Meet The Competition Organizers
Concepts for what became The Africatown International Design Idea Competition started in August 2018 as an organized means to leverage the spectacular Clotilda wreckage discovery to create a singular museum. The vision grew into The Africatown Cultural Mile based on one partner’s passion for transformational community redevelopment and the other’s world-class urban design ingenuity.
VICKII HOWELL
Competition Coordinator, CEO M.O.V.E. Gulf Coast CDC
Vickii Howell is a journalist, writer, PR strategist, and socially conscious community builder. She has spent many years as an advocate for social justice and economic inclusion in Birmingham and Mobile, using her writing and communication skills to inform, engage, empower, and build alliances that transform community. Her passion for community started as an award-winning journalist at The Birmingham News, Alabama’s largest newspaper at the time. After a distinguished 13-year career, Howell left The News in 2003 to create Birmingham View, which included a print magazine, a 30-minute community affairs cable TV show, a website, and social media, to highlight more positive news about Birmingham’s African American community. She also wrote for the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail, which is now part of the National Park Service’s Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and the national Civil Rights Trail, a national initiative from the Alabama Department of Tourism. Upon returning home to Mobile in 2013, Howell joined the Mobile NAACP, becoming its executive director. As co-chair of the Mobile NAACP Economic Development Committee, she worked with the Mobile Chamber of Commerce’s Growth Alliance Task Force, working for business inclusion and jobs for minorities. She is currently the founder and president of M.O.V.E. (Making Opportunities Viable for Everyone) Gulf Coast Community Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization to build collaborative partnerships with businesses, governments, and other nonprofits to create a supportive economic development ecosystem that grows the businesses and socioeconomic capacity of entrepreneurs, workers, and families in historically underserved communities. With support from her board, Howell commissioned and worked with studiorotan to develop The Africatown International Design Idea Competition, as a means to leverage the Clotilda discovery to create such an ecosystem based on cultural heritage tourism. The desired outcome is for the designs to help community leaders cast a common vision for Africatown’s future, using its history to form its economic base. Her hope is to create a sustainable model that other historic Black neighborhoods and communities can follow for their own revitalization efforts.
RENEE KEMP-ROTAN
Professional Competition Advisor, CEO StudioRotan
Renee Kemp-Rotan, Associate AIA/NOMA, is an urban designer, master planner, and the CEO of studiorotan, a cultural heritage/civic design firm. She is the first African American woman to graduate from Syracuse University with a bachelor’s degree in architecture (cum laude). She attended London’s Architectural Association and graduated from Columbia University with a master’s in urban and regional planning. Kemp-Rotan is an active member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA)’s Diversity and Inclusion Council and the National Organization of Minority Architects. She has directed the AIA’s Design, Education, Practice Division and the National Endowment for the Arts’ Design Demonstration/National Design Competition programs. Her professional work includes serving ten mayors as urban policy/designer advisor in Washington, DC, New York, and Atlanta. In Atlanta, she master planned eight communities for the 1996 Olympics and went on to serve as the city’s director of economic development and chief of urban design and development. Other projects in Atlanta include master planning for the Atlanta Aquarium and Olympic Park and serving as the construction liaison for the construction of Philips Arena. A native of Washington, DC, Kemp-Rotan now resides in Birmingham, Alabama, where she has directed planning for $200 million in capital projects for the City, including Railroad Reservation Park, Crossplex, SPARK@Sloss arts tech hub for millennials and the under-served (with the creative director of Cirque du Soliel as partner), and the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail. Her work is included in The African American National Biography (edited by Dr. Henry Louis Gates), Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Center, and Oxford University’s African American Research Center. Kemp-Rotan has brought these decades’ worth of experience in the master planning of cultural and heritage sites to her current work as the Professional Competition Advisor for The Africatown International Design Idea Competition.