Event Registration is now open and is required. Deadline is January 31, 2025, or until sold out.
COST: Seats are $20 for students and $35 for non-students. Student meal plan holders may use a meal swipe to make a reservation in exchange for one meal. Each table seats 8 guests.
Emmy-nominated, multiplatform storyteller, and producer Baratunde Thurston will be the featured speaker for the 2025 Martin Luther King Jr. Cultural Dinner on:
- Saturday, February 15, 2025
- 5-6 p.m. (doors open, cash bar available)
- 6-8:30 p.m. (keynote and dinner)
- Brown Ballroom, Bone Student Center
Thurston is the host of the PBS television series “America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston,” creator and host of “How To Citizen with Baratunde,” and a founding partner of the new media startup, Puck. Most recently, Thurston was featured in the Hulu original docuseries, “Black Twitter: A People’s History.”
In 2024, Thurston launched the video podcast “Life with Machines,” exploring the human side of the A.I. revolution—the good, the bad, and the weird. To help produce the show, he and his team built their own A.I. model named Blair to move from observers to practitioners of the technology. Through fun and enlightening conversations with entrepreneurs, artists, policymakers, technologists, business leaders, creators, educators, and scientists, Thurston seeks to demystify A.I. and answer the question, “How can these machines help us become more human?”
His comedic memoir, “How To Be Black”, is a New York Times best-seller. In 2019, he delivered what MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED talks of all time.” Thurston is unique in his ability to integrate and synthesize themes of race, culture, politics, and technology to explain where our nation is and where we can take it. Thurston serves on the boards of BUILD.org and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Los Angeles, Calif.
This event is presented by Illinois State University’s Office of the President, University Housing Services, Office of Equity and Inclusion, the Association of Residence Halls, the Association of Black Employees, and the Black Student Union.
