Melaine Ferdinand-King is a cultural strategist. She has been recognized for her work in public humanities, civic space creation, and systems design, having served as a co-founding agent for initiatives and institutions such as the Black Biennial at Rhode Island School of Design and the African Museum of Rhode Island, where she currently serves as associate director of curatorial affairs and development. As founder of Mprovise, a cultural studio based in Providence, R.I., she leads the Civic Imagination Lab at The Slate Space, which provides research support, literacy training, and creative resources in culture, media, humanities and artificial intelligence for public and private entities. Her work refuses to separate the political from the intimate, drawing connections across disciplines and generations to build bridges between knowledge and organizations, and the people they serve. She has a bachelor of arts in sociology from Spelman College, and master’s and doctorate degrees in Africana Studies from Brown University, where her dissertation, Afrosurrealism and The Art of Black Wayfinding, is one of the first to provide case studies of transgressive strategies developed by radical thinkers, writers, and artists of the Black arts and surrealist canons. She has curated and consulted on U.S. and international exhibitions on contemporary and modern art, history, and Black aesthetics. A poet of the jazz and blues traditions, she is the recipient of the 2025 Michael S. Harper Memorial Prize in Poetry and a 2026 Brew & Forge Witches & Warriors Poetry Fellowship. Her work as a writer proceeds from the conviction that public scholarship, art, and criticism are forms of care: for ourselves, our communities, and the archival record. She is a frequent contributor to Boston Art Review, exhibition catalogs, and federally funded projects such as the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 1877 Black Gospel Window project.

Melaine’s Rabkin Interview

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