Jasmine Blanks Jones

Dr. Jasmine L. Blanks Jones is a dynamic theatre nonprofit leader, award-winning educator, and scholar holding a dual PhD in Education and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research on theatrical performance as a civic engagement praxis illuminates global race-based inequities in education and health, lifting the potential of knowledge co-creation through the arts and digital cultural production. As founder of Burning Barriers Building Bridges Youth Theatre (B4YT), a cultural performance company dedicated to community empowerment through the arts in Liberia, West Africa and the US, she has more than twenty years of experience in youth development in Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. She serves on the Education and Workforce; Arts, Culture and Interfaith; and Health sub-committees as a State of Maryland Commissioner for African Affairs appointed by the Governor and has recently been selected for the Fulbright program in Tanzania on creativity in an era of climate change. She holds a Master's degree in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota and a Bachelor of Science in Music Education from Florida A&M University. A former middle school music teacher, she was awarded the inaugural Touchdown for Teachers Grand Prize by the Baltimore Ravens. She is an Assistant Research Scholar in the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration and Colonialism at Johns Hopkins University where she conducted research and public scholarship as an inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow with Inheritance Baltimore, a Lecturer in the Center for Africana Studies, and affiliated faculty with the Program in Theatre Arts and Studies and the Department of Anthropology. She is the Executive Director of JHU’s Center for Social Concern. She is the proud mother of three amazing children and is happily married to fellow creative and long-time supporter of B4YT, Elliott Jones.