“It gives me an opportunity to dance and spend time with people that I would usually not socialize with in the bubble that we call the Capitol.”

Julian Rankin
Julian Rankin was raised in Mississippi and North Carolina, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rankin was the founding Director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, and now serves as Executive Director of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. He is the author of Catfish Dream: Ed Scott’s Fight for his Family Farm and Racial Justice in the Mississippi Delta published by the University of Georgia Press as part of the Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place series. For Catfish Dream, Rankin was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award and recognized as the 2019 Nonfiction winner by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.