Michigan State University

Arts and Letters College Directory

LeConte Dill

  • (She/Her)
  • Associate Professor
  • African American and African Studies
Biography

Dr. LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, California, the eldest grandchild of four sojourners of the 2nd Wave of the Great Migration. She remains curious about sojourning, migrations, and landing and launching places. Dr. Dill identifies as a Black Feminist community-accountable and transdisciplinary educator, scholar, and artist. She engages with poetry, playwriting, dance, arts-based research methods, and ethnography as technologies of storytelling.

Dr. Dill is a proud Spelman College alumna, where she majored in Sociology and minored in Creative Writing. She holds graduate degrees in Public Health from UCLA and UC Berkeley and was a Health Policy Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine. She previously served on the faculty at several schools and programs of public health across the U.S. Dr. Dill has also honed her arts practices through workshops and community-building with several literary and creative organizations and collectives, such as Callaloo, Hurston/Wright, VONA Voices, and Movement Research.

Currently, Dr. Dill is the Director of Graduate Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. She is also a Certified Mindfulness Instructor and Certified Yoga Nidra Instructor, and breathwork is vital to her approaches inside and outside of the classroom. In her art, research, pedagogy, and advocacy, she aims to listen to and show up for Black girls and gender-expansive youth, in particular, and to carefully document their strategies of safety, healing, and wellness.

Dr. Dill’s work is critically informed by years of working in partnership with youth and community organizers, policy advocates, and health educators at community-based organizations and public health departments across the U.S. and South Africa. Additionally, her writing has been published in a diverse array of spaces, such as Feminist Anthropology, the Du Bois Review, POETRY, Journal of Poetry Therapy, and Health Promotion Practice. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Soul Survivors (np: and Counterpath) was published in February 2026.

Works

LeConté J. Dill (2015) Poetic Justice: Engaging in Participatory Narrative Analysis to Find Solace in the “Killer Corridor,” American Journal of Community Psychology, 55:1, 128-135, DOI: 10.1007/s10464-014-9694-7
LeConté J. Dill & Emily J. Ozer (2016) “I’m Not Just Runnin’ the Streets”: Exposure to Neighborhood Violence and Risk Avoidance Strategies among Urban Youth of Color, Journal of Adolescent Research, 31:5, 536-556, DOI: 10.1177/0743558415605382
LeConté J. Dill, Mercedez Dunn, & Orrianne Morrison (2016) The Enduring Atlanta Compromise: Youth Contending with Home Foreclosures and School Closures in the “New South,” The Du Bois Review, 13:2, 365-377, DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X16000217
LeConté J. Dill (2017) “Wearing My Spiritual Jacket”: The Role of Spirituality as a Coping Mechanism Among African American Youth, Health Education & Behavior, 44:5, 696-704, DOI: 10.1177/1090198117729398
LeConté J. Dill, Bianca Rivera, & Shavaun Sutton (2018) “Don’t Let Nobody Bring You Down”: How Urban Black Girls Write and Learn from Ethnographically-based Poetry to Understand and Heal from Relationship Violence, The Ethnographic Edge, 2:1, 57-65, DOI: 10.15663/tee.v2i1.30
LeConté J. Dill & Emily J. Ozer (2019) “The Hook-Up”: How Youth-Serving Organizations Facilitate Network-based Social Capital for Urban Youth of Color, Journal of Community Psychology, 47:7, 1614-1628, DOI: 10.1002/jcop.22216
LeConté J. Dill (2021) Breathe into Believing. Hypatia, 1-11. DOI: 10.1017/hyp.2021.42
LeConté J. Dill (2022) Butterfly Broke Off. Health Promotion Practice, 23(4), 544.
2022 Dill, L. J., Sutton, S., Cowan, E., & Holdbrook-Smith, A. Oh, we got beef?!: Rifts, Refusals, Ruptures, and Re-Commitments in Academic-Community Partnerships. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 11(3): 40–56.
LeConté J. Dill (2022) Growing Tired of Statistics. Health Promotion Practice, 23(5), 764.
LeConté J. Dill (2022) Maroons in Plain Sight: Blackgirlhood as Resistance and Survivance. Feminist Anthropology, 3(2), 263-273.
LeConté J. Dill (2022) Alchemy. Health Promotion Practice, 23(6), 934.
Sarah Mountz, LeConté J. Dill, Megan Willows, & Jordan Dyett (2024) “It’s okay to dream”: Navigating trauma, healing, and futuring among LGBTQ+ Black girls, transgender and nonbinary youth in New York State. Children and Youth Services Review, 163, 107755.
LeConté J. Dill & Shavaun S. Sutton (2025) “The School Pretty Much Doesn’t Care…But I Do” Syllabus: Schools as Sites of Risk and Potential. Black Educology Mixtape “Journal”, 3(1), 26.

 

 

 

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