Marieke Slovin Lewis

Marieke Slovin Lewis is a participatory artist, writer, musician, and scholar. She studied music at the New England Conservatory of Music, Berklee College of Music, and Bates College and began composing music in 2010. The focus of Marieke’s work is to bring the Self into the sustainability movement. Marieke’s work is founded on participation and creative agency through art. She works to create and hold the space for people to become the author of their own narrative and to step into the role of composer and artist, employing a participatory method of songwriting she co-created called Story-to-Song (STS). Marieke's doctoral research combined participatory art, narrative inquiry, arts-based research, and autoethnography. In her dissertation, “Becoming Sustainable: An Autoethnography in Story and Song,” she explored the concept of “self-sustainability” within the context of the global sustainability movement and in three areas of her own life, including personal, professional, and academic. She also explored the role of songwriting from stories to create moments of balance, clarity, and catharsis. Through an autoethnographic study, Marieke discovered four steps to follow for self-sustainability: 1) Awareness; 2) Permission; 3) Change; and 4) Intention. These steps are elucidated in her dissertation. Marieke earned a PhD in Sustainability Education from Prescott College in 2013.

Since earning her PhD, Marieke has worked with people from around the world and in many languages to compose music from stories. She has worked with youth and adults, guiding in-person and virtual songwriting workshops. She co-created the "Migration Songs" project together with poet and writer Sarah Reader Harris, with whom she offered weekly poetry and songwriting sessions for refugees and asylum seekers in Brussels from January 2017 to March 2020. This project was a finalist for the Amateo Award for volunteer arts participation projects in Europe in October 2021. Marieke is the co-author of the book, “On the Move: Poems and Songs of Migration” (2020) and was recently published in the Folkways Press literary publication, “Right to Life” (2024).