Megan 'Meg Jo' Jordan

Megan ‘Meg Jo’ Jordan is an artist-activist-scholar in Nashville, TN. She began painting just after the 2016 presidential election. Prior to pursuing art, Jordan worked as an organizer in her home state of Alabama, acknowledging the history, strengths and potentials of Southern grass roots activism. In her art, Jordan acknowledges and centers the history, strengths, and potentials of Southern grassroots activism. Jordan’s work calls for her audience to reconceive notions of power and justice—highlighting that power lies within us to produce the change we seek. A strong believer in the use of arts for political education and civic engagement, Jordan combines her art and research to build better understandings of social justice and the vital role of social movements in creating radically new worlds. Drawing from a legacy of Black feminists, Jordan spreads a message of love and intertwined fates as the basis of all her work. She is also the lead artist of RIOT (Radical Imaginers of Tennessee) collective, where she is co-creating a local abolitionist zine to assist Nashville’s defund-the-police effort. Jordan is a PhD candidate of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, where she is a Public Scholar at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise & Public Policy and a Community Scholar of the Meharry Medical College and Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Community Engaged Research Core.

www.megjoart.com

This bio/description was originally published in 2021 and updated in 2021. For more current information, please refer to the award recipient's website (if provided).