Carlton Turner

Carlton Turner is an artist, agriculturalist, researcher, and co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Cultural Production (Sipp Culture). 

Turner serves on the board of First Peoples Fund, Imagining America, Project South, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance. A member of the We Shall Overcome Fund Advisory Committee at the Highlander Center for Research and Education and is the former Executive Director of Alternate ROOTS, he is also a founding partner of the Intercultural Leadership Institute. 

Turner is an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation and was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA100. He is a former Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellow and former Cultural Policy Fellow at the Creative Placemaking Institute at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design in the Arts. 

Turner is also co-founder and co-artistic director, with his brother Maurice Turner, of the group M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction), a Mississippi-based performing arts group that blends of jazz, hip-hop, spoken word poetry and soul music together with non-traditional storytelling. 

Photo by Kevin Edwards

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