A Conversation with Michelle Miller and Stephanie McKee-Anderson: Embodying Antiracism Summer Leadership Institute Opening Keynote [Postponed with New Date]

Tuesday, June 6, 2023 at 5:30pm
Memorial Chapel, 221 High Street, Middletown, Connecticut

FREE!

PLEASE NOTE: This event has been postponed until Tuesday, June 6, 2023.

Michelle Miller, a co-host of "CBS Saturday Morning” and author of the recently published memoir Belonging: A Daughter’s Search for Identity Through Loss and Love (Harper Collins, 2023), will be in conversation with Stephanie McKee-Anderson, Executive Artistic Director of Junebug Productions, one of the three partnering organizations of Wesleyan’s Embodying Antiracism Initiative. 

This talk serves as the Opening Keynote for the initiative’s Summer Leadership Institute  “The Power of We,” and will be preceded by a short performance by partnering organization Urban Bush Women’s Founder and Chief Visioning Partner Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and former company member, movement coach, and community practitioner Bennalldra Williams.

Following the hour-long performance and talk, there will be a reception in the adjacent Zelnick Pavilion. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond is the third partnering organization for Wesleyan’s Summer Leadership Institute.

Stephanie McKee-Anderson is a multi-talented creative executive born in Picayune, Mississippi and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. She currently leads Junebug Productions Inc., the organizational successor continuing the significant interest of the Free Southern Theater. The Free Southern Theater was the cultural wing of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the primary channel for student participation in the civil rights movement. Her twenty years stewarding Junebug Productions’ important work has allowed McKee to use her skills as an executive artistic director, choreographer, and cultural organizer to continue using the arts as a vehicle for social change. 

Belonging chronicles Miller’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother. She traces the years spent trying to make sense of her mixed-race heritage and her place in a white-dominated world. From the wealthy schools where she was bussed to integrate, to the newsrooms filled with largely male faces, she revisits the emotional turmoil of her formative years, and how the enigma of her mother and her rejection shaped her understanding of herself and her own Blackness.

Miller’s work regularly appears on "CBS Mornings," "CBS Sunday Morning," the "CBS Evening News," and "48 Hours." She has reported on stories of national and international importance. From presidential elections to the climate crisis, her area of coverage is wide-ranging, but her reporting around social justice has been particularly groundbreaking. From her coverage of the killings of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, and the Charleston church shooting, to sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby, Russell Simmons, and Harvey Weinstein, Miller has been at the forefront of CBS News' coverage of the protest movement involving these issues.

She was the first CBS News correspondent on the ground at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and followed the movement to change the nation's gun laws, including the March for Our Lives protests. Her coverage has also extended overseas to the refugee crisis in the Middle East, the celebration and life of Nelson Mandela, and the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

Miller's reporting has earned her several prestigious journalism awards including an Emmy for her series of reports on the National Guard's Youth Challenge Academy, an Edward R Murrow Award for her coverage of a day care center stand-off in New Orleans, and she was part of the Alfred I. duPont – Columbia Award winning team for coverage the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting. In 2019, Miller won a Gracie award for her reporting on the hidden world of sex trafficking in "48 Hours: Live to Tell: Trafficked."

Miller has interviewed global leaders, politicians, artists, and celebrities, including President Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai, Beyoncé, Tiffany Haddish, John Goodman, Tony Bennett, James Earl Jones, Lenny Kravitz, LL Cool J, Carlos Santana, Denzel Washington, and Yo-Yo Ma.

View more 2023 Summer Leadership Institute public events.