Michelle Lanier is acting director of North Carolina’s African American Heritage Commission and Curator of Multicultural Initiatives with North Carolina’s State Historic Sites. With a BA in Art and Art History from Spelman College and an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she uses her background as an oral historian and folklorist to connect communities around the state’s rich cultural resources. She also brings the ethical issues of public history and documentary work into the classroom, as an instructor since 2000 with CDS. Michelle first encountered Portobelo as a participant of Prof. Arturo Lindsay’s Spelman College Summer Art Colony in the late 1990s and has been engaged in various projects in Portobelo over the last fifteen years.