DARNELL L. MOORE
01 THE ETHOS
'What do you do for a living?' is a question that tends to be asked when someone wants to know how it is that one makes money.
I despise that question.
It relies on the idea that one occupation, one box to be checked, is big enough to contain the fullness of our creative capacities. And, I have never been comfortable in cages of any kind.
My life and work have been an exercise in living out the answer to the query: 'What is it that I love?'
I love to collectively build -- meaningful relationships, creative interventions, and impactful institutions.
I love to tell stories.
I love community and all that it takes to build one.
I love to build strategies that help to strengthen institutions’ capacities to be human centered, equitable and just.
I love when people who exist on the edges of the margins within the communities that I am a part of are centered and cared for.
I love innovating and creating new things.
I love thinking big and strategizing solutions for social problems.
I love to tell the stories that emerge from the lives of people who tend to be talked about (in media, in research, in the public square) but rarely listened to.
02 THE WORK
03 THE BIO
I talked about love -- it is an idea, but demands expression in the work that I do and how I do it with others.
I Love to Tell Stories: My memoir, No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America, won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Best Memoir in 2019. It was also celebrated as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 as well as selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers' pick.
I’ve harnessed my love for storytelling as an editor at sites like The Feminist Wire, CASSIUS and Mic, I directed and hosted, for example, special forums on HIV/AIDS, love and manhood/masculinity.
I love to build strategies that help strengthen institutions’ capacities to be human-centered, equitable, and just: Over the past decade, I served as the Head of Strategy and Programs at Breakthrough US, which was a creative hub that used media, art and technologies to shift the public’s understanding of gender norms across the cultural landscape. More recently, I served as Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix where my team offered creative consultation to executives across the content, studio operations, marketing/ communications/ PR/awards and animation parts of the business as well as partnered with talent/HR executives to build and forward DEI efforts.
I love Thinking Big and Strategizing Solutions for Social Problems: I’ve been a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice at Columbia University; a Founding Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California; a Visiting Fellow at Yale Divinity School; and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. I have taught courses in the Women and Gender’s Studies and Public Administration departments at Rutgers University, Fordham University, City College of New York City and Vassar College. I am honored to have led and/or participated in several critical dialogues including the 58th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women; the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington National Panel on Race, Discrimination and Poverty; the 2012 Seminar on Debates on Religion and Sexuality at Harvard Divinity School; and was a member of the first U.S. delegation of LGBTQ leaders to Israel/Palestine in 2012 to name several that were important to me.
I Love To Help Build Institutions: Along with Beryl Satter and Christina Strasburger, I co-founded the Queer Newark Oral History Project at Rutgers University in 2011. I also worked with Thomas Krever and Lillian Rivera (former leaders at the Hetrick-Martin Institute), and then Mayor Cory Booker’s administration, to open HMI-New Jersey when I was the inaugural chair of the Mayor’s Commission on LGBTQ Concerns. And one of the most inspiring moments during my journey was co-organizing the Black Life Matters Ride to Ferguson in the wake of Mike Brown’s tragic murder and along with Alicia Garza, Patrisee Cullors, and Ayo Tometti (#BlackLivesMatter Co-Founders) assisted in developing the infrastructure for the Black Lives Matter Network.
I Love Innovating and Creating New Things: Currently, I am hard at work on my second book, tentatively titled Show You Better Than I Can Tell You: Black Men Freeing Ourselves, as I finish the final season of the award-winning podcast, “Being Seen”. And because I am an Aquarius who doesn’t believe in caging my big dreams, I founded a boutique creative consulting agency, Six Zero Nine Creatives, whose name is an homage to Camden, my hometown, and through which I will house my current and future creative projects.
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