management Intern for Physicians for Human Rights, a Waste Minimization Intern for the UVA Office for Sustainability and serves as the Director of the Textbook Access Office for UVA Student Council. She began volunteering with the Sound Justice Lab in October of 2022 as an Afghan Women’s English Circle Leader for the Cville Tulips program. This summer she will study the unique economic challenges faced by female refugees and interventions to better support them.

  • Kylie Mignat is finishing her first year at UVA Law and will be studying access to abortion and reproductive care for migrant minors detained in the US, particularly in states that have limited or banned abortion care. She has previously worked as a paralegal at the New York office of Kids in Need of Defense, primarily to help unaccompanied minor children seek legal status in the United States. Between college and graduate school, she worked as a bilingual paralegal advocate to help victims of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

  • Ryan Smith is an undergraduate Research Assistant for the Sound Justice Lab, working under Professor Nomi Dave on the Open Justice project. He is a fourth-year student studying Political & Social Thought and Music, currently working on a thesis that explores sonic normalization and ideology in the US legal system. Ryan also volunteers with VISAS to provide language learning assistance to international students and staff at UVa.

  • Oriane Guiziou-Lamour is a PhD candidate from the Department of French. She primarily works on eighteenth-century French libertine novels written by women, but is more generally interested in the relationship between power, gender and sexuality in erotic literature. Since 2021, she has been a Graduate Research Assistant on the Big Mouth documentary project, directed by Bremen Donovan and Nomi Dave. As a Graduate Research Assistant, she has been working on interview transcription, translation and interpreting, as well as researching archives on Guinean press and radio.

  • I study medieval English and French literature (primarily from the 13th-15th centuries), and I am currently serving as one of UVa's Medieval Studies graduate student representatives. My academic interests include gender and sexuality studies, virginity studies, Mediterranean trade networks, manuscript studies, and contemporary medievalisms and adaptations. My personal interests include cooking and hiking with my badly behaved dog, Moose.

  • Hannah is a rising sophomore at Colby College in Waterville Maine. She plans to double major in Global Studies and Spanish with a concentration in global policy. At school, she is an intern for the Office of Off-Campus Study and a student liaison for the Global Entry Semester program. This summer she will be volunteering with the C’ville Tulips and working on a project about terminology in Law. After researching common legal vocabulary that is often misunderstood she will create videos to explain these basic law principles.

  • Maya works on website design, social media coordination, lab management, outreach, and creative development for the lab. She is currently a third year undergraduate at the University of Virginia, double majoring in Urban and Environmental Planning and Global Sustainability, with a minor in Dance. Maya currently with her younger sister, runs a nonprofit called Sisters Project Peru, dedicated to building a sustainable medical clinic in rural Peru. Additionally Maya works under Institute of Engagement and Negotiation as a Student Research Assistant. In her free time Maya loves to dance Flamenco and Salsa, cook new recipes, and explore the outdoors.

  • Moussa Yéro Bah, an award-winning journalist, activist, and poet from Conakry, Guinea, visited UVA in February 2022, in a residency co-sponsored by the Department of French and UVA Global. During her residency, Ms. Bah hosted a poetry workshop, met with community partners in Charlottesville, conducted classroom visits, and participated in a discussion on the Big Mouth film project.

  • Marjan Omranian is a graduate student in the UVa school of education and the inaugural Sound Justice fellow. A co-founder and co-director of C-ville Tulips; her research interests center the lived experience of Afghan women and on refugee education. She has worked with Afghan refugees in Charlottesville, Tehran and remotely in Afghanistan. Trained as an engineer, she looks forward to research projects that merge her varied interests.

  • Ashon Crawley is a writer, artist and teacher, exploring the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness and spirituality. He moves in and out of multiple genres in order to sound out a critique of the normative world–to sound out the possibility for alternatives, for otherwise. He is the Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). As Founder of the Otherwise Arts Lab, an integrative arts practice and space, Crawley brings togethers scholars, artists, musicians and community members to exchange ideas, concepts, and practices. He has been granted fellowships with Yaddo, MacDowell, New City Arts Initiative, and Gilead COMPASS Faith Coordinating Center. His audiovisual art has been featured at Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Welcome Gallery (Charlottesville, Virginia), Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, California) and the California African American Museum (Los Angeles, California).

  • Molly Conger is a journalist based in Charlottesville, VA. She conducts in-depth, investigative work on white supremacists, neo-Nazis and hate groups in the US. Since 2017, and in the aftermath of the deadly Unite the Right rally that year, she has been live-tweeting Charlottesville city government meetings and other official meetings, as well as legal proceedings involving hate crimes and white supremacist violence. She has also written and produced podcasts, including a series based on her research of the trial against the Unite the Right car attacker. In addition to her extensive Twitter journalism @socialistdogmom, Molly has published essays in news outlets such as The Guardian and Slate.

Community Partners

  • Sri Kodakalla (she/they) is a mixed-media artist, writer, engineer, and arts organizer based in Charlottesville, VA. Sri expresses a reverence and abundant curiosity for the interconnection of human beings and the natural world, seeking to evoke a sense of mysticism in the seemingly mundane.

     

    Ramona Martinez (she/her) is a visual artist, writer, and musician whose work is driven by her desire to channel heavenly transmissions. Through her iconography, Martinez hopes to reclaim Christianity for misfits, radicals, anarchists, and outcasts of all types. She also writes and performs original Honky Tonk music with her band, Ramona & the Holy Smokes.

  • Bad Milk Press (formerly the Feminist Union of Charlottesville Creatives) is an arts organization creating programming that compensates artists and writers in central Virginia, while also creating spaces that allow women, non-binary and genderqueer creatives to share their work, develop their skills, build their artist resumés, and gain visibility within the larger local artist scene. Their most notable ongoing project is MALA LECHE, a radical art zine that features the art and writing of women, non-binary, and genderqueer artists and writers from Central Virginia, published since 2020.

  • Amy Woolard is Chief Program Officer for the ACLU of Virginia, where she works on civil rights & civil liberties advocacy in Virginia. Her debut poetry collection, NECK OF THE WOODS, received the 2018 Alice James Award from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Fence, & elsewhere, while her essays and reporting have been featured in publications such as Slate, The Guardian, Pacific Standard, and The Rumpus, as well as Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction in 2016. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, & holds a community residency with the Sound Justice Lab, a program of the Karsh Institute of Democracy at UVA. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Past Fellows, Practitioners, Researchers

  • Molly Kennedy is the Undergraduate Intern of the Sound Justice Lab and focuses on logistics, communication, coordination, and assisting on events. She is currently a third year undergraduate at the University of Virginia pursuing a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology. Outside of the Sound Justice Lab, Molly is works at the Social Cognition and Behavior Lab as a research assistant. She is a section leader for the tuba section of the Cavalier Marching Band and History and Traditions Officer of Tau Beta Sigma Honorary Band Sorority. She is also the President of the SpongeBob Club at UVA. Some of her non-academic interests include women’s sports and community service.

  • Demia Lee is a student at the University of Virginia School of Law, Class of 2024. Demia serves as the Sound Justice Lab’s first law student fellow, working on gender justice and responses to the Dobbs vs. Jackson case.