Symposium Keynote Speaker

L’Merchie Frazier, visual activist, public historian and artist, innovator, poet and holographer, is Executive Director of Creative /Strategic Partnerships for SPOKE Arts/Medicine Wheeel and formerly Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket, and was recently awarded the first Museum Educator Award by the Massachusetts Council on Social Studies.

She serves the Transformative Action Project,/Violence Transformed of the Public Health Advocacy Institute at Northeastern University as Director of Creative Engagement. Her work highlights the reparative and restorative aesthetic approach to expand the historical narrative, diminishing erasure, responding to trauma, violence and crisis through artistic activities and public art that mirrors community.

Her work traces authentic evidence, providing place-based education and interdisciplinary history pedagogy, programs and workshops, projects and lectures. She delivers diversity, equity, and belonging workshops for corporations and municipalities.

Frazier has served the artistic community for over twenty years as an award winning national and international visual and performance artist and poet, in one life work “Save Me From My Amnesia”, with residencies in Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Africa, France, and Cuba.. Her artworks are collected by the Smithsonian Institution, the White House, Museum of Arts and Design, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the International Quilt Museum.

As a lecturer and workshop presenter, her audiences include youth and adults. She is a Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellow and Massachusetts Historical Society Fellow and is a member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and has recently been appointed to the Massachusetts State Arts Commission.