LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant serves as the Director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she wholly and critically grapples with the profound questions that inform our understandings of gender, race, culture, and religious expression.
Manigault-Bryant was a faculty member in the department of Africana Studies at Williams College since 2011. She joins the faculty of the African, African American and diaspora studies department within the College of Arts and Sciences.
Manigault-Bryant has authored and co-authored numerous works for academic and general audiences, including her first book, “Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women,” which has been featured at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. She also produced and directed the film “death. everything. nothing.” which garnered numerous awards and was an official selection at multiple Academy Award nominating festivals for documentary shorts.
A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, Manigault-Bryant received her bachelor’s degree in history from Duke University, a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University and her doctorate in religion from Emory’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In recent years she completed a certificate in the documentary arts from Duke University and is the founder of ConjureGirlBlue Productions, a small media company celebrating nonfiction storytelling.
For her creative endeavors, Manigault-Bryant has been the recipient of independent and national grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fund for Theological Education, the Ford Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Religion and Theology, Emory University, Wake Forest University, Williams College and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Manigault-Bryant succeeds Joseph F. Jordan, who currently serves as vice provost for academic and community engagement, and who formerly led the Stone Center for 22 years.
