Lavett Ballard is a nationally acclaimed mixed-media visual artist, art historian, curator, and author whose work reimagines the narratives of people of African descent—particularly the overlooked histories of Black women. Working with layered collage, archival photography, and reclaimed wood and fences, Ballard creates richly textured assemblages that fuse historical memory, Afrofuturism, and ancestral storytelling. Her practice functions as both reclamation and elevation, rendering her subjects as sacred, celestial, and complex.

Ballard holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Art History with a Museum Studies minor from Rutgers University, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Her work has been featured twice on the cover of TIME Magazine—first for the 2020 Women’s Suffrage Centennial issue and again in 2023 for Pulitzer Prize–winner Isabel Wilkerson’s CASTE essay. She contributed to the NAACP Image Award–winning The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families and has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad.

Her work is represented in notable private and institutional collections including the Petrucci Family Foundation, Grant and Tamia Hill, the Francis M. Maguire Museum, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, U.S. Art in Embassies, Syracuse University’s Community Folk Arts Center, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum at Auburn University.

Across all forms of her creative practice, Ballard positions herself as a visual storyteller and modern griot, reclaiming history while envisioning expansive futures for Black women and the communities they represent.

Ballards portfolio can be viewed via www.LavettBeArt.com