Dr. J. Lorand Matory, Ph.D. (Anthropology, University of Chicago, 1991) is Director of the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Project and Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of African and African American Studies of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University. Previously, he was a tenured Full Professor at Harvard University until moving to Duke in 2009. He also served from 2009 to 2013 as the James P. Marsh Professor at Large at the University of Vermont.

He has produced 37 years of intensive research on the great religions of the Black Atlantic, West-African Yoruba religion, West-Central African Kongo religion, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santeria/Ocha and Haitian Vodou.

In 2003, the government of the Federal Republic of Germany awarded him the Alexander von Humboldt prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award and year-long residential fellowship, and U.S. President G.W. Bush appointed Professor Matory to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Cultural Property at the US Department of State, where he served until 2011. In 2010, he received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association.