Public Scholar. Curator. Artist. Cultural Worker.
Sharbreon Plummer, Ph.D. has spent the past fifteen years working at the intersections of nonprofit management, arts and culture, community engagement and project/program management. Her professional journey has prioritized cultivating resources and programs for communities of creators of the global majority, particularly those in the South, whose work advances freedom, liberation and social change. Her research and artistic practice have been shaped by her investigations into Black art history and cultural studies, craft and material studies, southern folkways and her lived experience as a native of South Louisiana.
As a public scholar, Dr. Plummer has facilitated and presented work at/through institutions such as Project Row Houses, Princeton University, Rhode Island School of Design, Americans for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive, and several others. A few of her creative projects include her internationally distributed zine Diasporic Threads: Black Women, Fibre and Textiles (2022) and curatorial projects such as Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South, Stitching Abolition (Chicago, 2022) and Mirrored Migration (New York, 2017). She has also been featured as an artist-in-residence at Rogers Art Loft (Las Vegas, NV) and Arquetopia (Oaxaca, MX). She also serves as the editor for Uncoverings and is a staff writer for Quiltfolk and Homecooked Magazines. Her most recent book, Black Quilts: Memory, Method and Medicine, is slated for release in 2026 through Chronicle Books.
Dr. Plummer applies the intersection of her management and creative experience as leader of AYA Thought Studio—a creative consulting firm that aids organizations and individuals at a crossroads in their development, in converting their ideas, visions, and values into actionable steps and outcomes.
Dr. Plummer earned a Ph.D. in Arts Administration, Education and Policy from The Ohio State University.
Artist Statement
Dr. Sharbreon Plummer is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in Black Southern lineages, technologies and ways of knowing. Her visual work employs fibers/textiles, mixed media installation, archival research and participatory engagement to explore how we alchemize and archive the everyday through Black feminist praxis. She references the South as a muse and anchor for Black embodied knowledge, inviting viewers to return home through moments of stillness and contemplation.
Plummer's use of repetition, piecing and suturing is an extension of her relationship to speculation and the role it plays in storytelling and memory work. Seams, joints and stitches act as metaphors for community-based oral traditions, where the confluence of disparate pieces reveal a more complete whole. She views her works as a form of public scholarship and cultural preservation shaped by ancestral guidance, intuition, and critique as an act of love.