John “Jahni” Thomas Moore, born June 20 in Huntsville, Alabama, is an African American artist and art collector. With bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from Alabama A&M University, Jahni has worked as an art instructor for years, teaching kindergarten to the college level, while maintaining a busy schedule as a prolific artist. When he “got to a place with art where I wanted to go deeper,” he studied at The Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned an MFA in studio arts in 2019. His public work is well known in Huntsville, where his first mural from 1999 is still on exhibit at Early Works Children’s Museum.