Shantrelle P. Lewis
| Shantrelle P. Lewis | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Shantrelle Patrice Lewis June 13, 1978 New Orleans, Louisiana U.S. |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater |
Howard University Temple University |
| Occupation | Curator Historian Critic Filmmaker |
| Website | ShantrellePLewis |
Shantrelle Patrice Lewis (born in June 13, 1978) is a curator, historian, critic and filmmaker. She is a 2012 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow and a 2014 United Nations Programme for People of African Descent Fellow.
Lewis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, to computer analyst father Wayne Lewis and retired social worker mother Patricia Scott.
Lewis was introduced to African American history by her father through her own genealogy as a child where she learned she was a descendant of Henri Christophe, the first king of free Haiti in 1811. She comes from a family of teachers: Her maternal great grandfather, Nathaniel Lewis, was a student at Tuskegee University, and later taught at Southern University A&M and her maternal great grandmother, Della Atkinson, was a professor at Straight College, which is known today as Dillard University.
In 2000, Lewis received a bachelor's degree from Howard University in African American Studies. By then, her childhood experience with Black history grew into a career, teaching African-American Studies at Hyde Leadership Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. Lewis then earned a master's degree in African American Studies from Temple University in 2006. She returned to her hometown after the Hurricane Katrina disaster to help with revitalization and taught African World Studies at Dillard University.
After returning home to Louisiana in 2007, Lewis became Executive Director and Curator of the McKenna Museum of African American Art.
From 2009 to 2013, Lewis was the Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in New York City.
In 2010, Lewis began working on The Dandy Lion Project, curating images of black dandies that has taken the form of an international traveling exhibition, a film series and a book. The project connects the subversive contemporary fashion and lifestyle movement to historical images and has dated the movement that blends African aesthetics with European menswear back to the fifteenth century in Africa. Women dandies and transmen are also featured, further complicating the idea of black masculinity. Lewis focused on curating images authored by over 30 photographers of the African Diaspora, thus reclaiming the authorship of images that in another context might have historically been seen as exploitive. This project has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Brighton Photo Biennial, and Lowe Museum of Art in Miami.
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