Community Fellow
Melani Douglass
Howard University
Melani's Story
Socially engaged, multi-disciplinary artist Melani N. Douglass is the founder of the award-winning Family Arts Museum - a migratory institution focused on the celebration of family as fine art, home as curated space, and community as gallery. She is also host of the CommuniTEA Salon, a series of gatherings where the community meditates and explores issues facing them. Melani anchors her work in the understanding that we are the answers and the medicine we seek. Her work unearths the solutions encoded in our dna - solutions she refers to as “ancestral technology.”
Melani N. is a former DC Arts and Humanities fellow, Humanities DC Fellow and the 2024 East of the River Artist in Residence. Melani holds a MFA in Curatorial Practice from the Maryland Institute and College of Art.
Melani's Research
Heal With Melanin Podcast: Intergenerational Healing Stories from Washington, DC
Heal With Melanin Podcast (HWMP) is a Washington, DC based community oral-history project documenting traditional and non-traditional healers—herbalists, midwives, breath-workers, pastors, political strategists, acupuncturist, elders and activits—who sustain local wellness traditions through family legacy or mentorship. Through intimate conversations, field recordings, and live public salons, the series maps how healing knowledge moves through family lines, neighborhoods, and generations to become ancestral technology.
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By weaving oral history, literary narratives, and private memorabilia, the Heal With Melanin Podcast expands the connections between the field of medical humanities beyond academia into daily life. Through building an archival record of healing knowledge for future generations, Heal With Melanin Podcast centers community storytelling as a public health intervention that advances collective mental, spiritual, and social wellness.
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Heal With Melanin Podcast shows the community's power to transform oral tradition into an instrument of care, connection and culture, ensuring that the stories of those who heal outside institutional walls and beyond notions of wellness are recognized as part of the broader human science of healing.