Interco(a)stal Partner Organizations
The Third Place is a cross-sector network that connects Maine’s Black professionals, students, and entrepreneurs to social, professional, and economic opportunities. We do this through in-person events, online programs, and a virtual community platform. These programs and platforms serve as a critical resource in creating and sustaining Maine’s Black cultural infrastructure. Our network is designed to create a dynamic ecosystem that connects Black Mainers to other communities of color, local businesses and institutions, and cities/towns across the state. The Third Place brings together individuals, emerging initiatives, and organizations who share a common goal: ensuring that Maine is “The Way Life Should Be” for ALL people.
Atlantic Black Box advances historical recovery and participatory public memory practice throughout the Northeast. We work with communities, researchers, artists, educators, and partner organizations to investigate histories of colonization, slavery, resistance, migration, and belonging, working to return stories to the communities from which they have been estranged and creating opportunities for collective inquiry, dialogue, interpretation, and engagement. Through place-based projects, public programming, research support, artistic collaboration, and field-building initiatives, we help communities connect historical understanding to contemporary civic life.
Bomazeen Land Trust is a community-led, intertribal initiative dedicated to supporting land return, foodways, and cultural transmission throughout Wabanaki homelands. The organization enables Wabanaki people to renew and resume their land caretaking and stewardship roles for lands and waters with historical, spiritual, and ecological significance. Through land return and relationship, food sovereignty, and cultural education, Bomazeen protects ancestral Wabanaki spaces, reconnects community members with their lands, and creates opportunities for Wabanaki knowledge, traditions, and relationships with land and water to be carried forward.
Maine Maritime Museum connects people to the past, present, and future of Maine’s waterways and their global reach. Located on a 20-acre historic shipyard campus along the Kennebec River in Bath, the museum preserves and interprets Maine’s maritime history through its collections, historic buildings and landscapes, exhibitions, educational programs, and experiences on the water. As a steward and educator of history and culture, the museum works to broaden access, expand scholarship, build community, and share the local, regional, and global stories that have shaped Maine and its waterways.
Interco(a)stal Steering Committee
& Project Team
Meadow Dibble
Meadow Dibble, Ph.D. is founding Executive Director of Atlantic Black Box (ABB) and convener of ABB’s ongoing Walks for Historical and Ecological Recovery (WHERE). Originally from Cape Cod, Meadow lived for six years on Senegal’s Cape Verde peninsula, where she co-founded and published a cultural magazine from 1996–2000. She received her doctorate from Brown University’s Department of French Studies and taught at Colby College from 2005–08. A Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice from 2019–2023, Meadow served as Co-Lead on the Place Justice initiative, carried out in partnership with the Permanent Commission on the Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations.
Interco(a)stal Project Lead
Adilah Muhammad
Interco(a)stal Steering CommitteeAdilah Muhammad is the Founder and Executive Director of The Third Place, a cross-sector network building social and economic infrastructure by connecting Black professionals, students, and entrepreneurs across Maine. Through initiatives like SHIFT Maine, she advances workforce connectivity, cultural visibility, and community-rooted pathways to opportunity. A strategic planning and research consultant by background, Adilah has spent over 15 years supporting ethnic and community-based organizations in strengthening capacity and driving systems-level change. She currently serves as board co-chair of Atlantic Black Box, a board director for the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, board Director for Lift All, a Corporator at Androscoggin Bank, and is the immediate past chair of the Maine Community Foundation. She collaborated on and served as Advisor to the Walks for Historical and Ecological Recovery (WHERE) in 2024 and 2025.
James Eric Francis, Sr.
Interco(a)stal Art DirectorMadeline Bugeau-Heartt is a Maine-based facilitator, community organizer, and theater-maker. She is a graduate of both the Harvard Divinity School and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Madeline currently serves two extraordinary Maine organizations: as a consultant for The BTS Center and as lead facilitator for the Intercoastal Project with The Atlantic Black Box. Madeline also co-runs a theater company based out of the Midcoast called the counter/current collective where she is excited to be directing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya this summer. When not consulting, art-making, or squeezing in some part-time farming, Madeline organizes radical changemaking spaces in her home of Sanford Maine.
Andrea Francis
Andrea Francis is a member of the Mi'kmaq Nation and the Elsipogtog First Nation. As the Executive Director of the Bomazeen Land Trust, she is committed to ensuring that the organization’s mission, vision, and values are effectively represented through the insights of the board. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resource Management from the University of Arizona and a Master of Public Health from the University of Southern Maine. Andrea hopes that her work with Bomazeen will promote the connections she has identified between Wabanaki health and land and food sovereignty. Her dedication to the Maine community is also evident in her roles as a Niweskok and Maine Initiatives board member and as an advisor for the Indigo Arts Alliance and the Maine Community Foundation’s BIPOC fund.
Interco(a)stal Steering Committee
Luke Gates-Milardo
Interco(a)stal Steering CommitteeLuke Gates-Milardo is director of exhibits and learning at Maine Maritime Museum. He co-curated the exhibitions Re|Sounding and Cotton Town, both of which challenge traditional maritime narratives by forefronting Indigenous and Black voices, history, and culture. He directs the coordination, design, and fabrication of exhibits and oversees the museum’s educational programming. His projects integrate universal design principles into immersive experiences that provoke critical thinking, invite cooperative discussion, and inspire imagination. He holds a certificate in exhibition design from the Pratt Institute, a BA in English and education from Bowdoin College, and a Maine state teaching certificate.
Madeline Bugeau-Heartt
Lead FacilitatorJames Eric Francis Sr. is a Penobscot artist, historian, and geographer based on Indian Island, Maine. As Tribal Historian for the Penobscot Nation, his work explores the deep connection between Indigenous people and their ancestral landscapes. Francis is widely recognized for his meticulous dot paintings, an additive technique inspired by the precision of flint knapping. His creative practice—spanning photography and film—was further refined during his Spring 2026 residency at Surf Point in York, Maine. Whether depicting ancient place names or the Penobscot River, his art serves as a visual bridge between historical research and contemporary Wabanaki resilience.
Corinna Dibble
Corinna Dibble is a multidisciplinary artist and project manager with a background in the publishing industry. Her artistic practice spans painting, mixed media, carvings, and textiles, where she explores themes of identity and our relationship with the natural world. She is also interested in uncovering hidden histories that shape our understanding of place and community. With years of experience in art production, creative coordination, and project management within educational publishing, she is passionate about broadening access to learning opportunities for all and fostering connections through creative expression.
Content & Production Manager
Aquarius Garcelon
Social MediaAquarius Garcelon, also known as Aquarius Funkk, is an interdisciplinary Afrofuturist artist, designer, and producer living on Wabanaki land (Portland, Maine.) Their work exists at the intersection of art, technology, and cultural imagination. In both their artistic and professional creative practices, they approach design as a form of world-building that invites people into deeper relationships with themselves, their communities, and the futures they imagine. Aquarius works as a community organizer and digital caretaker, alchemizing lived experience, place, spirit, and history into culturally enriching experiences both online and in physical space. They have presented performance, digital media, film, and live events in both the U.S. and Mexico, and they are an alum of the La Pocha Nostra live art laboratories since 2016.
Aquarius Garcelon
Project EthnographerMarcelle Medford, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at Bates College. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of urban sociology, immigration, race, and ethnicity. Specifically, she examines how black immigrants understand their own ethnically-specific identities in the United States. This shift in perspective explores how black immigrants produce ethnic boundaries that extend far beyond ethnic conflict with African Americans and incorporates dimensions of cultural performativity, nationality, political and class ideologies, transnationalism, and citizenship status.
Thought Partners
Daniel Minter
Darren Ranco
Catherine Menyhart
Chris Timm
Susan Stark
Michael Amico
Ryun Anderson
Funders
Monument Lab
Maine Arts Commission
Going Beyond Fund
