Shantrelle P. Lewis

In 2016, Lewis married business owner Tony Oluwatoyin Lawson with a wedding they called the "Royal Wedding of Zamunda" inspired by the blend of their Yoruba Nigerian, New Orleanian and Lucumi cultures with a nod to the film, Coming to America. The wedding included a traditional second line.

In 2010, Lewis began working on The Dandy Lion Project, curating images of black dandies that has taken the form of an international traveling exhibition, a film series and a book. The project connects the subversive contemporary fashion and lifestyle movement to historical images and has dated the movement that blends African aesthetics with European menswear back to the fifteenth century in Africa. Women dandies and trans men are also featured, further complicating the idea of black masculinity. Lewis focused on curating images authored by over 30 photographers of the African Diaspora, thus reclaiming the authorship of images that in another context might have historically been seen as exploitive. This project has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, the Brighton Photo Biennial, and Lowe Museum of Art in Miami.

From 2009 to 2013, Lewis was the Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI) in New York City.

After returning home to Louisiana in 2007, Lewis became Executive Director and Curator of the McKenna Museum of African American Art.

In 2000, Lewis received a bachelor's degree from Howard University in African American Studies. By then, her childhood experience with Black history grew into a career, teaching African-American Studies at Hyde Leadership Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. Lewis then earned a master's degree in African American Studies from Temple University in 2006. She returned to her hometown after the Hurricane Katrina disaster to help with revitalization and taught African World Studies at Dillard University.

Shantrelle Patrice Lewis (born June 13, 1978) is a curator, historian, critic and filmmaker. She is a 2012 Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow and a 2014 United Nations Programme for People of African Descent Fellow.

Lewis was introduced to African American history by her father through her own genealogy as a child where she learned she was a descendant of Henri Christophe, the first king of free Haiti in 1811. She comes from a family of teachers: Her paternal great grandfather, Nathan Lewis, was a student at Tuskegee University, and later taught at Southern University A&M and her paternal great grandmother, Della Atkinson, was a professor at Straight College, which is known today as Dillard University.