PAGE Co-Directors

Mandy Muise

Board Member & PAGE Co-Director

Mandy Muise (she/they) is a fourth year PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Originally from North Carolina, Mandy is a cultural anthropologist with research operating at the nexus of racial, immigrant, and food justice initiatives in the U.S. Southeast. Their ongoing dissertation work is a collaborative ethnographic project conducted in partnership with the Nashville Food Project and growers within their community agriculture network. Mandy’s dissertation work draws on anthropological and interdisciplinary literatures on food justice, racial capitalism, and urban agriculture, thinking with scholars who have theorized food access as a spatial racial formation (Reese 2019; Safransky 2023; Bowens 2015; White 2018). Linking food sovereignty with racialized geographies, Mandy’s work understands gardens not as neutral sites of cultivation but as relational landscapes––sites of both dispossession and possibility––where race, immigration, and belonging are constantly re/negotiated. With garden as guide, Mandy’s research interrogates how the racial landscapes of the U.S. Southeast shape and are shaped by ongoing conversations around food access and cultivation, further considering how initiatives headed by nonprofit institutions in Nashville further complicate the relationships between race, land, and food.

In addition to Mandy’s work with IA and the PAGE Fellowship, she is a part of the Vanderbilt-Meharry Community Engaged Research Core and was a 2024-2026 Graduate Public Scholar with the Curb Center at Vanderbilt University. They remain fully committed to the transformative work that emerges from genuine, authentic partnerships and collaborations born of an ethic of care, trust, and deep connection.