Meet Dr. Amanda Kemp

Dr. Amanda Kemp blends activism and spirituality, theatre arts and history.  A survivor of the New York City foster care system, Dr. Kemp  has been a lifelong advocate and organizer of movements for racial justice and equality since her first anti-apartheid march in 1983.  She graduated from Stanford University where she helped to lead the Stanford out of South Africa divestment movement and the successful struggle to revamp the University's Eurocentric humanities requirement.  Awarded Stanford's prestigious Gardner Fellowship for Public Service, Dr. Kemp apprenticed with the Honorable Maxine Waters and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. For her work in organizing statewide student movements, including a 10,000 strong March on Sacramento,CA for educational rights, Rainbow/PUSH awarded Kemp their 1989 Citizenship Award. Subsequently Kemp served on the Steering Committee of the National Black Assembly chaired by the Hon. Dick Hatcher.

An erstwhile poet and playwright, Kemp left politics to pursue a doctoral degree in Performance Studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.  After two years of doctoral work, Dr. Kemp traveled to South Africa to work with the Ford Foundation where she consulted and co-authored on a report on the complex and dynamic women's movements during the transition to democracy.  While in South Africa Dr. Kemp also consulted with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights South African Elections project which hosted U.S. elections observers. Coordinating assignments and real time report-in's, Dr. Kemp also experienced Nelson Mandela's joyful victory dance when the ANC swept the national elections.

Enriched by her South Africa experiences, Dr. Kemp completed her dissertation on African American and South African ties in the 1920s and 1930s.  She has since published articles about South African politics as performance and performed a one-woman show on being Black but not African in South Africa.

Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of American and Africana Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, Dr. Kemp has earned awards from the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and is currently touring "Benjamin Franklin Abolitionist? American Slavery, American Freedom." For more on this readers theatre production please select Historical theatre.

In addition to creating dynamic interactive performances about the legacy of slavery, Dr. Kemp also consults with organizations and individuals seeking to make a strategic impact on the movement for racial justice. Services include researching organizations and programs that work, designing and facilitating workshops that heal racism, and coaching individuals who want to BE the change they want to see in the world. Not your typical diversity trainer, she starts with the assumption that we all have personal power and responsibility, regardless of our access to institutional power. For more information on workshops and strategic analysis, please select Experiential Learning. Dr. Kemp resides in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where she co-parents her two children with historian Doug Anthony.