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May 18
Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating over 140 innocent death-row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults.
Stevenson has initiated major anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He also led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.
Stevenson’s work has won him numerous awards including the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Prize, the American Bar Association Medal, the National Medal of Liberty from the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Olof Palme Prize for international human rights. Additionally, Stevenson has received over 50 honorary doctorates, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014, and was named to the 2015 Time 100 list, recognizing the world’s most influential people. In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joseph Biden.
Stevenson is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller Just Mercy, which was adapted into a major motion picture, winning the American Bar Association’s 2020 Silver Gavel Award as well as four NAACP Image Awards. Stevenson is also the subject of the Emmy Award–winning HBO documentary True Justice. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School and the Harvard School of Government.
artist & composer
Boundary-breaking and genre-defying, Terence Blanchard is recognized globally as a trumpet soloist and a prolific composer for film, television, opera, Broadway, orchestra, and for his own ensembles.
An eight-time Grammy winner, Blanchard became only the second African American composer after Quincy Jones to be nominated twice in the Best Original Score category at the 2021 Academy Awards. Alongside his work composing scores for over 20 Spike Lee projects, Blanchard’s music has created strong backdrops to human stories like The Woman King, One Night in Miami…, Eve’s Bayou, the HBO drama series Perry Mason, and Apple TV’s docuseries They Call Me Magic (for which Blanchard received an Emmy nomination).
Blanchard’s second opera, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, received its Metropolitan Opera premiere in September 2021, making it the first opera by an African American composer to appear at the Met in its 138-year history. The recording of those performances received the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording, and the opera returned to the Met for a highly anticipated second run in April 2024. Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, was performed at the Met in April 2023 to widespread critical acclaim. It received the Grammy for Best Opera Recording in 2024.
Blanchard’s extensive recording catalog includes Absence, a tribute to Wayne Shorter created in collaboration with The E-Collective and Turtle Island Quartet. Absence received Grammy nominations in November 2021 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo for Blanchard. Blanchard’s recorded work has placed him at the forefront of giving voice to human rights, civil rights, and racial injustice, including the 2016 album Breathless, an elegy for Eric Garner.
Born in New Orleans in 1962, Blanchard is a musical polymath who launched his solo career in the 1990s. Since then, he has released 20 solo albums, garnered 15 Grammy nominations, composed music for over 60 films, and received 10 major commissions. He was named a 2024 NEA Jazz Master as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and currently serves as the executive artistic director for SF Jazz, the largest non-profit jazz presenter in the world.
artist
Halim Flowers is an artist, poet, and activist whose work is shaped by resilience and transformation. At 16, he was sentenced as an adult to two life terms for a crime he did not commit.
While incarcerated, he developed a deep love for language, beginning with freestyle rap before evolving into poetry as a way to process the traumas of surviving prison and growing up during Washington, DC’s crack epidemic. After serving more than 20 years, Flowers was released in 2019 following criminal justice reform in DC. Soon after, he expanded his creative practice into visual art, drawing inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat and translating his experiences onto canvas through vibrant, layered works.
Flowers has received fellowships from Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green, was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, and is a 2025–26 Obama Foundation USA Leader. His work is exhibited internationally.
Bryan Stevenson on Courage brings one of America’s most powerful moral voices to the Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival stage. In this keynote address, acclaimed civil rights leader, bestselling author of Just Mercy, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson reflects on the meaning of courage: how we confront injustice, stay proximate to suffering, and choose to hope in the face of overwhelming odds.
Stevenson’s remarks will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Festival Curator Terence Blanchard, offering an extraordinary opportunity to hear directly from a visionary change-maker whose work continues to shape our national conversation on justice and humanity.
The evening will also include an original spoken-word performance by Festival exhibition artist Halim Flowers.
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