The Team

Alexis Clements (Director/Producer) is an award-winning writer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Her creative work has been published, produced, and screened in venues across the US, Europe, and South America. Her feature-length documentary film, All We’ve Got, which focuses on LGBTQ women’s spaces at a time when many are closing, premiered in October 2019 in New York City and has since screened across the US and internationally. All We’ve Got is her first film. Her play Unknown also premiered in October 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Other plays of hers have been produced, published, and anthologized across the US and the UK over the past two decades. In addition, her prose writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, Bitch Magazine, American Theatre, The Brooklyn Rail, and Nature, among others. She is also a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

National Advisory Board
(board currently in formation)

Samir Gambhir is the Director of the Equity Metrics Program at the Othering and Belonging Institute where he engages in and oversees projects in the area of fair housing, zoning reform, racial residential segregation, opportunity mapping, and racial equity and inclusion. His work involves conducting empirical research, presenting analytics, developing diagnostic tools and providing policy recommendations on issues of housing, education, environment and many more with a social justice lens. Samir’s research interests focus on empirical analysis, spatial modeling and data visualization to highlight inequity, marginalization and othering, and to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. He has co-authored and supported a number of reports on projects such as Racial Residential Segregation, Inclusiveness Index, LIHTC housing and Zoning Reform. Prior to joining the Othering & Belonging Institute, Samir worked as GIS Manager for Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), Toronto. Prior to CGHR, he worked as Senior GIS Researcher at The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He graduated from The Ohio State University in 2003 with a Masters degree in City and Regional Planning. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from India.

Colin Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy. He is the author of Citizen Brown: Race, Democracy, and Inequality in the St. Louis Suburbs (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has written for the Nation, In these Times, Jacobin, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor). His digital projects include online companions to Citizen Brown and Mapping Decline, and public history on the history of racial segregation in Iowa counties, and in St. Louis. His recent research support includes a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2021-22) and a visiting scholar fellowship at the Russell Sage Foundation (2022-23). He is a senior research consultant at Common Good Iowa for which he has written or co-written reports on health coverage, economic development, and wages and working conditions (including the biennial State of Working Iowa series). He is the recipient of an F. Wendell Miller Professorship (2016), the University of Iowa Regents Award for Faculty Excellence (2016); the University of Iowa Award for Distinguished Achievement in Publicly Engaged Research (2015), and the College of Liberal Arts and Science Collegiate Fellowship (2014).

Chris LeFlore is special assistant to the president at The Kresge Foundation. He joined the foundation in 2021. Previously, Chris worked as a policy analyst for the City of Detroit in the office of Council Member Ayers. Chris was also chosen as a fellow for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in summer 2017, and most recently worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in their Community Development and Policy Studies division. Chris holds a Master of Public Policy and Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, where he was a Dow Sustainability Fellow, studying how to leverage public private partnership to provide transportation to job seekers. Chris is the cofounder of two nonprofits, BankBlackUSA and M-Years. BankBlackUSA is a nationwide grassroots organization that works to promote financial inclusion and wealth building through research and advocacy. M-YEARS is an education enrichment program that teaches STEM, social studies and urban planning to middle school students in northeast Detroit.