Community collaboration in the face of injustice. Using art to voice dissent to systemic issues in our communities. The path to creating a piece of protest art destined for the Smithsonian. Through a multi-disciplinary design practice, De Andrea Nichols helps change makers nationwide address social, civic, and racial equity challenges within their communities.
De serves as Director & Principal Designer of Civic Creatives, a social design organization that produces interactive events, tools, and services that foster the discovery, ideation, prototyping, and actualization of community-driven civic solutions. As an arts-based activist, Nichols organizes communities to develop creative calls-to-action for social justice issues through her leadership with the Artivists STL collective, Citizen Artists STL, and FoodSpark. Nichols also serves as a Board of Directors member for Forward through Ferguson and chairs the Board of Directors for Creative Reaction Lab. She is a national keynote speaker on the subjects of designing for civil rights and social justice, and she is a 2016 recipient of the St. Louis Visionary Award for community impact in the arts. Most recently, De was selected as a 2017 Citizen Artist Fellow for the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
De is an alumna of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, where she specialized in communication design, social entrepreneurship, and socio-economic development. She is a John B. Ervin Scholar, Brown Scholar, and Enterprise-Rent-a-Car Scholar. Her efforts have been supported by the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum for African-American History and Culture, Clinton Global Initiative, Women’s Caucus for Art, Gephardt Institute for Public Service, Ideas that Matters, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, StartingBloc Fellowship for Social Innovation, Points of Light Civic Accelerator, Microsoft YouthSpark, and AshokaU Changemakers. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx