Artist Statement
Rooted in the Gulf South’s folklore, dialect, foodways, music, art, and natural landscapes, Dr. Mel Michelle Lewis’ storytelling reveals Gulf South histories and Afrofutures through a Black queer feminist environmental humanities praxis. Raised in Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama Gulf Coast, their multimedia projects and creative literary portraiture feature ancestral lands, generational lineages, and queer longings in frontline communities. Their work presents Black, Creole, and Native (Porch Creek) 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, Biomythography Bayou, is available from The Griot Project Series at Bucknell University Press. Their forthcoming book and transdisciplinary performance and instillation project Waterbody is supported by American Bird Conservancy‘s Afrofuturism Collective, Re:wild, and and New Orleans Water Collaborative. Dr. Mel teaches environmental humanities and queer ecologies at Maryland Institute College of Art and is equity practitioner with Root to Flourish Collective, Planet Women, and The Art of Change Agency.
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 (under review) centers bodies of water and our human bodies as ecosystems and cultural sites, illuminating the past, examining our present, and conjuring futures along the Mississippi River and her tributaries, the rural bayous and barrier islands of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the port cities of New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. This environmental justice collection employs narrative portraiture in many forms, including both traditional poems and performative poetry in the form of folk tales, recipes, praise songs, spells, remixed archival narratives, and invocations. The text in this manuscript is paired with photographed images of ancestral altar assemblages (installations in nature or in the gallery/studio). With an emphasis on embodied knowledges, Waterbody engages West African cosmology, Native wisdom (Poarch Creek), Black and Creole Catholic worldviews, and contemporary articulations of complex southern identities and sexualities, offering readers archival histories, resonant contemporary political discourse, investigated environmental justice narratives, and Ancestral interventions. This multidisciplinary approach to poetry is both textual and material, presenting regional histories, religious and spiritual practices, cultural events, and everyday community rhythms, through the lens of social and environmental justice. Waterbody is generously supported by American Bird Conservancy’s Afrofuturism Collective, Re:wild, and New Orleans Water Collaborative.
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 