Artist Statement
Rooted in the Gulf South’s folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and natural landscapes, Dr. Mel Michelle’s Lewis’ creative work explores nature writing themes in rural coastal settings. 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 communities. Their work presents local and regional Black, Creole, and Indigenous southern religious and spiritual practices, cultural events, and everyday community rhythms, through the lens of social and environmental justice and the ancestral imaginary. Their narrative portraiture book project, Biomythography Bayou, is available from The Griot Project Series at Bucknell University Press and their forthcoming project Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective and Re:wild. Dr. Mel teaches transdisciplinary cultural studies at Maryland Institute College of Art.
Book Projects
Biomythography Bayou is now available – ORDER THE BOOK
Bucknell University Press book launch reading – WATCH THE VIDEO
Audio recordings from the book are available – LISTEN TO AUDIO
Biomythography Bayou (The Griot Project Book Series, Bucknell University Press, 2024) is a decolonizing narrative portraiture project featuring experimental performative writing. With an emphasis on queer embodied knowledges in Gulf South cultural contexts, this manuscript engages West African worldviews, Poarch Band (Creek) wisdom, and Black Catholic Creole cosmology, offering readers archival histories, contemporary political discourse, and tellings from the ancestral imaginary. Paring contextualizing non-fiction essays with biomythographic narrative portraiture and “ancestor veneration photography,” Biomythography Bayou presents local and regional Black southern folklore, dialect, foodways, religious and spiritual practices, music, and cultural events. These are celebrated in the portraits and conveyed from the first-person viewpoint of the narrative characters whose generational and place-based connections reveal themselves throughout the text.
Waterbody is a transdisciplinary narrative portraiture project that features Gulf South Afrofuturist nature writing, “bayou tableau” ancestral altars, celebrations of Black queer embodied knowledges, and remembrance as ritual. Rooted in the folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and natural landscapes, of coastal Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the work imagines the birds of the bayou and other plant and animal relatives as shape shifters, harbingers, and ancestral apparitions across space time and generations. Portraiture and poetic writing, paired with altar assemblages, present local and regional Black, Creole, and Indigenous southern religious and spiritual practices, cultural events, and everyday community rhythms, through the lens of social and environmental justice. Expanding on the performative writing, conjured images, and storytelling from the Ancestral Imaginary in their first book, Biomythography Bayou (The Griot Project, Bucknell University Press, 2024), Waterbody presents an environmental humanities and speculative arts project that draws from the well of the past and summons the waves of liberatory Afrofutures. *Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective and re:wild.
Poetry
Lewis, M. (2025). Slave Narrative Project 1936-1937 (Revisited 2025). About Place Journal, Black Earth Institute. *Pushcart Award Nomination*
Lewis, M. (2022). Thunder Cake. In J. Crews and M. Walsh (Eds.), Queer Nature. Philadelphia, PA: Autumn House Press.
Lewis, M. (2020). Catfish Mardi Gras Queen. In Judd, Bettina (Ed.), Auburn Avenue, Autumn/Winter. Atlanta, GA.
Lewis, M. (2017) We Take On. In Stephanie Andrea Allen and Lauren Cherelle (Eds.) Serendipity: Black Lesbian Literary Collective. Fall/issue 2.
Creative Prose
Lewis, M. (2021). Transformative Arts/Transformative Acts: Black Queer Feminist Art and Design Pedagogy. Artlines: Women’s Caucus for Art Publication. Winter, 4.
Lewis M. (2020) Liberatory Art and Design Education: Engaging Queer of Color Pedagogies for Creative Practice. St. John’s University Humanities Review. Winter 2020, 27-33.
Art Publications
Lewis, M. (in press) Bayou Tableau “Felé Sassafras,” Digital Photograph (2023) , Green 2.0 Zine.
Lewis, M. (in press). Bayou Tableau “Bell Ball,” Digital Photograph (2025) About Place Journal, Black Earth Institute.
Art Exhibitions and Performances
Intersections, Joyce Gordon Gallery, Oakland CA, June 2006
Arts Collective Performance, World Arts Focus, Washington DC, July 2005
DC Art Studio – Takoma Park, Resident Open Studio, Tacoma Park, MD, July 2005
Humaneyes: Kinfolk and Kulture (solo exhibition), Towson University Union, Baltimore, MD, January 2005
The Door Project, Eubie Blake Jazz and Cultural Center, Baltimore, MD 2005
The Voices, The Vanguard Artist Collective, Movement Emporium/World Arts Focus, Washington DC 2005
s’Lottery Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD 2004
Out the Box, Rocket Salon, Washington DC 2002
Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis 