Daily Inspiration: Meet Makeda Lewis

Today we’d like to introduce you to Makeda Lewis.

Hi Makeda , so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
As it pertains to my curatorial and arts administration work, the clearest description of a beginning I could give would be with my first internship at MINT Gallery in 2017/18, when they were still located in the small space up the street from the Five Points MARTA station, where The Bakery Atlanta now occupies. From there, I interned at several organizations and spaces around Atlanta, including Art Papers and ZuCot Gallery. Peter Ferrari hired me as the Gallery Manager for FACET Gallery (now closed) in 2019, and I returned to MINT gallery to be the inaugural Gallery Manager Fellow (and subsequent Social Media and Gallery Manager officially) late 2019. The fellowship gave me the opportunity to curate my first show in 2020, ‘somethin’ missing…somethin’ promised’, a group exhibition featuring 5 artists: Charity Harris, Arianna Khmelniuk, MaDora Frey, Hanna Newman and zipporah camille thompson. Over the course of all this time, I was working full-time at Caribou Coffee, then Starbucks, before quitting and being hired full-time as the current Program and Outreach Coordinator for Atlanta Center for Photography (fka Atlanta Celebrates Photography).

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I don’t know that I would describe any of my time spent over the last several years as smooth or particularly struggle-ridden. Overall, I feel incredibly blessed and grateful to have had such a vast amount of experiences for learning, building community, being in service and being involved in projects I’m incredibly proud of.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
These days, I do what I’m moved to do. This tends to manifest both personally and professionally in collaborative and documentation pursuits and overall creative practices. I’m an artist, a lover, a loud-talker and collard-greens-eater. I don’t take too much to ‘curator’ anymore, I prefer ‘synthesizer’–I studied Psychology at Georgia State and fell in love with using synthesis as a method of collecting and examining information from different sources, identifying where they either overlap or differ and using the result of that to guide a final presentation towards whatever chosen goal. I find the way my brain already processes a lot of the world around me naturally engages this process, so it makes sense to name this as a part of my creative and cultural working practices.

What I’m known for depends on who you’re asking. Most likely, equal amounts of people would name my curatorial work, artwork, or casual film photo documentation efforts of places, friends, artists, exhibitions and art spaces across Atlanta. (Harrison once told me he knew I was at an event because he heard my camera shutter click.) Fewer people might know me by my willingness towards knowledge-sharing, meme collections and writing, but almost everyone would name me in relation to a general state of being in love (with a person, a food, or you.) I’m not sure what sets me apart, but I’m less concerned with highlighting that distinction and more concerned with being earnest.

What are your plans for the future?
My studio practice has been in an amazing period of transformation and growth over the last year, so I’m looking forward to continuing to experiment with alternative photo processes, documentation, collaboration, sculpture and video editing. I’ll also be presenting the second physical iteration of my project, Say That Studios, with a tabletop manual vending machine, featuring the work of 3 artists I’m incredibly honored to work with: Jamil Fatti, DJ Jesus Niece and Blair E. Smith.

Finally, I’m marrying the love of my life this coming October, and rising to the occasion of loving her will continue to be one of my greatest accomplishments.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://makedalewis.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/hungermakesme and instagram.com/saythattosay

Image Credits
Headshot: Tintype portrait, Amanda Edmondson Corbett.
image 1: ‘the mud at our feet’, 2021, Swan Coach House Gallery.
image 2: ‘003 (may be the last time)’, 2024, resin, mussel shells
image 3: ‘untitled (care team)’, 2024, Operation game board, graphite, ink, watercolor
image 4: Camera Obscura Room by Say That Studios for the 2025 ACP Block Party, photo credit: Luke Beard