Ping-Ann Addo is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She has been teaching anthropology for 18 years, has published a book on globalization through art and value circulation (Creating a Nation with Cloth: Women, Wealth, and Tradition in the Tongan Diaspora, Berghahn Book, 2013), and researches global Caribbean carnivals in North American contexts. She is an ethnographer whose methodologies start with the arts and whose current research focus is on interactions between ethnic community building, minority women's entrepreneurship, and place-keeping. In Boston's Caribbean Carnival festival those who are at once Black and Caribbean provide lenses onto the politics of race and ethnicity, body and adornment, social class and (anti-)gentrification. Having grown up in Trinidad and Tobago, Ping-Ann has an insider's take on these articulations of identity, value, and place. She has also curated exhibits of Pacific textiles and has managed a community arts project with Tongan textile artists in Oakland. She received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from Yale University, USA.