About Michele
Michele Kumi Baer (she/they) is a facilitator, educator, cultural organizer, and grantmaker grounded in intersectional anti-racist knowledge and practice. Michele is the founder and principal of Kumi Cultural.
Photo by Shruti Parekh.
Image description: A mixed race East Asian woman with light, freckled skin, and short, black hair looks diagonally off frame to the right with a determined gaze. Behind her are trees and other plants that are out of focus.
With colleagues, clients, and partners, Michele crafts principles, policies, and practices to advance more just futures for our communities.
Michele is skilled at conducting research and building consensus with diverse stakeholders to promote dialogue and action, propel new program development, and strategically enable nonprofits, foundations, and networks to create and embody more equitable and just practices.
Throughout her career, Michele has worked in programming, advocacy, research, capacity building, and communications roles integrating racial justice, gender justice, and disability justice into nonprofit and philanthropic practice. Her career includes work at Race Forward, The New York Community Trust, Columbia University, Dance/NYC, and the Global Fund for Women.
They have also worked in a consultative and/or advisory capacity with a variety of nonprofit and government organizations, providing input and guidance on their grantmaking, programming, and communications work. This includes previous work with National Endowment for the Arts, Harlem Arts Festival, Staten Island Arts, and Dance Caribbean Collective.
Michele serves on the steering committee of the Cultural New Deal for Cultural and Racial Justice, and she is currently an advisor for the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project and a coach for MAP Fund’s Scaffolding for Practicing Artists (SPA) Program.
A person of mixed racial ancestry, Michele is a multiracial, East Asian, cisgender, and non-disabled woman. They are a proud Yonsei (fourth generation Japanese American) who has both Japanese and European ancestry. It was learning about their family’s incarceration during World War II that propelled Michele into critical inquiry at a young age.
Michele is also a trained dancer who has studied African diasporic dance traditions from Brazil and Haiti, as well as West African dance (Mandé & Malinke) for over 14 years. She has danced professionally with Aguas da Bahia, Duniya Dance & Drum Company, and Kriye Bode, and has choreographed and taught in New York City; Providence, RI; and Oakland, CA. Her dance practice is core to her understanding and pursuit of social justice.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area—the ancestral and unceded lands of the Ohlone people—Michele is currently based on Tovaangar, the ancestral, current, and future lands of the Tongva people, which people also currently refer to as Los Angeles.
They have a Bachelors from Brown University and a Masters from Columbia University.