The Art of Change Agency Lead & Collaborators

The Art of Change Agency collaborates with these agents of change.

Lead Coach & Consultant

Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis is Lead Coach & Consultant with The Art of Change Agency, cultivating critical voices and creative visions for sustainable practice, structural change, environmental justice, and social transformation. Previously, they provided strategic guidance and creative visions for the future of clean water for people and nature as Vice President for People, Justice, and Cultural Affairs at American Rivers.

Rooted in the Gulf South’s folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and landscapes, Dr. Mel’s creative work explores nature writing themes in rural coastal settings through the lens of Black, Creole, and AfroIndigenous knowledges. Raised in Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama Gulf Coast, their multimedia projects and creative writing portraiture feature ancestral lands, generational lineages, and queer longings in frontline Gulf South communities. Their book Biomythography Bayou is available via The Griot Project Book Series at Bucknell University Press. Their forthcoming project Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective and Re:wild.

Dr. Mel serves on the board of Orion Magazine: Nature and Culture and Greens REALIGN and was recently an Affiliated Researcher with the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. They served as Associate Professor and Director of the Ecosystems, Sustainability, and Justice Program, co-founder of The Space for Creative Black Imagination: An Interdisciplinary Making and Research Institute, and Chair of the Humanistic Studies Department at Maryland Institute College of Art and chaired the Center for Geographies of Justice, the Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Department, and Africana Studies Department at Goucher College, as well as the Department of Ethnic Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California.

MPP Public Policy Certificate, Concentration: Environmental Policy, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, May 2024

PhD Women’s Studies, Concentration: Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities, University of Maryland, College Park, August 2012

MA Women’s Studies, Concentration: Black Women’s Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, May 2008

MS Women’s Studies, Concentration: Public Policy, Towson University, May 2005

BA Women’s Studies and Sociology, Meyerhoff Arts Scholar: Dance, Creative Writing, Goucher College, May 2002

collaborator

Nana Osei-Kofi is Professor of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the Difference, Power, & Discrimination Program at Oregon State University. She has developed and delivered faculty development programs and workshops for over a decade, and regularly serves as a national consultant on higher education initiatives informed by commitments to equity, access, and justice. She accumulated 15 years of professional experience as a project consultant to small and large organizations prior to her entry into the academy.

Website design by Kira Wisniewski

Website photo credit: Adela C. Licona