Jesse Weaver Shipley is the John D. Willard Professor of African and African American Studies and Oratory at Dartmouth College. He is an artist, filmmaker, curator, and ethnographer who explores the links between aesthetics and power. His work explores a variety of phenomena, including analogue and digital technology, popular culture, music, theatre, urban design, labor, race, gender and mobility, and his work examines both spectacular multi-media performance events and the mundane aspects of experience. His films and multi-media work experiment with storytelling and portraiture and have been shown across Europe, Africa, and the United States, including, Is It Sweet? Tales of an African Superstar in New York; Portrait of an Artist(S); Black Star; High Tea; Anatomy of a Revolution; and Burnt Images. He is the author of numerous articles and two books, Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music and Trickster Theatre: The Poetics of Freedom in Urban Africa.