Cheryl Thompson

Founder and Director

Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA)

Cheryl Thompson is an Associate Professor, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity, Founder and Director of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), a digital platform that is reimagining digital curation and the importance of storytelling and living archive as a source of knowledge production, and cultural memory. She is also Director of Black Creative Lab, a digital incubator for the curation of public exhibits, speaker events on YouTube and Instagram. Thompson has written four books: Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898–1919 (2026); Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (2025), Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021), and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). In 2021, she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists for her contributions to Black Canadian studies.

Presenting at the following sessions

May 12, 2026 11:30am

Welcome and Keynote Session - On Haunting and the Living Archive: How MOBA is Redefining Gaps through Storytelling

One of the longstanding challenges in Canada regarding Black archival collections is the lack of adequate metadata, especially itemized information on Black subjects. From its inception in 2023, Mapping Our Black Archives (MOBA) has aimed to change this by focusing on storytelling as a way to fill