Annual Meeting Keynote Speaker Announced

Cheyney McKnight is Manager of Living History at New-York Historical Society, where she develops and runs Living History Programs.

McKnight is also owner of Not Your Momma’s History, a public history consulting business that aids museums and historical sites in talking about the African experience within 18th and 19th century America.

Not Your Momma’s History runs a YouTube channel with over 240,000 subscribers and 5 million views that shows the day to day lives of Black people throughout American history.

McKnight has taken her “Let’s Talk About Slavery” table to over 30 parks, historical sites, and public events across America to provide a safe place for people to learn and talk about the history of slavery. She provides handouts to encourage people to further their education beyond that one interaction.

She graduated from Simmons University in 2011 with a bachelors in Political Science.

In 2021 McKnight was chosen to be an African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Fellow for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Her project, titled ‘The Ancestor’s Future: An Afrofuturist Journey Through History,’ was both a piece of performance art and a conversation inspired by Afrofuturism about the future of historic preservation on former sites of enslavement. She uses clothing designs that meld modern textiles that speak to the Black experience in America with 18th and 19th century silhouettes.