Dr. LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California, the eldest grandchild of four sojourners of the 2nd Wave of the Great Migration. She remains curious about sojourning, migrations, and landing and launching places. Dr. Dill identifies as a Black Feminist community-accountable and transdisciplinary educator, scholar, and artist. She engages with poetry, playwriting, dance, arts-based research methods, and ethnography as technologies of storytelling.
Dr. Dill is a proud Spelman College alumna, where she majored in Sociology and minored in Creative Writing. She holds graduate degrees in Public Health from UCLA and UC Berkeley and was a Health Policy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. She previously served on the faculty at several schools and programs of public health across the U.S. Dr. Dill has also honed her arts practices through workshops and community-building with several literary and creative organizations and collectives, such as Callaloo, Hurston/Wright, VONA Voices, and Movement Research.
Currently, Dr. Dill is the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. She is also a Certified Mindfulness Instructor, and breathwork is vital to her approaches inside and outside of the classroom. In her art, research, pedagogy, and advocacy, she aims to listen to and show up for Black girls and gender-expansive youth, in particular, and to carefully document their strategies of safety, healing, and wellness.
Dr. Dill’s work is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, policy advocates, and health educators at community-based organizations and public health departments across the U.S. and South Africa. Additionally, her writing has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as Feminist Anthropology, the Du Bois Review, POETRY, Journal of Poetry Therapy, and Health Promotion Practice. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Building a Maker Outta Me (Third World Press), is forthcoming in October 2025.