Dr. LeAnna T. Luney

Project Director, Zion Community Member

Our Project Director, Dr. LeAnna T. Luney, is a child of the Zion community, and an assistant professor of African American Studies at Berea College. Her current scholarship traces and replicates grassroots learning systems of Black rural educational empowerment to co-construct freedom schools with African American communities in Kentucky. In past scholarship, Dr. Luney centralizes how Black girls, women, and femmes cope with anti-Blackness in educational institutions using theoretical and praxis-driven frameworks of Black feminism and decolonization. Other scholarship includes educational activism, and supporting students, families, and communities in re-creating and implementing equitable practice and policy in education systems. Dr. Luney applies a blend of ethnographic research methods to carefully and meticulously center Black folks’ stories of surviving and thriving in learning environments. Her methods range from statistics to oral history, photovoice, and vlogging techniques.

Dr. Luney earned a PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies, with a specialization in Africana Studies, and a Certificate in College Teaching from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021; a M.A. in Pan-African Studies from the University of Louisville in 2018; and a B.A. in African and African American Studies and Psychology from Berea College in 2016. In 2021, Dr. Luney trained as a Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Kentucky in the College of Education where she worked with the Civil Rights Initiative to conduct equity audits for school systems around the U.S.

Outside of her academic work, Dr. Luney finds joy caring for her dogs and garden, and being in community with loved ones.