Elma Lewis

Elma Ina Lewis (September 15, 1921 – January 1, 2004) was an American arts educator and the founder of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts. She was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Fellows Grant, in 1981, and received a Presidential Medal for the Arts by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. She is also an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

While her parents had immigrated from Barbados, Elma Lewis was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts.

In 1950 Lewis founded The Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts to provide arts education for the African-American community in Boston with a comprehensive program across the visual and performing arts. Lewis founded the National Center of Afro-American Artists two years later, which served as an umbrella organization for the school, local arts groups, and a museum.

She graduated Emerson College (B.L.I., 1943), and Boston University School of Education (M.Ed., 1944).

Lewis was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. She was involved in promoting African American culture through art forms. She served as a board member for various organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Congressional Black Caucus, Metropolitan Cultural Alliance, and NAACP "Miss Lewis also received the Commonwealth Award, Massachusetts’ highest award in the arts, and myriad other honors including nearly thirty honorary doctorates from universities including Harvard and Brown. In October 2003, the National Visionary Leadership Project in ceremonies at Washington’s J. F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, named Miss Lewis, along with Ray Charles and John Hope Franklin, as a Visionary Elder." She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.

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