Raised in the rural US South with genealogical ties to the forests and coastal areas of lands now known North Carolina and Virginia, Dr. Akiemi Glenn is a Honolulu-based scholar and culture worker. As a linguist who works in Indigenous language revitalization, filmmaker, artist, and cultural practitioner, Akiemi’s work engages concepts of culture, race, and belonging at the intersections of art, social justice, and education. She is the founder and executive director of the Pōpolo Project, a community organization whose mission is to redefine what it means to be Black in Hawai‘i through cultivating connections between individuals, our communities, our ancestors, and the land, highlighting the vivid, complex diversity of Black cultures and identities in the Pacific and around the world.

Her community work in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Islands region brings together language, art, environmental and social justice, and education. She is also the co-founder and principal at Hawaiʻi Strategy Lab, a mixed-methods research endeavor that brings together data and culture in the service of social justice. Akiemi was formerly the director of Tele!, a language revitalization and engagement project in Hawai‘i's Tokelauan community funded by the federal Administration for Native Americans and administered by Te Taki Tokelau Community Training & Development.