Sheri Lewis

Dr. Sheri K. Lewis is an Assistant Professor, Associate Chair, and Director of Community, Culture, and Connectivity in the African American and African Studies department at Michigan State University. She earned her undergraduate degree in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she later completed both her M.A. and Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies and Organizational Leadership.  Rooted in Chicago’s history, culture, joy and community, she brings a transdisciplinary, creative approach to Black Studies—bridging scholarship, artistic practice, and community engagement to produce innovative, impactful work advancing advocacy and social justice for Black girls. 

As a creative scholar and practitioner, Dr. Lewis studies Black girlhood while actively creating alongside Black girls. Her research centers on how to support Black girls’ needs, dreams, and desires by examining their image-making, aesthetic practices, meaning-making, and cultural productions. She employs art-based and visual methodologies—including public installations, magazine-making, space-making, and street photography—to co-create immersive experiences that center and amplify their everyday brilliance.

During her time at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign,  she deepened her commitment to Black girlhood through her work with the intergenerational collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), organizing curricula and performances with African American teen girls in Champaign-Urbana. In 2016, she moved back home to Chicago and co-founded Melt with former teen participants, as a special labor of love made for and by Black girls. Melt is a magazine built on the premise that Black girls identities are diverse and fluid, and when they do collective work they melt. Together, Dr. Lewis and the Melt participants developed three beautiful magazines and two community engaged art exhibitions. As a contributing author to The Black Girlhood Studies Collection, Dr. Lewis positions Melt as a critical creative platform , qualitative research methodology and an interactive process of “engaging, interpreting, analyzing, and creating a body of knowledge together to foreground and/or problematize social identity or social issues with the goal of producing a magazine” ( Lewis, 2019, pg. 157).  Melt methodology is an expansive way to see research as dialogical, inspirational for taking risks with method, and creative space to deepen critical pedagogy. Continuing the Melt trajectory,  she also co-developed another magazine entitled Real Thugs Cry, with Michigan State undergraduate students as part of their Black Girlhood Studies course.

Extending her work from page to public space, Dr. Lewis also co-curates community-engaged projects such as Chicago Street Portraits Presents: Black Girls Are the Inspiration at the historic Bud Billiken parade and the Candy Lady installation at the Black Girl Day Play festival in Lansing, Michigan. She frames these works as extensions of Melt methodology interventions that reposition Black girls as co-producers of spatial knowledge. Drawing on Black feminist theory, Black geographies, and art-based research, she conceptualizes public installations as embodied archives and sites of Black feminist spacemaking—where visibility, memory, and belonging are collectively rehearsed and reimagined.

Dr. Lewis brings a unique ability to translate theory into immersive, impactful experiences, supporting organizations, institutions, and communities in designing work that is culturally grounded, innovative, and transformative. Across her scholarship, creative practice, and leadership, Dr. Lewis’s intellectual praxis serves as a catalyst for Black girls to be seen, heard, and valued—expansively, economically, politically, and artistically.